I will be the last person to not have a smart home. There will be a banner over the doorway: “Welcome to Stupid House”.

There will be a small cover charge.

I’m with you. I hate how they expect me to control everything from my phone or with voice commands. I’m fine walking to a light switch or walking to the thermostat.

There’s a middle ground as well. I refuse to put Alexa or OK Google or whatever on any of my stuff, but I run home-assistant with zigbee smart devices. My entire setup runs completely cut off from the internet. I could in theory even air gap it, although that’s a little overkill. It’s a “smart” house, but one I’m 100% in control of.

Is that self hosted? I’d just about fuck with a FOSS self hosted smart home setup, but even then I could barely be arsed

Yes. You can host it on a pi if you want

That’s badass. I’ve got one lying around actually.

Be careful running it in a Pi because it’s a little heavy for that depending on how you configure it. A Pi model 4 is probably OK, but you wouldn’t want to run it on a model 3 or something even older, and you’re going to want to use one with at least 4GB of RAM.

Ah shit, the raspberry I’ve got is old as hell. Thanks for the heads up.

It will probably run even in a Pi Model 1, it’s just going to be a bit slow to interact with, and you’re not going to be able to do anything more complicated like enable the voice support (which you probably don’t want anyway, because I think it’s dependent on internet access for that, and then we’re back to the same problem as Alexa, although I don’t use it myself so I can’t say for sure).