Sometimes, I just want to turn everything off

I have been a proponent of home automation for > 30 years. I vaguely remember my Heathkit days, ordering from catalogs and spending days/weeks soldering things together to produce a functional project, only to find that a better, smarter, easier project was just announced. And back to the bench I would go. Fast forward through Arduino, Altair 8800, IBM 370, Apple I, II and III, TRS-80, Assembly language, Basic, Pascal, IBM 1442, Commodore 64, IBM PC, Wordstar, Atari, C, C+, C++, Fortran, BitNet, Turbo PC, CD-RW, iMac,.......and that's just through the early 1990's. You get the point. Most recently I have transitioned through X10, RPi, SmartThings, and now Hubitat. This ride through technology, and specifically home automation technology, has been a roller coaster of elation and failure. MOST of the time, things work as expected. MANY times, they do not. Enter my wife.....Now my automations must be more precise, reproducible, cheap and pragmatic. The slightest glitch, and I get the eye-rolls, scorn, the occasional curse word, and off-the-cuff requests to "just turn it all off", without any understanding of the time and effort that it required to get to this point. So many times I have wanted to honor that request and just shut everything down, just to see the frustration boil over. But I labor onward.

6 Likes

Do you feel better now that you have that off your chest?

2 Likes

While I don't have a "significant other", it does sometimes feel like they should form a lobby group and approach the companies we buy our (their) tech from to put their (our) point across that it does not live up to our (our) expectations....

Funny you mentioned shutting everything off. I did that for a month and they begged me to have at least some lights and reminder automations back on.
I started with X10 with my dad as well and it was so dame cool back then.

1 Like
2 Likes

That's deep.... Remind me to never take a car ride with you.... :wink: