Comment on Smart devices are turning out to be a poor investment

noorbeast@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• Starayo@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  If I can’t run it with home assistant, I’m buying a dumb device instead.

  Trying to buy an automated feeder for my cat was a nightmare. Why does everything have a camera and require an internet connection to China? Everything was on tuya! It’s fucking ridiculous. You don’t need cloud processing for this shit. Finding something that’s just a timer worth a battery backup that wouldn’t fail to feed my cat if the power or internet briefly went out took way too much effort.

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  • herrvogel@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Trying to set up home assistant for my parents’ house, I started seeing the point of all the cloud stuff. My dad wants to have home automation but he completely lacks the technical skills to run and maintain a home assistant instance and he’s completely unwilling to learn. Even after I’ve done all the difficult parts for him, he always manages to have trouble. The majority of those troubles could be avoided with a cloud managed service. I’m guessing there are way more people like my dad than there are who could be assed with setting up a 100% local smart home. Because that does require more than a little bit of technical inclination.

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  • hubobes@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    If anyone is still looking for one, I got myself this model (the one for 2 cats but it works the same): petlibro.com/…/petlibro-granary-automatic-pet-fee…

    The company has other models with wifi and cameras as well as an app but this particular model is just a dumb timer based machine.

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    • Starayo@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yeah, I ended up getting a cheaper shittier one to test out if it would work out well but that’s the one I settled on upgrading to eventually. It’s a bit harder to get cheaply in Australia.

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