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An iroh powered smart fan

iroh.computer

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Re: An iroh powered smart fan

#31

Post by miki123211 »

shermantanktop wrote: post #2

This is interesting as an example of just how complicated and elaborate a toolchain you can use to build something dead simple. There’s a lot that comes for free by adding all these libraries and crates and steps. But from what I can tell it comes down to: let _ = if fan_on { fan.set_high() } else { fan.set_low() };

The hard part isn't controlling the fan, it's controlling the fan from anywhere, without a central server in the way.

Sure, you could probably make this much smaller if you invented a specialized p2p fan control protocol, but that's a lot of work.

Re: An iroh powered smart fan

#32

Post by miki123211 »

rwmj wrote: post #13
cinntaile wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very much not a smart fan. Not really relevant.

Pretty relevant because I've never seen the reason for "smart" gadgets at all. Physical switches are simply better.

The reason is UI.

There's only a limited number of features that you can pack into a few buttons and a 7-segment display. If you want to sell outside the US and need to support the long-tail of non-English languages, preferably without per-country product variants, you can't even label the buttons any more, you have to rely on simple pictograms and icons.

If there's a $1 microcontroller in your device (and there often is), you're very tempted to implement lots of features which cost you almost nothing, but that kind of UI just doesn't really let you do so. Sure, you could add a proper touch screen with a localizable UI stack, with reflowable text and support for displaying Kanji and RTL languages, but that's often more expensive (and less practical) than slapping on a BLE or WiFi chip.

Re: An iroh powered smart fan

#35

Post by throawayonthe »

embedding-shape wrote: post #17
roblabla wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With that logic, C is nothing without assembly.

Does C also have a compiler that turns C code into assembly before the real runtime does its work? Never done much C development in the past, didn't get the impression it worked like that.

a c compiler turns c code into assembly which is then consumed by an assembler(?)

Re: An iroh powered smart fan

#36

Post by embedding-shape »

OJFord wrote: post #29
embedding-shape wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does C also have a compiler that turns C code into assembly before the real runtime does its work? Never done much C development in the past, didn't get the impression it worked like that.

> Does C also have a compiler that turns C code into assembly Yes, that's 'a C compiler', like gcc. > before the real runtime does its work Sort of, the program is 'the runtime', but this is backwards, languages that have 'a runtime' get the name from it running at runtime to compile/interpret source or byte code. In C what runs at runtime is just your program, whatever you compiled. (Maybe it's an interpreter though…

I mean, once you split that sentence into pieces and answer them individually, of course it stops making sense. It's the whole "+ chuck the results into a runtime" that makes it make sense (or not) as a comparison against "TS > JS > V8/SpiderMonkey"

Re: An iroh powered smart fan

#37

Post by Liftyee »

While this is neat, it strikes me as the software developer's idea of a "smart fan". The engineer in me says that an actual "smart fan" would be one whose blades are designed to produce maximum airflow with minimum noise (variable pitch? avoiding turbulence?)

Re: An iroh powered smart fan

#38

Post by unsolved73 »

Iroh is probably one of the best shots we have at making IoT finally secure with the built-in endpoint-to-endpoint encryption. The only thing that is missing is an embedded QUIC stack, the setup described in this article sees a little bit too hacky (4 MiB of PSRAM, really?).

Re: An iroh powered smart fan

#40

Post by lilhenry »

Liftyee wrote: post #37

While this is neat, it strikes me as the software developer's idea of a "smart fan". The engineer in me says that an actual "smart fan" would be one whose blades are designed to produce maximum airflow with minimum noise (variable pitch? avoiding turbulence?)

He’s using a noctua fan which are pretty much the quietest pc fans you can buy while still moving large amounts of air
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