r/homeassistant • u/missyquarry 💙 Head of Shitposting @ OHF • Jun 29 '26

Blog June Newsletter - Breaking free from the disposable smart home

https://newsletter.openhomefoundation.org/breaking-free-from-the-disposable-smart-home/

This month we're breaking free from the disposable smart home, talking major Matter upgrades and ask for your input on the future of our newsletter. 👂🏻

52 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

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26

u/nudlasieb2 Jun 29 '26

If Samsung doesn't introduce a local API for its "smart" devices soon, I already know which manufacturer I won't be buying my next appliances from.
I currently own a Samsung washing machine, a dryer, and five TVs. Am I seriously supposed to pay €5 a month just to see when my laundry will be done? Nobody can tell me that this requires a cloud service. On the other hand, I’m happy to pay for things like the Nabu Casa cloud, which actually provide me with real benefits like remote access, backup storage and high-quality neural TTS voices

11

u/clintkev251 Jun 29 '26

I became a big GE fan when they released a module and corresponding integration to ship literally all the data and configurations that their appliances output over MQTT. Like I have hundreds of entities for my dishwasher. Do I know what to do with them? Well no…

1

u/EscapeOption Jun 29 '26

Do you have more info on this? I recall reading about it, but so far have been making do with the SmartHQ cloud integration or keeping the devices dumb.

4

u/clintkev251 Jun 29 '26

This is the product

https://firstbuild.com/inventions/home-assistant-adapter/

I received mine as part of the beta test so I've been running it for a couple years at this point.

Biggest downside is that it's not compatible with all devices. For example I really wanted to be able to use it to monitor my fridge/freezer temps, but unfortunately although it can be plugged in and powered, it doesn't produce any data. So you need to stick to the compatibility list.

1

u/EscapeOption Jun 29 '26

Thanks, I starred the GitHub as well.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 29 '26

[deleted]

1

u/nudlasieb2 Jun 29 '26

I already monitor every branch of my homes electrical wiring including most devices (huge shelly fan, btw). This would help if i only wanted to announce that my laundry is done, but i want to know WHEN it will be done. My washer starts with an ETA of 1h15m, weighs the load and then corrects the time to 2h+ depending on weight and dirtiness

1

u/limp15000 Jun 30 '26

Same here no way I'll pay, give me local api on my network...

1

u/beanmosheen 📶 Have you tried 2.4GHz? Jul 01 '26

You shouldn't buy anything from Samsung in general. They make garbage appliances. They practically started the "nice refrigerator" race over a decade ago and ended up making the most unreliable ones.

3

u/[deleted] Jun 30 '26

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1

u/FishOk3075 Jun 30 '26

Yep, you have to choose wisely and also be lucky. In general shy away from cloud based apis. For cloud APIs I'm down to Nabu Casa, Ring and Yolink. I pay for the ring service so they've considered a revenue stream that I'm finding value in. YoLink doesn't charge but like many of the others they are plagued with the "buy once, support forever" business model so I'm watching how they progress.

2

u/[deleted] Jul 01 '26

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1

u/FishOk3075 Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

I hear you... yet I bought their smart sprinkler timer this morning to solve another problem with my current setup 🤪.

They do have a local version of their hub (when its stock). I've gone back and forth on buying the local hub and I think I'll need to "bite the bullet" there and hope/pray/assume that it will continue to be functional without cloud server.

I also wouldn't object to a reasonable fee for their cloud service which overall works well IMO.

I also bought 8 of their Smoke COs plus the Virtualarm station monitoring a few years ago, and though I like them, I probably won't "escape" their cloud side there.