Article: A Real Smart Home Should Work Offline

[Vadim Tkachenko]

Hello lurkers,

The article itself:
https://www.howtogeek.com/902153/a-real-smart-home-should-work-offline/

Rings all the right bells.

First and foremost: a system must function when there's no
connectivity. Feel free to throw the first stone - HCC Remote, as it
exists today, drops dead if outside connectivity is disrupted, for no
good reason except "it was implemented this way", and the only way
left to control HCC is the Swing console. Rest assured, a fix is
coming, along with a massive drop of features currently unpublished
(though present in source control, feel free to take a look at the
commit history to get a rough idea).

Read the article for the rest, let me just mention one another item:
privacy concerns. Good luck finding any home automation product that
doesn't want all your PII from the get go.

And the other item that I don't see commonly mentioned is: wasted
energy. All the power required to maintain the always-on connection
is, well, converted to heat.

Go offline.

I will try to help.

--vt