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Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019

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Re: Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019

#121

Post by adjkant »

dustinmoris wrote: post #97

Smart people don't buy smart home devices. My relatively poor grandparents and my slightly less poor parents had a hard working life, but none of them had to sleep in a dark cold room because the switch to turn the lights on or the heating stopped working. Ever. This problem has been solved by other people many many years ago. Last month I watched a documentary where a billionaire was showing of his multi million man…

Smart homes are indeed mostly build out of supporting laziness, but there are ways to avoid some of these problems.

If you've already sold your soul and have a home device with speech control, it's actually pretty easy to go and get a smart outlet device to control some lights. A single phrase without any screen or authentication and you're controlling your lights. If it breaks or gets outdated, you can always take it out in 10 seconds. Basically, if you do go for a smart home, keep it dumb and overridable.

Re: Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019

#122

Post by pault »

adjkant wrote: post #111

If there's anything to be learned from Nest, I think it would be interesting to se a full open source stack for things like Nest as well as Google Home / Alexa. If the NLP is right, the actual functionality is not hard to replicated means that third party integrations can be easily added/customized. Then you also eliminate the always on problem with everything going through your own servers. What I'm imagining (all o…

There's home assistant: https://www.home-assistant.io/

And mozilla web things: https://iot.mozilla.org/

Plenty of options these days. I have high hopes for web things to become the "app store" that you mention.

Re: Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019

#123

Post by matwood »

dustinmoris wrote: post #97

Smart people don't buy smart home devices. My relatively poor grandparents and my slightly less poor parents had a hard working life, but none of them had to sleep in a dark cold room because the switch to turn the lights on or the heating stopped working. Ever. This problem has been solved by other people many many years ago. Last month I watched a documentary where a billionaire was showing of his multi million man…

I mostly agree. Why do I need WIFI on my lights, coffee maker, or dishwasher?

A thermostat is my personal exception though. Being able to program it on my phone is a huge UI improvement over prior thermostats. Also, being able to change it without getting out of bed in the middle of the night is a bonus.

Re: Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019

#124

Post by [deleted] »

dustinmoris wrote: post #97

Smart people don't buy smart home devices. My relatively poor grandparents and my slightly less poor parents had a hard working life, but none of them had to sleep in a dark cold room because the switch to turn the lights on or the heating stopped working. Ever. This problem has been solved by other people many many years ago. Last month I watched a documentary where a billionaire was showing of his multi million man…

[deleted]

Re: Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019

#125

Post by sjohnsonweb »

dustinmoris wrote: post #97

Smart people don't buy smart home devices. My relatively poor grandparents and my slightly less poor parents had a hard working life, but none of them had to sleep in a dark cold room because the switch to turn the lights on or the heating stopped working. Ever. This problem has been solved by other people many many years ago. Last month I watched a documentary where a billionaire was showing of his multi million man…

"Smart people don't buy home devices"

Yikes. I mean sure, your points on why you don't see their value are valid. But calling people not smart because they enjoy being able to automate their homes is a leap and a half.

Re: Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019

#126

Post by nullwarp »

MrGilbert wrote: post #55
deforciant wrote: post #24

I did quite a bit of experimentation with home automation systems (HomeSeer, Home Assistant, Domoticz and so on) and decided that the best (at least for me) and the most control giving solution is NodeRED - https://github.com/node-red/node-red . You can create pretty complex flows with many already available nodes but if you want something custom - it's trivial either to add JS functions or to create your own node fr…

Another option: Use HomeAssistant for the user friendly interface (fancy buttons, value display, you-name-it), and use NodeRED for the logic. The HomeAssistant nodes are quite decent, it‘s how I‘ve set things up at home.

Same, home assistant really just acts as a consistent-ish api to all my home devices.

That said I only use smart devices I control over my LAN and none that require I interact with a companies provided API.

Re: Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019

#127

Post by adjkant »

smashah wrote: post #117
adjkant wrote: post #111

If there's anything to be learned from Nest, I think it would be interesting to se a full open source stack for things like Nest as well as Google Home / Alexa. If the NLP is right, the actual functionality is not hard to replicated means that third party integrations can be easily added/customized. Then you also eliminate the always on problem with everything going through your own servers. What I'm imagining (all o…

Home assistant

Thank you! It looks like a good start but certainly lacks some of the features and I'd of course expect a more user friendly version will eventually be introduced as it matures. Nice to see people are working on it!

Re: Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019

#128

Post by ben7799 »

dustinmoris wrote: post #97

Smart people don't buy smart home devices. My relatively poor grandparents and my slightly less poor parents had a hard working life, but none of them had to sleep in a dark cold room because the switch to turn the lights on or the heating stopped working. Ever. This problem has been solved by other people many many years ago. Last month I watched a documentary where a billionaire was showing of his multi million man…

I totally agree, and it's hilarious how many engineers fall for this Smart home BS.

We are all supposed to be keeping K.I.S.S. in mind because we're engineers.

Smart home crap is the complete opposite of K.I.S.S.

Smart home setups are the guy on your group who wants to write a java program dependent on spring to solve a problem that a shell one liner can solve. Smart Homes are prepping the space shuttle to go down the block to the drug store.

Re: Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019

#129

Post by eeZah7Ux »

dustinmoris wrote: post #97

Smart people don't buy smart home devices. My relatively poor grandparents and my slightly less poor parents had a hard working life, but none of them had to sleep in a dark cold room because the switch to turn the lights on or the heating stopped working. Ever. This problem has been solved by other people many many years ago. Last month I watched a documentary where a billionaire was showing of his multi million man…

If I had a 100k cinema room ... I would ask myself some hard questions about my priorities in life.

Re: Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019

#130

Post by nine_k »

derefr wrote: post #104
nine_k wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't help but quote: «“the "Internet of Things" won't work until the "Local Area Network of Things" works», seen here on HN [1]. There's significantly less money in it, though, and more hassle. It's not going to become popular enough until people get burned enough with vendors going out of business, or just stopping support, and making their convenient $199 gadgets obsolete. In a sense, a large company like Nest pul…

I would say that the Local Area Network of Things has existed for decades, but the intricacies of its deployment means that so far, it’s required a network admin to set up. The most classical example of such “things” are softphones. They need their own vxlan and switch QOS policies and so forth, to function the way people expect phones to work (rather than flaking out when someone is torrenting.) Softphone deployment…

Internet routing in general used to require some solid engineering knowledge. Still, home routers that mostly work out of the box exist, and the learning curve is approachable for people with enough special needs not covered by the default settings. It took some protocols to be designed and widely deployed, from DHCP to mDNS and STUN. But this has been done, and it mostly works.

Running a RAID array was once as enterprisey as it gets. Now you can buy a RAID-ready box (something like Synology) and have a reasonable default configuration, or configure to your taste if you have a general knowledge of what you're doing.

I suppose that LANoT is going to develop eventually into something easy enough to deploy, too.

Re softphones: since US cable providers effectively sell softphones as a part of the cable package, they have every incentive to prevent home routers from allowing to easily set it up for free. OTOH the QoS settings are there in the routers firmwares for that same reason, and desktop / mobile softphones (aka "internet messengers") can use that if they care enough.

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