I know I have seen this asked before, but I figure things change. I REALLY want to get smart things in my home, but am not OK with not having control of my own devices. Will there be an option to control these things from the internet without asking your servers for permission. I find this concept very much like buying a house and the real estate agent insisting that you not get the keys and that you have to have the real estate agent come out and open doors and turn lights on and off on your behalf. I want my phone to contact the hub or a server in my home with no reliance on a 3rd party whatsoever before I’ll go down this road no matter how much I want to.
As of today, the answer is no. The current SmartThings hub will not work without an internet connection. It has been suggested that some functions on hub v2 will work without an internet connection, but it will still have many that rely on the cloud. If you want a completely stand alone server, smart things will never be that.
I checked out Vera just now after seeing your post, but after 5 minutes of looking it still looks like at least authentication is done through a cloud server. I’m just not OK with asking a 3rd party for permission to my stuff. That also means they have access to my stuff which I am also not OK with. I really want to get into this market but this is my home. Once I buy the equipment, me and people that I designate should be the only people in control of our security… all authentication and control should be happening on my home servers or devices.
I understand your concern, yet I don’t think you’ll find anything out there that doesn’t require some form of trust if you want Internet access. Have you looked at a traditional alarm panel?
I believe Indigo runs entirely locally on a server of your choice, and the mobile device and remote access are optional (i.e. you don’t have to enable them).
Control4 also touts their local processing. I imagine you can isolate the Control4 brain from the internet if you want:
I’ve not actually used either of their products.
Control4 can be used completely offline. Needs internet to upgrade only. I have a complete control4 system. Must be installed by a certified dealer.
Be prepared to spend $$$$ to do a room. Need a controller to start, hc250 is the basic model and the hc800 is the top of the line.
All adds to the system, ie one outlet / switch or a driver has to be done by a dealer as well.
If you buy the composer HE version from the dealer, you can do limited programming of your project.
Yeah I should have mentioned Control4 is expensive. ST is cheap. ST is maddening sometimes… but for what I paid for it, I don’t think there’s anything better out there.
And if ST ever goes belly up, I’ll be able to take my devices with me somewhere else.
I think it helps to think of home automation on ST as a hobby… not some integral part of living in your home
Oh, and I forgot to mention, I’m working on getting almost all the zigbee Control4 products to work natively in SmartThings…
Now if SmartThings would consider IR control and a media control layer so I can turn on my tv, etc…
Playlist / listing content would also be nice, but ultimately, as ST evolves, it will eventually be able to take out a high end HA system. Not there yet.
Wish IP control also allowed power on/off, just a few high end tv’s allow this…
Vera can operate without internet connection. The online login is necessary only if you want to control it over the Internet (i.e. outside of your home). There was only one issue with the old Vera, that it didn’t have real-time clock and relied on NTP server to get current time when booting up. I don’t know it this has been addressed in Vera Edge.
Its probably easier to hack your servers than ST’s.
It’s not a trust issue. It’s a reliability issue. The longest outage for my system this year was 5 days. And, wouldn’t it be great if at least something worked in case of an internet outage? My Hue bulbs work fine without an internet connection. Would be great if my garage door would open without an internet connection.