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there's nothing here that requires internet.
Disappointingly, I discovered my heating needs an internet connection to work properly.
It has local failover, but only as a dumb system.
Ideally, I'd like it to run on a local controller, but my guess is that would take hacking way beyond my means.
NotThamesWater-
Disappointingly, I discovered my heating needs an internet connection to work properly.
It has local failover, but only as a dumb system.
This is true of Hive in general if you have the same one.
When I moved in the previous occupants had programmed some complex schedule, and we couldn't adjust it with the local dumb controls.
The Hive system is the worst of all the systems as it does require an internet connection for anything more than rudimentary home control. At least ChromeCast is standalone, at least Philips Hue does everything on the local hub on your local network (their APIs and clients just update the local hub). But the Hive... requires an active internet connection for advanced control.
Even though it is programmable: https://github.com/aklambeth/bg-hive-api you still need the internet to use it.
Once I have my network set up I'll Wireshark and see whether this looks trivial to reverse engineer (i.e. whether they've been so lazy they've not put TLS on the local connections).
Velocio
Yeah, but aside from voice control everything so far has sane fallback to manual things.
I can go adjust the heater manually, the light switches work, the stereo I can manually put on, the TV can fallback to the freeview digital signal.
So far, aside from voice control, there's nothing here that requires internet.
And so far, everything I've got is from a company that has made a huge bet on it and isn't a startup that will vanish overnight.
I'm still an engineer enough to not think this shit will all break.