The Internet of Way Too Many Things • Hacker News Board

Re: The Internet of Way Too Many Things

#221

Post by simcop2387 » Tue, Sep 08, 2015, 3:33 AM UTC

alkonaut wrote: post #168

antr wrote: post #2

I just bought a home, and just started a considerable renovation. I'm putting in new water pipes, new electrical wiring, etc. I thought of putting "smart" devices (i.e. switches, alarms, thermostats, etc.) given the "advantages" these promise. After considerable research, it's not worth the hussle or money. Let's put aside the fact that these are considerable more expensive, and won't breakeven in years (some devices…

> After considerable research, it's not worth the hussle or money. Agree. There is no point in making a 75% smart home. A 10% smart home is fine, it feels like a nifty gadget here and there. It can be clever to automate just a few things, maybe get a nest or make it possible to start watering plants remotely when on holiday. But the dream of the full smart home isn't here yet. If you have 9 lights switchable on your…

The light switch stuff has actually worked out well for me with a specific case. Living in apartments with basically no interior lighting at all. There'll lights in the kitchen and that's about it. You're expected to use lamps and there might be one or two switched outlets. The smart home stuff combined with some battery operated controllers that i can double sided tape to the wall I can add my own switched lamps that have wall switches without tearing the walls out to run my own wiring. Makes things much closer to a normal place. Other than that it didn't tend to get used nearly as much but it was fun being able to turn off the lights on someone from work.

Re: The Internet of Way Too Many Things

#222

Post by nitrogen » Tue, Sep 08, 2015, 3:45 AM UTC

tw04 wrote: post #214

BurritoAlPastor wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, yes. Not only do I pay $50 for my light switches, I also have to write my own interface before they behave differently from $10 light switches. What an incredible value proposition.

That would be the case in the most extreme circumstances. And likely in those circumstances, you'll make money. Much like the general Linux ecosystem, someone else has the same problem, is in college/has no kids/has a ton of spare time, and has already written the program for you. Out of my entire household, I've written one app ever, and it was because I wanted an alert on my sump pump based on an amperage draw on a…

What outlets do you use for monitoring current draw?

Re: The Internet of Way Too Many Things

#223

Post by metaphor » Tue, Sep 08, 2015, 3:59 AM UTC

CydeWeys wrote: post #160

metaphor wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming $50.00 for a Roku, electricity at $0.15/kWh, and 16 hours average daily usage, breakeven point is in ~3.8 years vs. an existing 20W solution.

16 hours daily usage?! Whoa nelly, that's a lot of TV watching! I suspect a lot of people on here (like me) watch less than one hour a day. The US national average is five hours, which is still startlingly high, but doesn't get you close to 16 hours per day even with multiple people in a household (as their viewing times will tend to overlap). I suspect that stand-by power usage may be more important than active powe…

The point of the disillusionment exercise was to carefully select parameters that favored narrowrail's perceived "advantage" in an improbable but still realistic way.

In other words, assuming a proverbial couch potato got a sweet deal on a new Roku 3 and pays up the wazoo for electricity, it would take a solid 4 years of usage in the prescribed manner before breaking even on a relatively small investment, rendering any perceived power savings "advantage" over an existing 20W system null...let alone other considerations like product MTBF, lifecycle, the next trending 6-second attention getter, interoperability, etc.

Re: The Internet of Way Too Many Things

#224

Post by asdfkajh2 » Tue, Sep 08, 2015, 4:22 AM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #82

narrowrail wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been considering replacing my media PC with a Roku, so I'm curious why you would call them "empty plastic boxes" considering the Roku can stream from my local server and I block all outbound requests at my router (firewall). The advantage I see is the 5W power draw vs. my current 20W. I'm also unclear on what interoperability would mean for one of these devices. I don't think 2 Roku on the same network have any…

I'm not krisdol, but I presume the "empty plastic boxes" is a reference to the fact that the amount of hardware necessary to stream video is now miniscule. My Roku is the size it is not because it needs to be that big to hold components, but so that it looks substantial to consumers and doesn't get lost in a ball of cables. And interop for me would mean that instead of N proprietary platforms that must be targeted se…

>My Roku is the size it is not because it needs to be that big to hold components, but so that it looks substantial to consumers and doesn't get lost in a ball of cables.

Are you sure its not because multiple-generations-removed miniaturization technology is cheaper, and the latest Roku devices are under $100? Or that perhaps it's a different economic driver, rather than so the consumer sees its physical size?

Regarding the second app, I think the issue is again non-technical -- content is not available across devices because it's a differentiator. It may seem an artificial barrier -- your Roku can decode any video stream -- but the structure of a system that created the content suggests otherwise.

Sounds like things are ready for interoperation except for the human/economic/structural element.

Re: The Internet of Way Too Many Things

#225

Post by tajano » Tue, Sep 08, 2015, 4:24 AM UTC

I'm glad the "Internet of Things" is being held to task by a mainstream media outlet. The Internet of Things is just a marketing term being pushed onto consumers by Cisco, Qualcomm, Google, etc., because selling more radio chips and putting more sensors in the home directly benefits these companies.

But it's offensive marketing because these companies haven't even bothered to frame the issue in terms of solving people's real-world problems. You want to sell an overpriced thermostat or smoke detector? Fine, but don't tell me it's a revolution.

A lot of smaller players are getting swept up in the hype, and wasting time and money thinking consumers will jump at the opportunity to pay 10X the price for something that interacts with their phone. Prove me wrong, but I'm not buying it.

Re: The Internet of Way Too Many Things

#226

Post by wpietri » Tue, Sep 08, 2015, 4:38 AM UTC

gherkin0 wrote: post #111

wpietri wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine, a great cook, regularly performs what she refers to as The Dance of Smoke Alarm Supplication, wherein she and a broom jointly try to persuade the alarm gods that everything is fine. When she heard that there was a smoke alarm that would pop up a notification on her phone first so she could mute it with zero shrieking, she was very excited. It may be that her landlord installed it wrong, but landlord…

> A friend of mine, a great cook, regularly performs what she refers to as The Dance of Smoke Alarm Supplication, wherein she and a broom jointly try to persuade the alarm gods that everything is fine. When she heard that there was a smoke alarm that would pop up a notification on her phone first so she could mute it with zero shrieking, she was very excited. The Dance of Smoke Alarm Supplication can still apply to s…

I don't know why this was downvoted; I thought it was very relevant.

Re: The Internet of Way Too Many Things

#227

Post by meowface » Tue, Sep 08, 2015, 4:57 AM UTC

rm445 wrote: post #126

azatris wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi :-) This is very interesting. What exactly are you doing then? Designing (software, hardware, both?) dumb devices for home?

Parent poster's bio link points to https://www.hellotwist.com/ which does multi-room speaker systems. What I was going to say before thinking to check the link, is that there must be a wealth of applications available to the instrumentation engineer, using modern microcontrollers without making the full step to Internet of Things. The smoke alarm with the "I'm cooking for the next ten minutes" button. The simple alar…

Twist seems like a pretty clever idea, especially by integrating it all into the lightbulb.

Can anyone think of potential downsides to this approach? Other than the audio probably not being of very good quality compared to a serious speaker system.

Re: The Internet of Way Too Many Things

#228

Post by Animats » Tue, Sep 08, 2015, 5:27 AM UTC

michaelsbradley wrote: post #109

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is also in the works, with standards efforts kicking into high/er gear. The two big contenders seem to be the American-led effort/s that has come together for IEEE P2413[1], and the German-led effort known as Industrie 4.0[2]. See also: Industrie 4.0 vs. the Industrial Internet [3]. [1] https://standards.ieee.org/develop/project/2413.html [&] http://www.industrialinternetconso…

Most factories have had in-house networks for decades. Ordinary CAT-5 cable works quite well in electrically noisy industrial environments, because it's a differential signal on twisted pair. In industry, the big problem is getting all the gear to interoperate.

There's also what's called "machine to machine communcation", much of which takes place over low-cost wireless pager networks. Many industrial air conditioners, elevators, and vending machines are regularly sending their short, boring, but important messages to a server. There's even M2M over Iridium two-way satellite paging, for oil wells and such. That works anywhere you can see the sky.

Re: The Internet of Way Too Many Things

#229

Post by bcoates » Tue, Sep 08, 2015, 6:14 AM UTC

tacon wrote: post #77

OliverJones wrote: post #15

Internet-enabled house jewelry? Feh. It will be fun for a week, then boring. Here's what I want: stuff that will make me a better neighbor and citizen of the world. Specifically: Realtime smart energy and water consumption meters. Wouldn't it be great to get some sort of alert if there was a pipe burst or even a water trickle? Wouldn't it be fabulous to track electricity consumption? That could generate the creation…

About ten years ago I sat through a funding pitch for a monitor that detects sudden changes in residential water flow rates. Cost was about $250/home, and part of the pitch was that insurance companies would help cover the cost to save catastrophic damage. Apparently washing machine hoses burst on a regular basis, and such an event in an unoccupied home is very expensive. I haven't heard anything about that problem/s…

Is it common to have washing machines in rooms without floor drains?

Re: The Internet of Way Too Many Things

#230

Post by hohenheim » Tue, Sep 08, 2015, 6:26 AM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #35

guybrushT wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the companies that is solving this very problem is Xiaomi. Their method is quite crude - that is, they make everything themselves. But the end result is that everything they make - from an air purifier to a TV - is connected and operated via a similar / familiar OS called MIUI. They give away their phones for very cheap, because the phone is the Trojan horse - it is the remote control for all the other devices…

Yup, Xiamoi makes everything interoperable by making it themselves. And Apple makes HomeKit. And Google makes their own. And Microsoft makes their own. And HP makes their own. And... See the problem?

That is not a problem. That is competition. Imagine the opposite where a company has monopoly over the technology.