Local is the goal!
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Yes. I think that is fine. Will Knocki work if someone blocks it from accessing your cloud after initial setup?
Tomw, the cloud-based behavior defined in our FAQ is the current default behavior despite the hardware have the capacity for local (with some firmware work).
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I get the concept, but it isn’t for me. I don’t want to be knocking my knuckles on furniture late at night ….
Still think it’s a neat idea - might get one for the front door.
For me this would be fine. The main reason most of us want local is due to reliability. Stuff should work even if the internet is down or your cloud is down. So if it also reaches out that's fine as long as it doesn't fail when it can't get out.
Love the idea BTW though, loads of use cases.
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This is so wicked cool - I can imagine easily many use cases for this. This is sci-fi movies coming true to life stuff.
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That would be perfectly fine in my book. Management of the device and firmware updates through cloud are fine as long as it is able to operate locally without requiring cloud connectivity. That way it’s no different from how the Philips Hue integration works for instance.
The reason we are passionate about local processing is the reliability, fast response times, privacy and security local only processing provides. A few of us go as far as preventing Internet access from our IoT networks in order to further secure our smart homes and protect our privacy.
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My use cases center around providing command/control/convenience for the elderly/disabled/cognitively/visually challenged. Learning curve can be set quite low for someone to trigger some powerful rules/routines.
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I’m less fanatical about local processing than other hubitations - after all I have MS Windows, Adobe, Alexa, Sonos, and Apple products everywhere that all use the cloud anyways. I do like the speed and reliability of HE’s local processing. Anyway all that to say I’m game to beta test and contribute to an integration. I’m just a hobby level coder but if I can help I will.
I block all home automation systems/functions from reaching the Internet. However, I do briefly allow HE Internet access when I wish to do an update. If Knocki can function in the same manner with very infrequent (2-3 times/year) then I'm good with that.
I also block domains to a fairly fine granularity with Pi-Hole so when I want HE to get an update I disable blocking on only the domains absolutely needed for the same period of time.
Yeah. I have a ton of "could connectivity" for my setup, but for key things I make sure there is also local control so that my automations still work even if my internet is down. Turns out this is also great for responsiveness and latency. Since a lot of my stuff is battery powered, and I have my routers on UPSs, even if my house looses power and/or internet a lot of my automations still work.
That's what I appreciate so much about zigbee/z-wave and things like my Ring Alarm, Lutron, Sonos, Homebridge, etc, that have direct local connectivity to my hub.
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Jnosa899: It looks like Hubitat offers everything most people need to customize smart home routines. However, the current Knocki architecture requires for tap patterns to be assigned and configured via the mobile app which communicates with our cloud-based backend, so creating an interface to assign/configure the tap patterns locally will take some reworking. Our firmware engineer would have the best idea about this, but perhaps we could create a web-based interface that connects to our device via its "access point" SSID, enabling for the tap gestures to be set via that interface, and/or perhaps via commands directly from Hubitat hub.
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Those are great points.
That is very informative. I can understand having to use cloud or whatnot as a stop gap, but if I have to use the app after setup it's just not worth it to me. I have plenty of smart apps on my phone but luckily their buried as I don't have to use them unless maybe something goes terribly wrong. Hubitat is th only app I am willing to open and actually I've turned the Hubitat app into my android phone UI. That may be a bit extreme but I am completely burnt out on individual apps. It's just too much to deal with and individual apps are almost always useless for automations.
With all of that being said count me in for at least 1. I love the idea for my bedroom especially. I'll risk being burnt on servers that turn off someday for such a creative device. Let us know when it can be connected to Hubitat even if it has to use a cloud API. I cant wait to take it for a spin.
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Rather late to the party, but here's how I'd solve that. Dropping it back into local access point mode means you'd need to D/L the firmware upgrade and temporarily save it on the local device that's going to connect to the Knocki's AP. Plus you'd need to flip WiFi modes on the Knocki between client and station, twice during the whole process. That's a whole pile of effort that I'm not sure you need.
Instead, when running in local mode, all tap actions are handled via local http calls, and most of the time the Knocki doesn't attempt to go to the cloud. Then as part of the HE driver, we'd expose an endpoint that simply returns the current time and date, or you could ping an NTP server, or something.
Anyway, one way or another the Knocki gets some idea of what time it is, and then once a week, or however often, it checks the cloud and does updates using the usual path. One advantage of this is that it'll be beating on your servers a whole lot less. That's always good.
That's the same pattern as HE uses: as has been mentioned time and again, control with HE is primarily local, that's its great advantage. If you suffer an ISP outage, your smart home continues to work. But it still pings home base once in a while to D/L firmware upgrades.
That's the key point. It's not that we don't want it to ever hit the cloud, all we're trying to do is keep "control actions" local. Cloud based firmware updates - not a problem. Cloud based light switching - that's what we're all trying to avoid.
In other news:
Wave wave!
I spent about the first ten years of my career in the embedded space, with a mix of C and 8051 assembler. Granted, that was quite a while ago, but I've recently got back into that with a whole collection of Arduino projects that talk to my HE to do various useful things.
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Hi Dgnuff,
Clever ideas - one of the challenges with have with our firmware is that it's difficult to modify the device's access point behavior, I'm going to DM you to see if I we might be able to collaborate on technical side of things.
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@dgnuff do I need a certain privilege in this message board in order to send you a DM, or am I missing the DM icon?
The instructions on the messages page are as follows, but I'm not seeing a message button.
Need to have a direct personal conversation with someone, outside the normal conversational flow? Message them by selecting their avatar and using the message button.
Join the owners group here:
https://community.hubitat.com/g/owners
Doing so will give you the privileges to send a PM/DM, and post images.
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