There seems to be no greater hive of scum and villainy in technology than the IoT space. Between security issues, obsolescence by (lack of) firmware updates, and companies curtailing services that make any of this stuff work after a few years the whole thing seems like a shit show that showcases all the worst tendencies in modern tech.
This announcement fits that mold nicely. A "service" where an IoT vendor piggybacks their own mesh-ish network on top of products you bought from them.
If anyone is interested, I wouldn't mind collaborating to create a privacy oriented SmartTV or PC for devs or simply an industrial grade dumb TV. I have experience designing and building 70" industrial displays that utilize Samsung LCD panels. These "industrial" panels are normally twice the price of consumer grade ones but are designed to operate 24/7 with a MTBF of 100k hours (approx. 11 years) and are usually twic…
Dealing with industrial panels for a large fast food chain menu system was pretty enlightening. There was a surprising amount of management and environmental/telemetry information available from the embedded system on the panel.
Based on the application, some manufacturer do create custom controllers that monitor/capture environmental data in order to safeguard the equipment from experiencing catastrophic failure or performing triggered/scheduled reboots, brightness adjustments, etc based on specific events like local temp, fan speed, on-time hours, etc.
Please don’t support Amazon from creating another network-effect product that creates vendor lock-in, and privacy issues. Convenience should not be the end-all goal, as the ad blatantly states, but instead interoperability and open-protocols.
I generally agree, but on the other hand, from a consumer perspective IoT devices have and continue to be particularly inconvenient. After 15 or so years of IoT devices, what do we have that resembles interoperability or open protocols? Maybe Zigbee? Instead, it seems that each IoT device is a one-off effort by a very small team, and that networking is the part where you cross your fingers, close your eyes, and hold…
There are a few companies that have "closed" systems that are nonetheless extremely easy to integrate into something like Home Assistant, or anything else. Lutron, for example, exposes a Telnet port on their (pro) hub that you can connect to and issue plain text commands. Sure, open standards are always better, but I'll take documented local control as a pretty close second.
Higher-end can mean a lot of things, especially when talking consumer grade. I generally translate consumer grade high-end as being more aesthetically pleasing vs operationally. My expertise are more aligned with industrial grade equipment where size is typically not the limit. I've deployed a 16ft x 9ft high-res LED display for a customer in the past. That's something you don't normally find at BestBuy or even at th…
How much does something like that go for?
I was involved with a project that had an approx 2m x 7m LED sign as part of it, and that portion cost roughly $500k.
It used the same components that you'd find in the LED billboards alongside highways in the US.
It is interesting how stark the reaction to this Vs. Apple's "Find My" network is. Apple's version adds every iPhone to part of their network. It uses battery AND expensive mobile data even when the owner has no eligible devices, and that isn't considered controversial. But Amazon wants to use data on non-battery/non-pay per transfer lines and this is considered controversial (and an "abuse of their market position")…
Its just part of the general online narrative that Amazon is "evil", while Apple, who still works with Foxconn in China and did things like have poor authentication on iCloud that cause celebrity photo leaks, goes largely unnoticed.
My guess is that tech people just really like the flashy Macbooks so the bias is present.
Higher-end can mean a lot of things, especially when talking consumer grade. I generally translate consumer grade high-end as being more aesthetically pleasing vs operationally. My expertise are more aligned with industrial grade equipment where size is typically not the limit. I've deployed a 16ft x 9ft high-res LED display for a customer in the past. That's something you don't normally find at BestBuy or even at th…
How much does something like that go for?
approx $75k with control system for a 5mm pixel pitch. The control system is required for source input mapping/transformation onto the display. Here's footage from 4ft away https://bit.ly/3y5AuhW running at 30fps 60hz.
Why does Amazon only seem to be able to invent dystopian products? This, Ring, those package delivering drones, Amazon partnering with landlords to put Echos in rental apartments, etc. Why?
What would be a utopian product that would fit into their ecosystem and benefit from their moat?
You jest, but all I'm thinking about is just how unpolluted the 2.4GHz spectrum would be if everybody's house had a built-in Faraday cage, and how nice that would be...
And as long as the faraday cage wasn't in interior walls, wifi would work really well on 2.4 inside your house, with such a nice low noise floor. You'd need it though, since cell service would be rather poor.
Couldn't you have a cell antenna outside of the cage?