Mine re-throws the error every 30 seconds or so after pressing said button. The only vacuuming is now manual.

That's still ridiculous. Amazon servers have no business being between my phone and my vacuum. At least when I'm in the same local network.

Ideally it should let me set up port forwarding on my router to talk to the vacuum from the outside too.

This is the big problem with most (all?) commercial "Internet of Things" devices. It's a real mess, and that is because this idea is unworkable from the start. What we should have instead are many, isolated "Intranets of Things".

Luckily, not everything uses WiFi. There are tons of Zigbee and Z-Wave devices which physically don't have a WiFi chip.

Of course, you should build your own bridge to connect them to (rather than using the bridge of a big tech company).

For Zigbee you can use the Conbee [0] and for Z-Wave you can use the Z-Stick [1] to build your own bridge.

Furthermore, some of the cheaper WiFi devices that are based on the ESP8266 chip can be flashed with a custom firmware called Tasmota [2] to make them cloud-free.

[0]: https://www.phoscon.de/en/conbee2

[1]: https://aeotec.com/z-wave-usb-stick/

[2]: https://github.com/arendst/tasmota/#readme

Just because you have WiFi doesn't mean all communication must happen over the Internet.

If both the phone and the device are in the same network, they can communicate just fine.

A ZigBee or Z-Wave stick + Home Assistant (or openHAB, Domoticz, others) gets you more reliable operation and no notifying $MEGACORP every time you flick a light switch (or something equally dumb).

Devices based on the popular ESP8266 can also frequently be freed from their cloud overlords with community-made firmware [0], [1] and used as proper Intra-o-T devices.

I decided a while back that I would have no part in this Inter-o-T madness and I think it was a good choice.

[0]: https://github.com/arendst/Tasmota

[1]: https://esphome.io/

Heh, just noticed you linked Tasmota as well while I was writing this. Good project, I use it too!

Trading cloud provided services with your own home grown systems just trades unreliability in one way with its own sets of maintenance and reliability problems, plus a lot of complexity that is out of reach for most people. Smart home technology is a mess and someone that cares enough needs to design an open, reliable, future secure, and user friendly system that can work wired and wireless.

Do note that you can unintentionally expose data to the BigCo too -- Home-Assistant and I'm sure the other platforms can export all local devices to Google/Amazon to allow control via Assistant/Echo and will send entity state updates to facilitate that.

Everyone has their own threat model, but I'm more comfortable with Google knowing when my light switch is on than I am with their outage or service deprecation preventing me from turning it off.

For the technically-literate home automator, I think the sweet spot is something like Hubitat. It's not home-brew, has decent commercial support, integrated Z-Wave and ZigBee etc. and is designed to be completely self-contained on your LAN.

I dumped my Wink Hub for one after they did their bait-and-switch for subscription fees. Never been happier with home automation.

> What we should have instead are many, isolated "Intranets of Things".

Nah, Internet is great for updates.

The problem, while it doesn't fit a description as slogan-friendly as yours, is the reliance on centralized servers as essential for routine operations rather than just for optional (though potentially important) updates, and this isn’t an engineering problem but a deliberate business decision to enable X-as-a-Service business models (whether paid for via recurring subscription, ongoing user data, or both.)

> Ideally it should let me set up port forwarding on my router to talk to the vacuum from the outside too.

Imagine having to fiddle with iptables to use your vacuum. I think I'll just get up and press that button manually...

Most people use web UI-equipped home routers.

In a cloud-bullshit-free world, a UPNP-style autodiscovery/port could be useful, perhaps with Urbit-style access control.

Yes, I'm sure they would sell tens of vacuums that way. And then you would complain when you got hacked because you opened up your vacuum to the outside world.

Communication through the cloud doesn't make it any more secure. To the contrary, it makes massive leaks/hacks possible.

You're right. Also, if I have two computers on the same local network, why does Dropbox still insist on syncing everything through their servers?

It doesn't, it calls it 'LAN sync' but still requires an internet connection to coordinate the transfer...

By all means, lets have consumers poke holes in their firewall for their vacuum. What could possibly go wrong?

> Amazon servers have no business being between my phone and my vacuum.

Actually, that's exactly where their business exists.

Exactly. The power to step on your air hose.

I think he meant it from a purely technical standpoint... (curious use of the word 'business')

I think you're both right.

"to have no business" is an idiom. It's not strange at all.

> curious use of the word 'business'

I'd explain, but it's none of my business.

Ah, hell, why not. You see, he made it his business to point out that the phone-vacuum communication has no business going through Amazon servers, there's simply no need.

it's a bit like a pun, because by doing that they make a business (and a profit) out of sticking their noses where they shouldn't

Amazon servers are doing the hard work of voice-to-text understanding.

You’re talking about an average consumer that can’t remember their WiFi password or simply pair devices with it. Of course the future is in devices shipping their own internet, and everyone who works in that space would tell you - whether by their professional experience or through user surveys - that WiFi / local internet is the biggest obstacle.

That is not universally true. There are also plans to use completely different radio stacks and offer localized control.

The amount of people that do not want any cloud controlled devices is quite significant.

It is also a huge waste of energy to have my device contact Amazon to set a value. Voice interfaces can be nice, but only very few customers seem to be interested. It also adds costs for customer support and you need maintenance on apps and services.

I work in that space, although it is true that IoT is not central to the products, so I don't know about the latest trends. Luckily it is just a feature we like to show of on expositions.

For me a line is crossed if people add security cameras directly connected to vendor networks. If that is allowed I should also be able to install my laser with 100w optical output power and face detection. I have a right to security after all.