Smart home automation - done right - should be simple. Not having to worry about lights coming on or going off at the optimum times, or blinds opening/closing, or doors being locked, makes life easier.
When chuck wants a light on, he flips the switch. When he wants it off, he flips the same switch the other way. Iām gonna go out on a limb and say he rarely worries about them during the in between times.
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Man, who knew. I thought my life was pretty easy, but I see not itās not.
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I always wanted The Clapper.
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I can do that too. I have just made it so that, most of the time, I donāt have to.
I know emojiās are taboo here butā¦
Edited to add, if anyone here ever wanted an exegesis of emojiās, let me know. Iāll hop on my soapbox and expound vociferouslyā¦
Ohā¦something else to add to Limeyās white list of smart tech: Phillips Hue.
I have a number of their bulbs and strips, and they - like Caseta - have been flawless, because they should be for the price
The piĆØce de rĆ©sistance is the TV light strip in my living room that has the box that reads the screen image and changes the lights accordingly so that the entire wall becomes an extension of the screen.
Sometimes when Iām really living large Iāll ask my wife or that weird little guy who appeared out of nowhere and lives here now for some reason to flip a switch on or off. And you know what, sometimes they do it.
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So after years of thinking about it, I finally added a wifi access point to my back patio. Ran the wire from the switch out there and set up an outdoor AP. Itās working great. I got plenty of juice all over the back yard. The hell is, itās a different SSID than the one in the house. Can I make them the same? What happens if I do?
And on a related questionā¦how many ethernet switches can I cascade? Now that I have a an ethernet cable run outside it opens up possibilities, but Iād need to add a switch, or two, to the wire which is already on a switch.
TWSS
Canāt help you with the SSID, but I believe you can cascade as many ethernet switches as you like.
You can make them the same, but:
- The SSIDs and passwords need to be completely identical, including case sensitivity.
- The encryption protocols (probably āWPA2 Personalā or āWPA3 Personalā) should ideally be the same but are usually cross-compatible.
- The encryption algorithm (usually already AES by default these days) needs to be identical.
- Set your APsā 2.4GHz and 5GHz radios to āautoā channel if you can. Donāt want them interfering with each other.
- A lot of progress has been made toward devices gracefully switching from a weaker AP to a stronger AP, but itās still not perfect. If you go from the house to the patio or vice versa, any unbuffered connections like wifi calling or a Zoom meeting may freeze for a few seconds (or even drop, if the connection is less fault tolerant) as the handoff is made. Itās also possible your device may stay latched on to the AP it started with and suffer from slower speeds. If you notice this, just turn off/on the deviceās wifi and it will always reconnect to the strongest AP.
Theoretically there is no limit to the number of switches you can daisy-chain. Itās not a great practice because youāre adding points of failure, and technically it increases latency downstream (each switching hop may add ~1ms) and processing overhead upstream (each switch handles all the internet traffic of its own plus everything downstream). That said, we still do it sometimes, and in a home setting youāre unlikely to ever notice the latter two drawbacks. If you can live with the extra points of failure, knock yourself out.
Thanks. I guess Iāll dive in and start renaming everything and see what happens.
As for multiple switchesā¦my plan was more of ācascadingā than ādaisy chainingā (I think I understand those terms correctly). Itās not to put them all in a linear chain, one connected to the next with the signal passing through all of them, but rather have each āremoteā switch connect directly back to the main switch at the router. So Iāll have the one big switch at the router, a line run to say the office where thereāll be a smaller switch connected to devices. Then similarly, a line running from the main switch to outside, where a smaller switch will connect to multiple devices, etc. So itās really only one switch between a device and the main switch, which if the main switch fails, Iām screwed no matter what. I plan to have maybe three or four of these āremoteā switches, all wired directly back to the main switch at the router. And on a side note, this appeals to me because there are some devices that just seem to do better hardwired than over wifi (the printer, for example or the DirecTV). I donāt know why, just the way it seems to always be.
Got it. Youāre referring to a hub-and-spoke topology and itās exactly how we do it in the professional IT world. Youāre only limited by the number of ports on your ācoreā switch.
Thatās not a huge surprise. Wifi is susceptible to a lot of things that wired Ethernet is not, and Ethernet also has a higher top speed and less latency. I usually try to hardwire any device that never moves, like a desktop PC or a set-top box.
āHub and spokeāā¦that was the term I was looking for but couldnāt think of it.
And for the recordā¦I can set up a wifi access point on any one of those spoke switches, correct? Not that I need them, but I could if I wanted, correct?
Iām not Waldo, but I did stay at a Holiday Innā¦once.
Just think of the ethernet like the plumbing in your house: when you turn on a tap the water comes out and this is true of any of the taps in the house even though thereās only one pipe coming in. If you turn on more than one tap at the same time, you probably wonāt notice; if you turn them all on at the same time, you might notice a drop in pressure, but itās not like they wonāt work at all. And, as you reduce the number of taps running, the flow of the others will return to normal.
As to working better hardwired, I think this is true of every device. My ethernet-connected computer has a ping time of 8ms and download speeds of close to 1GB/s. My iPhone 14 Pro - designed to exist wirelessly only - when mere feet from the router gets a ping of ~25ms and download speeds of ~400MB/s.
Yes, on an unmanaged network it doesnāt matter how many APs you have or which switches or switch ports theyāre connected to. You could even reshuffle the APs around after setting them up and everything would be none the wiser as long as all the switches can talk to each other.
Plumbing in my house is more like a daisy chain than a hub and spoke. Yes, it all enters the house through one pipe, but everything passes through the same pipe down the line. Itās not like thereās a central manifold that each fixture or run of pipe connects back to. So the pressure at the end of the line is less than it is closer to the supply, and if thereās a leak at the first fixture, it affects the ones farther down the line. At least itās that way on my house. Newer houses may have a central manifold, which honestly if you have the room, is the better way to plumb.
One nit to pick: your units should be Gbps and Mbps, not GB/s and MB/s.
Wifi 7 stands to finally eliminate this bottleneck once it gets wider adoption. Ping times on wireless will still be higher because physics, but people are already getting real world speeds as high as 2-3Gbps on early Wifi 7 gear. At that point the bottleneck will not be wifi itself but rather an APās uplink to the network or the userās ISP bandwidth. Thereās some hope that, just like Apple led the charge on USB-C, Wifi 7 will make multigig LAN ports (in 2.5G, 5G, or 10G flavors) more common in consumer equipment. As for the ISPs who in many areas max out at far less than gigabit, theyāre going to do whatās profitable and nothing more.
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Thanks for the terminology correction.
I used to be religious about getting my ISPās combo box out of the router business and, if possible, out of the modem business too. When I had cable internet back in the mid-teens, I had my own modem and a much-lamented Apple Extreme Base Station.
Currently, I use the Xfinity combo box for modem/router duty. Itās perfectly adequate for my needs and they make using non-proprietary equipment just annoying enough to keep me away from doing that. Fucking thing takes 12 minutes to reboot though, which is why I have it on a UPS.
If Apple ever gets back into the router businessā¦