The first thing I do when researching a new electronic thing is to search “[brand] home assistant” to see if there is already an integration for their stuff. If not, I usually keep looking.
There’s so many issues with all the smart/IOT devices that it’s just not worth getting into. Few if any manufacturers offer proper, open integrations and when it comes to home appliance there are more important features than that. Just get up to turn off your AC, that’s still the best solution.
My heat pump has a timer setting. I can tell it when to start heating water or when to start AC. If your weekly schedule doesn’t vary widely it should be enough. I have it set up to heat the water during the nigh and heat up my apartment a little bit right before I get out of bed. I never needed anything more.
If any appliance manufacturer says that accessing your own appliance (that you own) outside their software ecosystem is financially “damaging” to them, they might as well be saying “Hey, just so you know, we’re collecting and selling your data.” If you have already purchased the appliance and their software is free, there is absolutely no other way that using a 3rd-party application could damage their bottom line.
Thanks, Haier, for letting me know never to purchase your products.
The project was accessing Haiers cloud API, not just your appliance. Not that that it makes this any less shitty, but there is a difference. They aren’t saying you aren’t allowed to access a product you own, they are saying you aren’t allowed to access their servers.
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Last thing I had was a dishwasher by them a couple of years ago. Seals leaked about 6 months out of warranty and it cost about as much as a new one to replace them.
I'm so sad about Fisher & Paykel. It was a local (New Zealand) manufacturer that prided itself on quality. It had such a great reputation for quality it eventually took that great quality internationally. And then capitalism and enshittification got its grubby hands on it and turned it into another trash brand. Yet another quality local company disappearing off overseas, screwing over local workers and trashing the quality in favour of profit.
I don’t use Haier products but a similar thing happened with Chamberlain when they blocked the MyQ integration even though it was using the legitimate API and not breaking any rules. No attempt to work with anyone in the HA community at all, just shut everything down.
On one hand, this means projects like Home Assistant are getting popular enough to have enough usage to effect these companies. So that’s great! In the long term, we’ll all figure out solutions, but in the short term it feels like an increasing fight between corporate and open-source control over smart devices.
Buy Zigbee in cases where there isn’t a Matter alternative. It’s not quite as interoperable as Matter but it’s fully offline once setup (and some newer coordinators have dual zigbee/Matter support). Avoid cloud connected WiFi devices like the plague.
Or, you know, just don’t buy smart devices. They are pointless wastes of money and don’t solve any problem but the imaginary problem their marketing made you think actually exists.
But they do create a whole lot of actual problems by having them in your home, and on your network.
Which is better than just supporting something that google, amazon, and apple have developed. Which makes it inherently suspect and suspicious, and anyone with a brain should have an intense primal need to avoid anything being pushed by those 3 individually… much less working together as one.
There are problems they can actually solve, mostly heating and power related:
In summer, lower the blinds on south facing windows when the sun comes up to reduce solar heating, then raise them in the evening to increase air flow against the window panes. This reduces the need for air conditioning, resulting in a surprising amount of power saved.
On a home solar system, start the washing machine, dishwasher, and dryer that were loaded in the morning when the batteries reach 80% charge. Allow them to run off the inverter rather than taking the charge/discharge losses involved in battery storage, reducing the size of both battery bank and solar array needed.
Lower the freezer temperature when there is a power surplus, and raise it back to normal when not so that cooling energy is used when it’s cheapest/most available
If you don’t work from home, you can’t do the second two yourself. They require automation. Reducing baseload requirements and battery storage needs can make a transition to renewable power much cheaper and more efficient. With mass adoption, that extends to power grids and not just off-grid homes, and has significant effects on things like the amount of lithium that needs to be mined or the number of coal and LNG power plants that are needed for times that are off-peak for wind and solar generation.
Being upvoted doesnt make someone right, and being downvoted doesnt make someone wrong. Its just empty, addiction-driven gamification of human interaction that is completely devoid of any legitimate or good or purpose.
No, its a parasite thats been added to communication, to its great detriment, to trick fools into fighting for points in a dopamine driven addiction scam and is directly responsible for the polarized and extreme direction human interaction has taken online.
It is literally destroying communication. Not enhancing it. not providing another form.
No, its a parasite thats been added to communication, to its great detriment, to trick fools into fighting for points in a dopamine driven addiction scam and is directly responsible for the polarized and extreme direction human interaction has taken online.
It is literally destroying communication. Not enhancing it. not providing another form.
Wonder if you still feel this way when a comment of yours gets many upvotes, instead of downvotes?
Would you risk going into massive legal debt for project you make no money from? Or would you continue to develop it for yourself and no longer post it publicly.
taking pro se forces the company to provide evidence and pay for lawyers while you just wait for their case to build, if they don’t have a case, then there’s no problem, if it gets to trial they have to prove damages, since there aren’t any, that will be difficult to prove.
Taking pro se is not recommended in most situations but in this one, where the damages are entirely made up, taking pro se would not be overly tumultuous
The mistake is forking and hosting it on GitHub. If Haier sends GitHub a DMCA takedown notice, they will comply, and the forks will be deleted too. Use other hosting services for redundancy and keep a local copy.
Good point. Nothing in the article explicitly states that it’s a copyright claim, but they do mention “protecting… [their] intellectual property”. In any case, it’s always easier for the website host to fold to cover their own asses than to continue hosting the content.
Good news is there is a lot of forks that were made by various users. I have a copy of the source…
Unfortunate news is that development is likely stopping so if they change the API I don’t know if there are any fellas that will come around to fix it…
I’m sure it exists outside the sphere of my knowledge, but this saga made me wonder if there’s some sort of Git/Bay-type site for software developed in the public interest, but is otherwise belligerent to corporate pressure.
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