I have had something stuck in the back of my head for a few weeks and I ended up writing a LinkedIn newsletter about it (if you want to see the stuff I write on LinkedIn, let me know and I'll share a link).

Still, LinkedIn isn't the best place to share my thoughts on this topic. Reddit is.... so:

Companies suck.

A lot of them suck.

Most smart home product manufacturers suck.

Mod hat off here. Before I came to work for Shelly, I had a small Facebook group, maybe 5k members, called Smarter Home Club. That's where I met Dimitar, Shelly Group's CEO, as well as a number of important and interesting characters from the smart home world. I used a mix of technologies and brands in my smart home, many of them with glaring flaws that you'll still find in smart home products today.

Everything I say here, I'm saying as a consumer, though I have to admit I am a consumer with far more intimate knowledge of what Shelly can do.

One of the most critical of those flaws is that, for too many products, you depend on someone else's computer.

The June Oven still gets hot. You can walk up to it, tap the touchscreen, and roast a tray of vegetables like any other countertop oven. What's gone since Weber shut off the app and cloud on September 22 is the stuff people actually paid extra for - remote control, the live camera view, software updates. Weber says it thought about open-sourcing the software and decided against it. That was close to a $1,500 oven at launch.

Belkin did the same thing to WeMo on January 31. Plugs, light switches, even a crockpot lost the app and their Alexa and Google control. If you'd paired yours with HomeKit beforehand it kept going; otherwise the advice was to replace it.

Every time, it's the same story. The smart part lives on a server somebody else pays for, and the day that bill stops making sense, your device gets dumber.

Most of you already run your devices this way, but for anyone newer to the sub, here's what a Shelly does with no cloud in the picture.

Every device serves its own web interface. Type its IP into a browser on your LAN and you get the full settings page, no account, no app. If the Wi-Fi goes down, the device can put up its own access point and you connect to it directly.

Under that is the RPC API, reachable over plain HTTP, WebSockets, or MQTT on your own broker. curl "http://<device-ip>/rpc/Switch.Set?id=0&on=true" flips a relay, and it's the same command language the devices use to talk to each other.

Automations can live on the device too. Actions let one Shelly fire a webhook at another when an input changes, so a button by the front door can switch a relay across the house without a packet leaving your network. On Gen2+ you can run JavaScript right on the chip, reacting to events and reading BLE sensors with nothing upstream.

Plenty of the 100+ integrations are fully local, Home Assistant being the most important and obvious one. Hubitat, openHAB, Universal Devices, Domoticz and many others - all local.

What does that mean?

The wall switch wired into a Shelly relay still turns on the light, because that input goes straight into the device. Your house keeps working even if every Internet server and network switch explodes and shuts down tomorrow.

A device you bought should keep doing its job for as long as the copper and silicon inside it hold up, not for as long as someone's server budget does.

I still have a handful of cloud-dependent services and many are replicable by Shelly today, I just haven't done the projects.

Honeywell Thermostat - I can wire up a few dry contact relays to switch 24vac and override my thermostat any time. I might do it this winter when I have some spare time and it isn't so hot working in cramped spaces.

Cielo Breeze - I have two mini splits in addition to the 5 ton - one for the master bedroom, the other for the garage. I can use The Pill with an IR blaster to handle this and will do that project next.

MyQ - I don't actually use this any more, I've used Shelly for years (https://shelly.link/garage - I have the full set up with IR sensors and reed switch integrated). I just haven't pulled it out yet because I have a tangle of wires in the closet where all this is installed. That's my project for this weekend and when I am doing it, MyQ comes out.

Ring Cameras - one doorbell and three flood cams. You'd better believe I am annoying the dickens out of my coworkers who work on the camera product line, telling them how we need to do all the different types of cameras. They're rolling their eyes whenever it shows I'm typing in Teams.

Arlo cameras - solar powered cameras - see above.

Voice Assistant - this is the worst. Because of my work, I have Alexa, Google Home, and Siri at my house and office, since I never know when I need to troubleshoot anything or write up instructions. I have a Mac Mini that I'm messing around with to run an LLM with Home Assistant Voice. I'm probably wiping the machine and starting over because I've restarted this so many times, but I'm making progress - and it's not that beefy of a machine, just the $600 model. I've got an M5 Pro with 48 GB at work that I'm repeating the projects with.

The one use case I actually have for these is on the clothes washer, clothes dryer, and the dishwasher - I use power measurement to determine when they've completed their work (time and consumption, actually) and then use Shelly Cloud to trigger an Amazon Alexa notification saying that whichever appliance it is has finished.

You'd better believe that's going away the second I have a local voice assistant running dependably. It's not because I don't trust Shelly Cloud. I know how private it is, I have insider information, right? But the fact is that if my Internet connection goes down for 5 minutes, my automation can fail.

So that's my appliance dependency. I have a handful of "smart" appliances but they're not even connected to my network.

What's the most cloud-dependent thing you still have running at home?

If you're looking for a deal on Shelly sensors, here's an early tip on a sale going out later today (and live now):

https://us.shelly.com/collections/flash-sale-sensors-controllers

20% off sensors and 30% off the irrigation controller.

If you've been waiting for Flood S, it's here:

https://us.shelly.com/products/shelly-flood-s-gen4

A lot of people have asked for the small form factor of the original Shelly Flood, now you have it.

Updates from the original:

Gen4 platform, so Zigbee and Matter certified
New sensor pads - instead of three pins, you have stainless steel pads - three double rows
IP67 rated enclosure
Detects filtered/purified/low mineral water

I have a 7 year old boy who is the light of my life. I wanted an old truck for us to play in, go fishing, and so on. I want it in good enough shape by the time he's 18 that I gift it to him. I also wanted something simple enough that I can work on it and keep it in good enough shape to drive back and forth to work.

My first truck was a 68 C10, three on the tree and a straight six thought I bought in 1991, less than 30k original. It was gifted to a scrap yard by my first wife when she wanted a little revenge over me moving out. I wanted to get back into that generation, but couldn't find anything worth the asking price. The closest was oen with an LS swap that looked great, but I wanted something old school. Even though I added a much more modern radio to this, I didn't cut metal out of the dash - I just peeled it back so it can be tacked back together in the future if somebody needs to.

I bought this 1986 Silverado 1500 from a youngster who'd moved to South Florida from Central Florida. I'm in my 50s and wanted a daily driver, so I wanted power breakes and steering, automatic transmission, and air conditioning. It took way more than I expected and I learned that I'm not as capable of working on a truck as I was 20 years ago.

The first job was getting rid of the Jeep rims and adapters when I repalced the dry rotted 33s and went back to stock tire size. I couldn't find a good price on stock rims locally, so I bought the steel ones you see here. At the same time, I picked up all now front end components from LMC Truck, as this beast hated staying in the road and every bushing was worn slap out.

Replaced the distributor, plugs, and wires, fixed popeye headlights (which started with replacing the bulbs, getting irritated that it didn't fix them, rewiring from the switch to the lights, then putting in relays and LEDs, realizing that the LEDs were popeyed in a different layout, and then reversing the direction of the diodes on two bulbs, finally had 4 working lamps).

I pulled the steering column and dropped it off at Broward Steering, right about the time I was having some health issues. The owner of the shop dropped it off at my house one day when I was in the driveway monkeying around behind the dash, putting in a Carplay head and backup camera. I guess I looked pretty sickly because he got back out of his truck and offered to help me put it in. New steering shaft at the same time, and now the turn signals, hazard lights, horn, and high beams all worked like they should.

The engine is a 305. The good ole boys had figured if some is good, then more must be better, and so put a 750 cfm Edelbrock on it. I replaced that with a 500 and it worked flawlessly for 17 hours, then had it towed so i could swap out the fuel pump (also put in the toolbox in case I was stuck beside the road again). It only has one tank on the passenger side. At some point, I'll replace the missing one and get all of that working so I have a better range. Maybe even put in larger tanks on both sides.

The brakes started squealing on my test drives, so new rotars and pads on the front, the drums and shoes looked good in back, lots of adjustment left.

For the last 7 months, I've been going back and forth with the shop about the AC. I knew the expansion valve was bad, and they tested the compressor, replaced both, but then it still wasn't blowing cold. Replaced the cable to the blend door and a few of the associated pieces and finally took it back. They tested for vacuum leaks and found a nasty one behind the climate controls in the vacuum select valve.

I spent the next 5 months trying to find a replacement. I spent a good $400 on eBay misses and finally had an idea. I went to chat.chatbotapp.ai and said "This part number is not right for my truck. here is the VIN number for my truck. Find the right part number for the equivalent on my vehicle" and it not only found it, it sent me a link to https://newboyzsquarebodyrescue.com/ where I bought three of them (tucked two away for a rainy day) and now the AC runs cold.

The engine has 85k miles on it and either the rings or the valve seats are worn, as it blows a little smoke when I start it up. Otherwise, it's running great and I've been driving it for a month now as my daily driver.