cloud-free smart home
Can you cut the cloud from your smart devices and control your home privately?
Reader Colin Robertson recently contacted us with a concern about connectivity and oversharing. “It feels more and more like an adversarial relationship between consumers and the companies who want to spy on – I mean, serve us,” he writes. “I’m interested in the convenience of video doorbells and thermostats, but all of these solutions involve companies that want to access your data for themselves via the cloud.”
Is removing that a realistic ideal? Those who recall the first wave of X10 devices will remember the way the local smart home once operated, and that’s not something we’re looking to revisit. While it was a more private way to do things, it was plenty clunky; switches and relays forced to carry massive antennae, only the most simplistic operations available, limited central processing that forced you to keep a noisy computer running at all times – it was the convenience and power of the smartphone and the cloud that pulled smart devices out of the doldrums and made them mean something.
Go local
So is it possible to run a local, or at least private, smart home without losing those modern conveniences? We immediately run into a few big problems with data (see ‘Data gone wild’) and with the core nature of smart home devices: many, if not most of them, are tied inexorably to the cloud. Control passes almost immediately from a typical smart device to a server online, where it’s acted upon and a message is bounced back to, say, your phone to offer an alert, or to another device to tell it to switch on or change a parameter.
More complex kit relies on much of its smart functionality being offloaded elsewhere. A wireless camera that can recognise faces, for example, likely won’t have that capability built into its own hardware – the face is actually recognised in a server farm, because it’s a computationally expensive task.
To really pull this off, we’ll need to bring that processing in-house. That means dropping most wireless smart devices – a proper power supply offers more opportunities for internal processing without the battery running flat in a few seconds – and making some sacrifices. Not as many, perhaps, as you might think though; there are some smart hubs which work hard for themselves. Amazon Echos above the Dot, Google devices beyond the Home Mini, and
If we want to run cloudfree smart tech, we need to bring some of the processing in-house
the HomePod (or iPad) can all perform some processing without needing to access the cloud. The latter, as the enabler for HomeKit, does even more.
The heavy lifting the HomePod performs means HomeKit devices don’t actually require their own internet connection, just a local one. It’s one of the things that makes HomeKit a uniquely low-power protocol, one which tends to pool those smart home devices more into the domain of the home, but one that doesn’t actually solve our problem – that HomePod is still chatting away online.
Good choices
So, presuming you’re happy to lose at least some functionality, let’s think about options you can use to keep your data away from the cloud and safely inside your home. When you’re buying devices, look for a Bluetooth connection, or a non-Wi-Fi wireless protocol – look for Zigbee, Z-Wave, Caséta or RadioRA 2. These devices don’t ever explicitly need a connection to the internet, but they do generally need to be controlled from a hub of some kind – that may or may not require a connection of its own.
Primary amongst choices for disconnected hubs seems to be the Hubitat Elevation (around £76), which is specifically designed to be a local-only device, focusing on functions which really don’t need to go through the cloud like switching on lights. It’s compatible with both Zigbee and Z-Wave devices, and only requires that you attach it to the internet initially to activate it – after that, in local-only mode, you can use it to set up the kind of complex rules that you might previously have built in the Alexa, Google Home or Apple Home apps.
The Hubitat is also directly compatible with those super-cheap Yeelight bulbs rolling out from Xiaomi – something which might be reassuring if you’re less than trusting of their Chinese origins and want to contain what little data they might be passing around. For a similar alternative, the Mixtile Hub (around £114) boasts of being cloud free, and even includes (limited) voice actuation facilities.
Other options
If you’re comfortable with at least a little cloud communication, the Homey (£269) might be a good choice since it offers control of a wider range of devices. Parent company Athom states: “Only the things that are absolutely necessary for Homey to communicate with the outside world are stored in the cloud,” maintaining that “most of your personal data is stored locally; account information, your devices.” Admittedly that’s probably more than you’d be willing to give up if you were hunting for a truly cloud-free solution, however private the Homey’s storage procedure may be, but it does mean more complex wireless devices can find a place in your smart home.
You could, if you were confident, dig deep into your router’s inner workings and block connections to and from suspect servers while watching which functionality breaks; you might also want to set something like PiHole running between your home hardware and your ISP’s DNS server to filter out any unwanted trackers. And if you truly want to take control, doing it yourself is the key.
Consider Home Assistant (otherwise known as HASS), which you can download from hass.io and install onto a platform like a Raspberry Pi. It’s a complete smart home control platform, completely free to use, and while it does demand some technical tinkering in order to get things just so, it’s the platform that many hardcore smart home enthusiasts swear by. One neat side-effect is that it’ll allow you to jump in and access things from afar without requiring any cloud connectivity – you can go straight through your router if you’re comfortable setting up a tool like OpenVPN. See also systems like the Mac-specific but paid-for Indigo (indigodomo. com) or perhaps Domoticz (domoticz.com), which may suit you better – if you’re taking control, it’s going to pay to put the effort in.
Increasing complexity
Let’s finish off talking about those specific-use cases our reader mentioned. There’s no reason for a smart thermostat to explicitly require an internet connection, and there are indeed a few (outside of the major examples) that can run local-only. Shop around and you may be able to find an older Z-Wave thermostat from the Radio Thermostat Company of America, though these (particularly the CT100 Plus model, which is just about ideal) can be hard to come by.
When it comes to a video doorbell, you’re pretty much out of luck – although there are, as you’ll see in the ‘Offline-happy cameras’ box, a few smart cameras that can be pulled back to local-only recording if you’re happy to climb a ladder to remove the internal SD card.