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

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#201

Post by gambiting » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 9:26 AM UTC

verisimi wrote: post #194

failingslowly wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you want people to be more environmentally conscious [...] they need far better data This is one of the reasons all UK homes are being fitted for free with smart meters. (There are others, such as enabling better grid control.) > You want to be able to see usage to a resolution of at most 5 minutes. My one updates every few seconds and has a set of traffic light LEDs at the bottom giving a visible guide to energ…

The consumer element is the sugar to help the masses swallow the pill. If it was just about the consumer, the unit would never report its findings back to base. But blurting back your information is integral to, well, all smart devices. That is the point. Once the government has that info, it will be able to come up with bespoke taxes for you according to what it ordains as fair use. 'Your showers are too long', 'you…

I don't understand your point - these meters only report your overal usage, not what is using the energy/water. It's letting you skip the step where you manually upload the reads every couple months or whatever, or worse, where the energy company employee has to visit your house to read them in person. Why does it matter if I upload my meter reads to my provider every month or if the device reports it automatically? The end result is the same.

(At least that's how it works in the UK - the "smart" meters don't report live usage back to providers, they just submit kWh reads, the live readout is local device only)

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#202

Post by 55555 » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 9:26 AM UTC

methou wrote: post #197

I remember when I rented a palace in Singapore, my landlord asked me to download an app called MyKNX to control the lights and blinds in the room. I dumped some packets, and found system is using tcp/ip and the KNX is standardized protocol. The box is more like a PLC than “smart things”, so it doesn’t need internet to function. It’s also supported by home-assistant. I want to get one when I’m building my own home. Ed…

Please, please write a blog to document the build of your next palace.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#203

Post by throw310822 » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 9:27 AM UTC

thrwwycbr wrote: post #138

miellaby wrote: post #136

I like how the author is surprised by the technological aberration that form Linux powered home appliances. A node server to power and publish over wifi a web site, an API, a web socket, while the site is being displayed by a outdated webview engine within an heavily constrained terminal which cant be reused for anything else. That's... the norm. All this is very common. And yet displaying a couple of digits and a ba…

The reason why the Mirai botnet is still at large is: Android. From a business perspective nobody wants to pay the costly people that can do microcontroller programming. Frontend devs are dirt cheap, especially for something as simple as that interface displaying the bar charts.

There is also an enormous amount of flexibility gained when, instead if designing and building your own single-purpose device, you just use a cheap, mass produced, off the shelf, general purpose device.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#204

Post by jonathanlydall » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 9:27 AM UTC

failingslowly wrote: post #181

jonathanlydall wrote: post #128

A few years ago I came to the realisation that if you want people to be more environmentally conscious or economical in terms of utility consumption, (electricity, water, gas, etc), they need far better data than a single figure per month. You want to be able to see usage to a resolution of at most 5 minutes. That way people can spot things like “having my electric heater on for those couple of hours used more electr…

> if you want people to be more environmentally conscious [...] they need far better data This is one of the reasons all UK homes are being fitted for free with smart meters. (There are others, such as enabling better grid control.) > You want to be able to see usage to a resolution of at most 5 minutes. My one updates every few seconds and has a set of traffic light LEDs at the bottom giving a visible guide to energ…

As evidenced by the article, the problem is that some of these devices within less than 10 years can become essentially bricks.

I think these devices must be required to send the data to the utility company and the utility company must be forced to make the data easily accessible in a standard format so that independent analysis is trivially possible.

This way you don't have a situation where a device manufacturer goes out of business and the capability to monitor is lost.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#205

Post by PeterisP » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 9:30 AM UTC

thrwwycbr wrote: post #138

miellaby wrote: post #136

I like how the author is surprised by the technological aberration that form Linux powered home appliances. A node server to power and publish over wifi a web site, an API, a web socket, while the site is being displayed by a outdated webview engine within an heavily constrained terminal which cant be reused for anything else. That's... the norm. All this is very common. And yet displaying a couple of digits and a ba…

The reason why the Mirai botnet is still at large is: Android. From a business perspective nobody wants to pay the costly people that can do microcontroller programming. Frontend devs are dirt cheap, especially for something as simple as that interface displaying the bar charts.

From employee perspective it was my impression that EE developers tend to get lower salaries than web developers.

But it could be the case that building an android or web app for a simple UI would take less dev-months than an embedded app with similar functionality.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#206

Post by userbinator » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 9:34 AM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #201

verisimi wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The consumer element is the sugar to help the masses swallow the pill. If it was just about the consumer, the unit would never report its findings back to base. But blurting back your information is integral to, well, all smart devices. That is the point. Once the government has that info, it will be able to come up with bespoke taxes for you according to what it ordains as fair use. 'Your showers are too long', 'you…

I don't understand your point - these meters only report your overal usage, not what is using the energy/water. It's letting you skip the step where you manually upload the reads every couple months or whatever, or worse, where the energy company employee has to visit your house to read them in person. Why does it matter if I upload my meter reads to my provider every month or if the device reports it automatically?…

the "smart" meters don't report live usage back to providers

Either they can be easily upgraded to do that, or they already are and the energy company merely gives you the total every month to maintain the impression that they aren't.

If the meter-reader needs to visit periodically, you know with much greater certainty that they aren't gathering live data.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#207

Post by tomqueue » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 9:34 AM UTC

systemz wrote: post #150

jonathanlydall wrote: post #128

A few years ago I came to the realisation that if you want people to be more environmentally conscious or economical in terms of utility consumption, (electricity, water, gas, etc), they need far better data than a single figure per month. You want to be able to see usage to a resolution of at most 5 minutes. That way people can spot things like “having my electric heater on for those couple of hours used more electr…

About monitoring water consumption, maybe using some webcam + OCR would help to recognize reading of a water meter? Then Home Assistant would be helpful to see charts with energy consumption etc

This is what I am using for this exact purpose: https://github.com/jomjol/AI-on-the-edge-device

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#208

Post by oarsinsync » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 9:38 AM UTC

verisimi wrote: post #190

cjfd wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds pretty good as such. The worry to have these days, though, is if we can also get this without energy usage data being traded between all sorts of shady companies and/or criminal organizations.

> shady companies and/or criminal organizations. You mean energy companies and governments?

There was a report recently that Facebook users have their data sold to 1000-5000 companies, and Facebook takes input from up to 100k companies when compiling data on people.

Supermarkets are also into the data game, exploiting the gold mine of data that is shopper loyalty cards.

Smart TVs are in the data game, selling details of what you’re watching on to other people.

Cars are recording visuals, audio, telemetry, and selling that on.

I think it’s reasonable to assume that energy companies are selling the data they’re collecting about you onto data brokers (aka shady companies and/or criminal organisations)

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#209

Post by squarefoot » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 9:39 AM UTC

miellaby wrote: post #136

I like how the author is surprised by the technological aberration that form Linux powered home appliances. A node server to power and publish over wifi a web site, an API, a web socket, while the site is being displayed by a outdated webview engine within an heavily constrained terminal which cant be reused for anything else. That's... the norm. All this is very common. And yet displaying a couple of digits and a ba…

> within an heavily constrained terminal which cant be reused for anything else.

Except for botnets and/or spying. Some of those boards already contain MEMS microphones and cameras (the box in the picture even shows the camera objective). I'd have took apart the device to take a look inside, or at least run some diagnostics to explore which hardware was installed/detected.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#210

Post by jonathanlydall » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 9:39 AM UTC

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #157

jonathanlydall wrote: post #128

A few years ago I came to the realisation that if you want people to be more environmentally conscious or economical in terms of utility consumption, (electricity, water, gas, etc), they need far better data than a single figure per month. You want to be able to see usage to a resolution of at most 5 minutes. That way people can spot things like “having my electric heater on for those couple of hours used more electr…

Something in my apartment is consuming a ton of power and I don't know what. I would love a graph with a resolution better than a day.

If you're looking for something simple to try work it out, I bought a smart plug a few years back which could record usage for around 20USD, you can then move it between your devices getting a sense of each's usage.

Long term tracking usage of individual device energy usage is nice, but just knowing from past measurements how much a device tends to use is already very useful.