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Air Con: $1697 for an on/off switch

blog.hopefullyuseful.com

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Re: Air Con: $1697 for an on/off switch

#471

Post by rogerrogerr »

cameldrv wrote: post #438
spikej wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which company, and which product did you see this with?

Chamberlain and Liftmaster do this. They’re both owned by Chamberlain group and I believe they are the two most popular brands. It’s caused tons of headache for people doing home automation stuff, especially since Chamberlain has cut off API access to home assistant. Then the home assistant people figure they’ll just rig a raspberry pi or something to short two wires, but then they hit this encryption nonsense.

Heh, bet you can just short the contacts the button usually closes. Really hard to DRM a button.

Re: Air Con: $1697 for an on/off switch

#472

Post by skinkestek »

ranebo wrote: post #45
redact207 wrote: post #6

I love that this man resurrected his blog after 10 years just to write this. Anger and spite are strong motivators.

You have no idea how true this is :). I had to upgrade everything, the old site didn't even have SSL. But this annoyed me so much I wanted others to know how to fix it.

Hopefully this costs the company that tried to fleece you even more money in backlash and also as more people see that is possible to fix this.

Re: Air Con: $1697 for an on/off switch

#473

Post by lupusreal »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #416
audunw wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're both missing one of the more likely explanation.. that nobody gave much thought about how long the device would last. "It's solid state electronics, it'll probably outlast the warranty anyway".. I can imagine an aircon company puts a lot of effort into analyzing the air-conditioning unit itself to make sure it lasts at least as long as the warranty, with good margin. But I can totally see them winging it on an…

> I don't think actual malicious planned obsolescence is as prevalent as many believe. I've been saying this for a while. Consumers are insanely price-sensitive while also short-sighted. They'll buy a $20 blender that will die in a year rather than the $100 blender that will last a lifetime. Manufacturers know this and there's a race to the bottom on pricing. To get pricing as low as possible, quality and durability…

> Consumers are insanely price-sensitive while also short-sighted. They'll buy a $20 blender that will die in a year rather than the $100 blender that will last a lifetime.

It's so much worse than that... They'll buy a $500 blender that lasts 6 months if it comes with sufficient "smart" technology integration to make them feel like they're buying into a futuristic lifestyle that others can be jealous of.

Hence, home AC units controlled by fancy tablets (which are actually shit) instead of thermostats (analogue or even monochrome LCD digital units) on the wall. Because tracking down wherever your family members wandered off to with the control tablet is so much easier than simply turning a knob or pushing a button that never moves because it's screwed into place... It must be better, it's new and expensive....

Re: Air Con: $1697 for an on/off switch

#474

Post by nucleardog »

happyopossum wrote: post #73
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me how, in USA, it’s the only civilized nation I’ve been to where you must have a prescription to purchase contacts and glasses. Everywhere else I’ve been will just sell you whatever magnification you need at the pharmacy. Obviously there is some acceptable line here, but I think the States handles this decently well enough. In Austin where I live you can get what is called a “homeowners permit” in a lot of c…

> Reminds me how, in USA, it’s the only civilized nation I’ve been to where you must have a prescription to purchase contacts and glasses Anecdotally this is far from true. Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, and the UK for example require a prescription for anything more complicated than reading glasses. There are plenty of reasons why, mostly summed up by your comment about “whatever magnification you need” - eyegl…

> Anecdotally this is far from true. Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, and the UK for example require a prescription for anything more complicated than reading glasses.

I’m in Canada. To order glasses I just punch the few numbers from the optometrist into any random website and glasses show up. That’s… kind of necessary if you want lenses that actually correct for your vision.

With Americans in this thread talking about them trying to verify with the optometrist and stuff… I don’t think we’re in the same league at all.

Re: Air Con: $1697 for an on/off switch

#475

Post by Dove »

OkGoDoIt wrote: post #448
xandrius wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because all who gets hired at these hyper-fast startups are fresh graduates who can do leetcode by heart. The people who have been in the field for a decade or more can't be arsed putting up with all that and so you get stupid issues which were solved years ago but the devs were not aware of them.

So where do those people go to work instead? I want to work with them.

Defense companies.

Re: Air Con: $1697 for an on/off switch

#476

Post by wanyar »

I really love this article! But I'm also confused about the fourth paragraph of "ok I'll fix it myself". Why does cutting datalines worked? My intuition is you need to cut the USB 5v lines and keep the datalines so data can be transferred without interference. I'm totally a noob about datalines and chips so could you please provide a further explanation thank you so much;)

Re: Air Con: $1697 for an on/off switch

#477

Post by sumtechguy »

Suppafly wrote: post #440
sumtechguy wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a conversation I have had with many a jr dev. 'ok you are logging this how much space is that going to take? how long do you want to keep it? what is your rotation schedule?' I usually get the 'oh did not think of that' because logging is a serious afterthought in many cases. It is boring and you just drop in log4j and log away right?

>It is boring and you just drop in log4j and log away right? log4j had big vulnerability a while back and it was a huge pain to contact all our vendors and find out if they had patched for it or not.

I guess I should have added a /s :)

Re: Air Con: $1697 for an on/off switch

#478

Post by albrewer »

athrun wrote: post #148
paranoidrobot wrote: post #108

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 was thinking of doing the same but IR control only allows for unidirectional communication with the unit. 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?

A lot of remote controlled air conditioning systems (like mini-splits and windows units) send the entire state of the remote via the IR blaster every time a key is pressed so there's no chance of the two getting de-synced.

Re: Air Con: $1697 for an on/off switch

#480

Post by dclowd9901 »

unkulunkulu wrote: post #183
dclowd9901 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made my daughter’s bed from scratch out of anger and spite toward IKEA.

IKEA? Thats a surprise, what happened?

Wrote it elsewhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41397160

Nothing to do with the furniture itself and everything to do with their cockamamie order pickup system.

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