> C in IoT stands for “cost-effective” I guess. Thanks, that got a laugh out of me.
The old joke asks what is the S in HTTPS, what is the S in SFTP, what is the S in IoT.
I've heard it phrased more directly as, "The S in IoT stands for security."
What's that touchscreen in my room?
81–90 of 576 posts
Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
The person lives in an apartment in Britain. Apartments are only built in towns and cities, and are generally within walking distance of convenience shops and supermarkets. Every plug in Britain has a fuse, so they are about as easy to buy as replacement light bulbs. Probably on the same shelf.
This is fascinating! I did not know this about british plugs. Why is that? Is it a safety measure?
Let’s say you desperately need a cup of tea. So you buy a cheap 4-way extension cable and 4 electric kettles. You fill all the kettles and turn them on at the same time for maximum tea-making throughput.
The combined load of all the kettles exceeds the rating of the extension cable.
With a fuse: the fuse in the extension cable plug blows, you buy another fuse, and learn some patience.
Without a fuse: the extension cable overheats and causes a fire, your house burns down, and worst of all you still don’t have any tea.
Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want to know more. History of java is just insanely weird.
SIM cards and secure elements (contactless credit cards) both use this, or did at one point.
For a time, Java was set to be the 'everything everywhere' language, IIRC in some quarters the hype behind Java on everything was even bigger than Cloud, then Crypto, then AI.
Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?
#84This was an extremely well written article. It had me gripped in the story. Thanks for posting!
Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?
#85> There were two strings printed with labels “SSID” and “Pwd”. I froze in horror. They wouldn’t dare. It is literally 3 meter distance. These are embedded devices, they do not need this complexity… Not surprising at all. I would expect that a lot of these are bought as retrofits, and not as a part of new construction. Running wires through existing walls can be annoying, and they don't want to put that barrier to sal…
> Probably don't need to be so worried here. If it's a 3A fuse, the entirety of your apartment's mains power is not running through it. If it's a "3A fuse" that doesn't blow at 6A or worse, then it will get very hot (fire hazard) if/when there's a short regardless of the distance to the mains power. If it truly is a 3A fuse, then great. If it's bought from Amazon then I doubt it's truly a 3A fuse.
Louis Rossman over at YouTube has been going over this fuses thing from Amazon. All the fuses he tried from top-results didn't blow until he put 4x or 5x the current rating through them.
Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?
#86Yet another reminder: I really need to get off my ass and isolate all of the IoT junk connected to my network away from home/work/lab devices.
Honestly, this is the main reason¹ I just haven't got into IoT much as I love the idea in theory. I don't want an adversarial relationship with the electronics I'm putting in the house, so I just don't.
I want my IoT to work off-line with no talking to the Internet unless I explicitly let it for some reason. I want it to interoperate with other things and not just some shitty app on my phone - I don't carry my phone with me around the house all the time and it's a PITA anyway.
I could go the DIY route and bust out the soldering iron and some ESPHome compatible chips, but that's not my passion and life is too bloody short. And even if I did I'd still have strong reservations doing DIY around the 240V AC mains power.
¹ That, and the first thing I'd automate is light switches², but the regulations around mains power wiring in Australia are pretty stringent and the only AES certified IoT light switches I've seen look like I would have and adversarial relationship with and can only be controlled by a shitty app.
² Automating light bulbs themselves is a sub-optimal solution in most circumstances, in my opinion. Perhaps if I wanted to control the colour, but not for on, off and brightness. If I did that it would just make me feel sad.
Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?
#87> There were two strings printed with labels “SSID” and “Pwd”. I froze in horror. They wouldn’t dare. It is literally 3 meter distance. These are embedded devices, they do not need this complexity… Not surprising at all. I would expect that a lot of these are bought as retrofits, and not as a part of new construction. Running wires through existing walls can be annoying, and they don't want to put that barrier to sal…
Also, too: Wifi has inherent galvanic isolation with a wide gap.
It isn't strictly necessary, as anyone here obviously knows, but it can be a cost-effective way to isolate the [electrical] pokey-bits from the [meat-based] pokey-bits, and to avoid loops when things go wrong.
Wireless has uses beyond just eliminating wires.
Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?
#88A fun read! I feel compelled to say that all British (type G plugs) _have_ to be fused as the ring main has a maximum current of (typically) 30A yet the plug and socket maximum is 13A. So every appliance plug is fused, and the consumer unit has an RCD on most accessible circuits in addition to a circuit breaker. Some plugs don't make the fuse obvious, but the traditional values are 1A, 3A, 5A, 7A, 10A and 13A (iirc -…
Why don’t you use a 13A circuit breaker in UK? That’s what we do in the rest of the EU, I think.
There’s a main input to the house which usually is around 15A-30A , then we’ve got multiple sublines with individual circuit breakers, typically 10A or 16A.
Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is fascinating! I did not know this about british plugs. Why is that? Is it a safety measure?
British household electrical systems are normally built as one large ring circuit, originally in order to save copper after WW2. This means you don't have breakers for each branch circuit (there are no branch circuits), just the single mains breaker for the house. This single breaker is too large to trip from a short from occuring in the smaller wires inside an appliance. So each plug (or hardwired device) needs it's…
To add: Many pre-90s buildings don’t even have circuit breakers, they have fuse boxes with fuse wire (different fuse to the one being talked about). Literally just a piece of wire that burns out at a certain current and breaks the connection. You “reset” it by putting a new piece of wire in.
The second fuse at the plug allows using a narrower gauge of wire in the device’s cord. Let’s say you have a lamp with a 3A fuse, the cord only needs to be able to handle 3A, so then it can be lighter and cheaper. If it had to handle the same amperage as the circuit it’s plugged into then it would be seriously impractical and expensive.
Of course there are modern ways of solving this but fuses are dirt cheap and already implemented.
Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe they originally intended for them to be internet connected? That would also explain the MQTT.
Yeah I think it makes more sense like you said. It has the Wifi stuff there already too.
Could prolly take it out of access point and attach it to your network (or one you segregated from your actual network). Set up nat, dyndns, wireshark and see what happens.