What's that touchscreen in my room? • Hacker News Board

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#101

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 4:53 AM UTC

tjohns wrote: post #77

MeImCounting wrote: post #69

Earlier 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…

[deleted]

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#102

Post by BHSPitMonkey » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 4:53 AM UTC

anotherevan wrote: post #86

xyst wrote: post #79

Yet 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…

You can go far using only Zigbee or Z-Wave devices with a Home Assistant server, and then nothing (but the server) has to be networked.

As for switches vs. bulbs, at this point I can't go back to the life I led before picking up a bunch of Hue White Ambiance bulbs and having HA automatically adjust the color temperature throughout the day.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#103

Post by fortran77 » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 4:54 AM UTC

From the article:

> I am not an embedded Linux expert, but this does seem like a lot after tinkering with Raspberry Pi Pico and such.

...but of course the Pi Pico doesn't run Linux and doesn't need a lot of memory

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#104

Post by fortran77 » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 4:56 AM UTC

geerlingguy wrote: post #83

astrange wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I remember those days well. I had the misfortune of working for one of Java's biggest advocates at Sun, Patrick Naughton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Naughton

To this day, I refuse to use Java or anything on the Java ecosystem, like Clojure, or Groovy, etc.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#105

Post by Nursie » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 4:58 AM UTC

chefandy wrote: post #17

Weird to see some micromuse thing listed as the service listed for 1534. I worked for them back in like 2006 and we got eaten by IBM/Tivoli and I don't believe they kept the name for anything? I always knew nobody really updated those but man, really nobody updates those.

Hah, weird to see micromuse come up. I started working for them two weeks before the acquisition was announced!

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#106

Post by userbinator » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 5:00 AM UTC

xerox13ster wrote: post #98

kelnos wrote: post #53

> 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…

> A 3A fuse would burn out in a fraction of a second if you tried to do that. he bought it on Amazon. He has every reason to be worried that it won't burn out. Louis Rossman did a video[0] where he put 8 amps through a 2 amp fuse and left the room for quite a long time, I think it was several minutes with 8a going through a 2a fuse. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B90_SNNbcoU

Fuses are notoriously imprecise, even "fast blow" ones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG11rVcMOnY

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#107

Post by famicom0 » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 5:00 AM UTC

Probably a long shot, but would anyone happen to know the color scheme used by the author in the snippet of Python code showing an example of tcf-agent? I really like the mix of bold, italics, underline and shading to achieve a distinct syntax highlighting with such a limited color palette.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#108

Post by anotherevan » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 5:04 AM UTC

BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #102

anotherevan wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can go far using only Zigbee or Z-Wave devices with a Home Assistant server, and then nothing (but the server) has to be networked. As for switches vs. bulbs, at this point I can't go back to the life I led before picking up a bunch of Hue White Ambiance bulbs and having HA automatically adjust the color temperature throughout the day.

Yeah colour temperature would be my rationale for smarter bulbs as well.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#109

Post by AnthonyMouse » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 5:06 AM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #53

> 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…

> Running wires through existing walls can be annoying, and they don't want to put that barrier to sale in front of them.

It also makes it more convenient to compromise the device from across the street (or across town with a directional antenna). Though of course that's not a problem if your security is up to par and the device continues to receive regular security updates, and we can only surmise that the author has discovered a rare outlier in this space where that is not the case.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#110

Post by TheCoelacanth » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 5:07 AM UTC

zarzavat wrote: post #82

MeImCounting wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

Without a fuse, the circuit breaker trips and then you go reset it and hopefully learn not to plug in so many kettles next time.

You would have to be a maniac to wire up a house without fuses or breakers.