141–150 of 496 posts
Reaffirming my belief that I want nothing “smart” controlling critical infrastructure in my home. What if it were dead of winter, would he have been able to control the heat?
Any idea if that "POE board" has a FTDI USB to UART chip on it ?
The dialog he got when he plugged it in mentioned FTDI and "Vinculum" which appears to be a programmable USB interface chip with serial and SPI support https://ftdichip.com/products/vnc1l-1a/ https://ftdichip.com/software-examples/vinculum-projects/ Since it's not just a generic non-programmable serial chip I assume it's also doing something more. But it doesn't do Ethernet so I bet it's not actually PoE but like...…
> For whatever reason (I suspect some sort of storage failure) everyone’s tablets die around the same time. What a fun, completely coincidental quirk that that time appears to fall outside the warranty window, hey?
Very convenient for them and also easy to accomplish by buying the cheapest parts. It's probably eMMC-based and writing a logfile constantly. Source: every Android that has ever died on me in this exact way (four and counting)
The underlying flash memory is trash and the controller already does a ton of heavy lifting to keep the data coherent.
Unfortunately, if/when someone from the manufacturer knows about it their first thought will not be "How do we make it easier for our customers". It will most likely be "How do we restrict this hack" and will eventually get into more restricted/quirky hardware & software.
I installed AC in my home in the last year. I specifically went for units that were IR controlled rather than any proprietary smart B.S. For the smarts, I used cheap IR blasters from AliExpress and hooked them up to HomeAssistant. I just mounted cheap Lenovo tablets to the wall to do the room-dashboard thing to allow controlling lights/AC without a phone. These kind of horror stories only serve to reinforce my decisi…
I have a Broadcom one which works well but expensive.
Please do this via a script on GitHub
Then it'll make it easier for other people to use on other tablets
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You think this is bad? Try swimming pool equipment.
I think home EV charging equipment is heading in the same direction as well. Very few have local and open APIs and instead depend on the vendors cloud service for control.
Worst case, you just buy another one. It'll set you back a couple hundred dollars. Unpleasant, but not a big deal.
Air conditioning systems can easily cost more than $10k.
I installed AC in my home in the last year. I specifically went for units that were IR controlled rather than any proprietary smart B.S. For the smarts, I used cheap IR blasters from AliExpress and hooked them up to HomeAssistant. I just mounted cheap Lenovo tablets to the wall to do the room-dashboard thing to allow controlling lights/AC without a phone. These kind of horror stories only serve to reinforce my decisi…
Since there's no feedback mechanism, how do you solve for when the state of the unit(s) gets out of sync with HomeAssistant's?
I love that this man resurrected his blog after 10 years just to write this. Anger and spite are strong motivators.
> For whatever reason (I suspect some sort of storage failure) everyone’s tablets die around the same time. What a fun, completely coincidental quirk that that time appears to fall outside the warranty window, hey?
I wonder if it could be they are logging and not clearing the logs, filling up the storage - since its happening around the same time for everyone.