A smart home on wheels ... without Yandex?

How did it all start? Six months ago, I made voice control of the light on a Raspberry Pi at home with control from a smart speaker from Yandex and was very happy that I got rid of the use of servers from manufacturers of lighting equipment and localized control as much as possible. But during operation it turned out that not everything is so simple. The fact is that Yandex decided that synchronization of equipment with its own Smart Home should only take place through the domain name !!! and a VALID certificate attached to this name. That is, you need to assign a white address to your equipment, bind a domain to it and assign a certificate to this domain, which must be confirmed by a trusted certification authority. And even if you raise your root certification authority, create an intermediate certificate and issue a certificate for the domain on behalf of it,then nothing will work anyway. Like this :(



Of course, initially there was information that Yandex does not work with self-signed certificates, but I tried ... And then I turned to technical support. By the way, I would give the technical support a great job. They answered promptly, sorted it out quickly, and so on. Well done. It's a pity not their level of decisions. And I asked a question (for the second time, the previous time half a year ago they answered that they had passed the information to the right place, thanks) and asked to redirect it to a higher level - why shouldn't Yandex organize the issuance of its valid certificates?



Register a domain, issue a binding of white addresses of people who want to connect to the Yandex Smart Home system, to subdomains of this domain and issue their own certificates, which will definitely be valid. But again they told me "thanks, the information was sent." I suspect that everything above the level will also stall.



This was a preface so that it was clear what I was facing. But now I want to express (dump) the result of reflections. First, about the good. Short.



So, Yandex did, in my opinion, an awful good thing - it implemented a speech recognition neural network, in a simple way, Alice, released its own smart column with the same Alice and, which is also very important - "invented / thought out / further develops" the Smart House software system from Yandex. Voice control of appliances is a real 21st century. Respect!



And now about the bad. She released something, but in fact, limited access to it for most of those who want to use it, DIY-specialists, geeks who raise their own houses such as openhub, homeassistant or domotics. That is, in order to connect to this system, you need to go through a whole quest - ask the provider for an external address, find some left organization somewhere that allows you to register a domain or subdomain, then get a certificate for this domain from another third-party company. I am especially happy that you have to pay for the domain and the certificate, and if you want free, then you need to renew the certificate every 3 months (you can automate, for example, with cron), and binding the domain to the IP - once a month and without automation (I'm talking about NOIP and Letsencrypt if that). Large manufacturers do not care, they are few and they can raise at least a hundred domains.We can say, of course, that this is Yandex development and he can do whatever he wants with it. So be it. But judging by these results, the development of the Smart Home system seems to be underway, but it has no prospects. Yes, they released smart bulbs and sockets, but few people need them. Because there is nowhere to apply them.



Screw into a floor lamp and show off to friends? This is not enough. Smart speakers are a thing! But without equipment that they could control, this is a wonderful and technological toy. Which you can ask what time it is, set the alarm, find out about the weather. Ask how is that? There is also equipment, there are gateways from Xiaomi, all kinds of smart Samsung and Phillips. They work fine with Yandex, turn on / off. But they all work through their servers, they are not connected with Yandex in any way and it is not known how they work. Tomorrow they will break down or they will be turned off - that's the control. It seems that the system was made, but only for themselves and large equipment manufacturers who just don't need to adjust to someone, localize control and the like. And one more minus. Many people know about the MQTT protocol,which is used in the vast majority of software smart homes, and the yandex2mqtt converter from a friendmunrexio... Apparently, the converter has long been abandoned and is not being updated. And Smart Home from Yandex is constantly updated, new features appear. That we can't use. And the Yandex team should either buy yandex2mqtt or write their own. Which is not and is not expected. Very disappointing somehow.



What am I leading to. For instance. Yandex sells smart speakers. Nowadays they are bought mainly as smart toys, for example for children. No more. If you do not limit the development of the system to “only for your own people” and lower or straighten the entry bar for small developers so that they can also do their projects with voice control, then you can increase sales due to new solutions, and we have a lot of smart minds. If this is not done, speakers from Google or Apple will be bought as an alternative. If you modify the column a little, for example, integrate a zigbee coordinator or something from similar protocols into it, then it will be possible to hook zigbee devices directly to the column, the control interface will go to the Smart Home on the Yandex server.Then, for example, with a simple replacement of switches with radio-controlled ones, voice control of the light will be implemented for some 10-15 tr. IN ANY APARTMENT! And there are tens of millions of them. And it will not be homemade, but industrial performance. Who wouldn't want to buy this? Or add normal support for in-house sensors, and recognize temperature, humidity and something else by voice. And then, as an option, add something like CMU Sphinx for local recognition and small templates so that everything continues to work in the absence of the Internet. In the future, sell tablets with a web muzzle or some kind of interface for poking your fingers. Sea options. They just don't want to hear.Who wouldn't want to buy this? Or add normal support for in-house sensors, and recognize temperature, humidity and something else by voice. And then, as an option, add something like CMU Sphinx for local recognition and small templates so that everything continues to work in the absence of the Internet. In the future, sell tablets with a web muzzle or some kind of interface for poking your fingers. Sea options. They just don't want to hear.Who wouldn't want to buy this? Or add normal support for in-house sensors, and recognize temperature, humidity and something else by voice. And then, as an option, add something like CMU Sphinx for local recognition and small templates so that everything continues to work in the absence of the Internet. In the future, sell tablets with a web muzzle or some kind of interface for poking your fingers. Sea options. They just don't want to hear.



Why am I so hooked on Yandex? Many companies offer sets of devices that claim to be UD, but which in fact are not. And Yandex, in my opinion, is so far the only office that was able to come closest to the high-quality implementation of a smart home, and will be able to pull. But she just went wrong somewhere.