Tried to plug in our holiday lights this afternoon only to find that our old switch, an iHome ISP100, apparently isn’t usable anymore because SDI completely abandoned Android for the iHome Control App, which has somehow broken device pairing. So that thing has become e-waste and now I’m looking for a new outdoor plug that I can set up with some sort of mechanism for timing (open to anything) and voice control (Alexa).
At this point I think I’d prefer simplicity, I’m happy to forego bells and whistles, and to pay more, to just have something that solves a problem and can continue working after the company who created it has given up on it. I assume Matter is the answer there, but if there’s some other company that has a different way of solving this (maybe by releasing their source or something) I’m all ears.
Open it up and see what chip it’s using. It may not be ewaste just yet.
Kasa. Cheap and great.
plenty of zwave outdoor plugs. Jasco/GE, Zooz, Minoton, probably others.
Matter, Zigbee and Zwave are all local control. And on Home Assistant, you can have a dongle for all three. That will open your options quite a bit.