Re: The "Smart Home" crashed?
Been saying - and doing - this for years, Dan. I've built a "LAN of things" for my off-grid homestead to automate what I can here - and it's never been on the internet at all. It controls things like the solar power system, the backup generators, heaters (plumbing/freezing), water collection and purification, general status reporting to database and CGIs for realtime status display and control, video cameras (nice game shots here in the wild) and whatever else I can do with some pi's, odroids, and ESPs.
(detailed on my sci/tech forums which I won't pimp here)
It's great and pretty reliable, but nothing is perfect, so of course, having watched the aliens on Star Trek take over the computers - only a plot device for them...there are manual backups. But saving having to go turn valves and unbolt access panels in nasty weather most of the time is valuable.
As far as I can see the only reason to put ANY of this on the internet is to slurp data in an even more blatant (but probably less effective?) way than the big outfits known for this. It can be pretty intimate - my barometers all show every time a door is opened or shut, water flow shows a flush...and so on.
So it's all for profit - and not yours. How many people really NEED to do anything with their home from away? How did they manage without it only a few years ago? People need to be asking themselves....