Communication is generally a very big problem in a smart home, and even this is not just the wi-fi or zigbee connection itself, but in general both hardware and software that work using these protocols.

For example, if you use wi-fi, then of course this is most often a cloud solution, that is, you don't really expect any reliability from them, because after all, both the Internet and external servers are already available.

Of course, in principle, I use the smart home more for experiments, buy some devices, configure them, see how they work, I look at how others interact with them, draw some conclusions, come up with some new algorithms, of course I constantly have various failures in these algorithms, and I understand that the device does not work correctly, it needs to be changed there to find a new one, pick up some device, or some parameters of this device are incorrect or the time characteristics are not what I expected initially, or in principle it is inconvenient to use and get confused in it in this device, and the wrong buttons are pressed, or in principle it does not fit there for some reason.

Sometimes I have to make changes so urgently that I don't even have time to test them there to understand whether I did the right thing or not there, summer may suddenly come or winter may come, or guests may come and we need to turn everything off or on urgently, or we decided to start cleaning or some other actions there, and we need to turn off the script or to enable a specific mode in this scenario, this is all of course not tested and may simply not work correctly.

And of course, different old devices, they also work often incorrectly somehow buggy and not even necessarily old, it may just be some that I bought a long time ago, on some old protocols still working, for example, I have a relay that operates at a frequency of 433 megahertz over the radio channel, this is a four-channel relay and everything seems to be fine, it is compact and you can install it somewhere very well, but a situation has arisen, that just for some unknown reason, this relay turned out to be sensitive to certain wireless switches that I have, that is, I configure it to work with some kind of wireless switch, which also works on the radio channel, but at the same time it can also be triggered on a certain other switch and only on two out of four are like this, and even if I reset all the bindings to the switches in this relay at all, it will still respond, but it does not turn on, only turns off, at first, of course, I could not understand for a long time why it was turned off, it turned out that it just reacted to this switch, and this switch was used to control the light in the room and when someone turned on or off the light in this room, the relay in general in another room reacted and turned off the light there.

Well, also with these wireless switches that are directly connected for example, I have a wi-fi switch from Tuya, which can also work in conjunction with a wireless switch operating at a radio frequency of 433MHz, that is, there you can bind each button to the corresponding button of the wired switch, but if for example there forgot to untie and then this switch if you use it somewhere else, then of course there may be a situation that just at some fine moment the switch will start to turn on or off and you will not remember why this is happening there, that it was tied to such and such a wireless switch, there were still cases, at first I tried to control a lot on this radio frequency and for example I did it so that I just sent certain commands from the transmitter and thus programmed this binding to switches or relays there, and then after a while it may turn out that I I run this command again, or even it happened so that some sensor starts sending a signal, there are basically 32 bits of the signal seems like a lot of combinations there are more than a billion, but it may turn out that some combination is either very similar, either it directly coincided, and the switch, for example, turns on and off simply from the fact that, for example, some motion sensor worked there, or there the temperature sensor transmitted a certain temperature and how this switch would work exactly on this signal.

I still have an old iPad, which also has a bad touch screen, and it also started pressing some different buttons on this dashboard randomly and it was also not clear why something turned on or off, at first it started certain scenarios, and then when I decided to turn it around, he started turning off different thermostats and sockets connected to these thermostats, which of course was incomprehensible and unpredictable, and he didn't do it all the time, but only sometimes started doing it, and I just had to change the touch screen for 4500, because of course it was impossible to leave it like this, he could create some incomprehensible situation in a smart home.

I also use geolocation detection for finding people in a smart home, and more precisely their devices, and I also have a determination by IP whether a device has appeared on the wi-fi network or not, but it also happens often that the phone has changed and, accordingly, it will already have a new ip address, of course you will not need to forget to reconfigure the script in the smart home system so that it works out at the new address, otherwise it will just work incorrectly and sort of come home, but the light doesn't turn on or some script doesn't start there, because they think that I am not at home and, accordingly, in this way it is blocked.

I also monitor the state of batteries in various wireless sensors and switches, of course, in principle, I set up a dashboard for myself and I have a separate view in my smart home system that I can open and see the state of all batteries on it, but of course I forget to go there, open it, sometimes of course I can skip it, so I set it up so that if this battery runs out, then I get a reminder in Telegram, but in general, I often have a lot of different failures, and I try to send them to Telegram to understand when it happened, what it affected there, and what it should be done do not forget that in principle I can easily miss that there was a message that some sensor battery is dead or sitting down, and of course ignore this event, message, and of course do not replace the battery, but then I will see that there is some sensor stopped send the value I have on the dashboard will be highlighted, that the value is too old I made so that if I have more than an hour, there is one sign appears, if there are no messages for more than a day, then another attribute appears on the dashboard and I can see that some value is no longer sent to the smart home system.

But there was even an idea to make two different telegram bots there, one for some service messages of all sorts of errors, something else, the other is just a service one that will simply record different messages, which I can then simply review and read in a quiet mode, and do some actions related to this one.

A lot of problems arise when setting up different new devices, they can start to conflict, for example, I had such a situation when I set up new devices for the zigbee network, it turned out that, of course, I didn't know about it at first, what if some device has an old zigbee network ID and I created a new network there, for example, and in I connected all the new devices to it there, and then I turn on this device, put a battery in it, or it came out of sleep mode and started getting connected to the network, well, since it has an ID, of course it is a device, it can send information about itself to this router, or rather zigbee networks, but it can't receive it back, because the router doesn't actually know this device and there was such a problem that my network just started to fall apart, I didn't know what to do and I don't know why this can happen at all and only later, after a long study, I realized that you need to be very careful about network identifiers and if you configure some stick, then you still need to choose this network identifier not by default, but set your own and at the same time do not forget, what if, for example, two networks are used, they should not have overlapping indicators, but in general, the more I start using different ecosystems and different applications for a smart home, the more difficult it turns out that you need to remember where and what you set up, in which ecosystem and how it is configured there, and it happens that something it works and in principle it is not clear, what's going on and where to look for it, or I suddenly forgot to turn it off somewhere, or for example, after the next reboot, some script turned on in some smart home system and started being processed, or some value came in there, and for some reason the script suddenly worked at this moment, and this of course is very difficult to catch and it happens that for example, if I made a script of some kind in the Yandex smart home system, and there I called some device with a certain name, then I start using this name in some other script, then I can click there and run the script, some button, or by executing some command to turn on the light in another room at all and there, I don't know, turn off something in another room, some device, this is certainly not very convenient.

I temporarily now also have a switch that usually lies on the balcony, but now it's just in the room on the nightstand, there are three pieces, and I recently also came and began to press them, it seems like this one is responsible for turning on the light in the room, this one is responsible for something else, but in fact it turned out that this switch just turned on the light on the balcony, started the music there, turned off the light in the room, that is, absolutely different scenarios were running, and it just turned out that I got everything mixed up, because of course it is very difficult to remember where and what is there, which button is responsible for what, or what scenario, what is the name of the commands, and there the device is tied to what, and there at least buy some stickers stick on these scenario switches, so that you can somehow remember where and what you need to press there.

For example, I have about 10 such 3-button wireless switches only in one room and at the same time there are also buttons separately, which also work out 6 clicks there, there are also wireless switches in general there are six-button Aqara switches, which in general there are a lot of combinations more than 30 combinations can do different things, and of course it is very difficult remember, sometimes you press a button and it doesn't start at all, it doesn't turn on, and of course you think there may be, I don't know, some kind of smart speaker that you can teach it there, that she will guess that there I tell her some nonsense, and it turns on correctly, but this does not happen, of course, a smart column, it basically works according to certain rules, executes certain commands with certain names, and for example I had a situation when she just, I tell her turn on the socket 3 there, it actually turns on this outlet for three o'clock in the morning, and then it's still unclear how to turn it off, this timer, and then in the middle of the night this outlet can turn on and it's good if this outlet is responsible for turning on the light, for example, and you can still survive it there, and if the heater can turn on, another device, and start working all night, this of course will not be very good.

Well, there is also a lot of indignation on the Internet that there are some Yandex speakers that do not have a battery, they cannot work independently, I think that this is generally correct, probably the surest decision for Yandex is not to do this, because the column is tied to a specific room in order to work correctly in it, and if it is possible to take it somewhere with you by accident, now even in the Yandex smart home system it is possible to create several houses, then you can accidentally turn on this column somewhere in the country some device, instead of being in a specific room in the house or vice versa.

Automation in a smart home should be useful and create additional comfort, but sometimes everything goes wrong… The reasons for this, and how to configure everything, see on my channel.