201–210 of 496 posts
DIY is the way to go, only if you know what you are doing.
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Hey - As the owner of a similar system I have a question for you - do you use their phone app to control your system from your phone in/out of the house, and did it still work after this?
I use the home assistant plugin with it personally, but I have tried the apps and they still work fine both locally and remote.
Now back to connecting an orange-pi zero to the petcube cam someone bought me for Christmas. I've found TTL pins on there and I want to know what's going on...
> 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)
My guess is that their "RAM Plus" feature (aka swap) combined with the memory hungry modern android apps turned out to be a nasty timebomb. Which has or still is bricking millions of smartphones after a few years of usage.
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I am not sure about Canadas situation since that is where I used to order my contacts from before I got LASIK several years ago. I don’t recall having to provide a script then. But Mexico and several other European countries I’ve been to (Sweden as an example) it’s absolutely the case you can just walk into the pharmacy and grab the magnification you need with no prescription. I am actually surprised you were able to…
> it’s absolutely the case you can just walk into the pharmacy and grab the magnification you need with no prescription. I don’t understand how this could possibly work. Contact lenses have at least three parameters to define the lens. It’s not just “magnification”. If you have an astigmatism, there are two more, and a further two if you have presbyopia (for a total of up to 7). Almost everyone has presbyopia by the…
Here in Japan, you can easily buy contacts from optical stores. They have several shelves behind the counters where they stock many varieties. Sometimes they even put a bunch of unsold/unpopular ones out front for 1/2 off (a lot of these are color contacts). I get mine online; I don't need a prescription.
One thing I did notice, as someone with astigmatism, is that the number of possible values is less here. My axis back in the US was 100, but here I have to use 90; they just don't carry them in all the possible axis values here.
This is when smart gets stupid. I'm a bit worried about this with my nest and other smart devices, but even with normal air conditioners there are a few stupid simple problems that will cost you hundreds of dollars! A couple of weeks ago my AC blower fan stopped working, the compressor would run. I went up and found out that the capacitor was bad, and took a picture of it, buying a replacement. Took about 15 minutes…
I did something similar for a clothes drier. The thing was ancient (mid-80’s) but was fantastic. It was huge and you could dry maybe 3 comforters under an hour. It stopped heating and it turned out there are solenoids that control the natural gas flow. Quick disassembly (back when products were made for easy repair) and swapping out two $8 solenoids from Amazon and I was back in business.
Unironically one of the proudest moments of my life was when I fixed the the belt on our dryer.
A $10 rubber belt and YouTube and voila!
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so if the company has established they're willing to go that far to lock customers into their ecosystem and milk for $$$... it's not inconceivable that they also engineered (or chose not to fix) the cheap flash + chatty logging hardware failure for the same purpose.
Seems those tablets die not long after the warranty expires. I'm willing to bet money on that it's planned obsolescence, especially considering their "technology keeps moving forward" bullshit.
They made the analysis, how long the flash will live and saw, that it will make it out of the warranty period. Thus they did not opt for more durable and expensive flash and/or software change.
I've seen this myself before. One process step before release of the control module was a write cycle analysis to make sure the unit will live for at least 10 years (i think) before the guaranteed write cycles of the flash memory were consumed.
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Yep this is nearly guaranteed. Kills so many IoT things, logging the world and eMMC write limits being garbage.
I feel this may be natural selection at play. With bottom-of-the-barrel (and/or "value add") IoT garbage, hardware suppliers are a commodity, and under competitive pressure, the winners will be ones that can make cheapest hardware that just about outlasts a typical warranty period of their customers' products. Shorter-lived parts will not bring repeat business; longer-lived parts will get value-optimized further. Fai…
On a much, much smaller scale - this is why I insisted on having my roller covers driven by a physical button on the wall, instead of some proprietary radio. Not only the remote would never be where it belongs, but I just had to plug in a shelly to have a full automation connected to my home assistant. The vendors really wanted me to go for their solution until I met a guy who said sure, this is what he did too. One…
I followed the same logic when deciding what kind of blinds control to choose building my house few weeks ago. Now I am in the planning of adding automation to it. Did you use Shelly Plus 2PM or are there any cheaper options to choose from (they seem to start at 30€ in my country shops)? Did they fit nicely in the wall switch socket?
I mounted them right next to the roller (in the roller enclosure) and if I did not have that possibility, I would have done it close to the ground to have good access. I do not have a socket per see, rather a small switch on the wall not inside the wall, this is not permitted where I am)
I had a look at cheaper solutions in the past but gave up - I do not have a lot of rollers so the cost difference is likely to be minimal. I like the fact that they work well and it is really a kind of mount-and-forget kind of setup.
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Seems those tablets die not long after the warranty expires. I'm willing to bet money on that it's planned obsolescence, especially considering their "technology keeps moving forward" bullshit.
I'm offering you a different viewpoint: They made the analysis, how long the flash will live and saw, that it will make it out of the warranty period. Thus they did not opt for more durable and expensive flash and/or software change. I've seen this myself before. One process step before release of the control module was a write cycle analysis to make sure the unit will live for at least 10 years (i think) before the…