I let lasers power my smart home – and I don't want to go back
1–10 of 20 posts
Re: I let lasers power my smart home – and I don't want to go back
#2Re: I let lasers power my smart home – and I don't want to go back
#3People go through so much trouble just to avoid using a wire despite 95% of their "smart home" devices home being static. It seems like such a colossal waste of time and effort in my opinion. Wires are not complicated, and if you put in even 1/10th the effort into using wire as they use in avoiding wires you can make them look nice.
Don't like the look of bare kinked wires? A $5 piece of decorative conduit or mounting tape or a new wall socket will do what an extra $100+ in less reliable specialty tech can accomplish. For people who are suppose to be all about tech you would think something as simple as a bit of wiring wouldn't be so out of their depth.
Re: I let lasers power my smart home – and I don't want to go back
#4> One morning last month, I walked into my kitchen to get a glass of water, but my smart faucet was out of battery.
Not sure what on Earth that is, but it doesn't sound too smart to me.
Re: I let lasers power my smart home – and I don't want to go back
#5People go through so much trouble just to avoid using a wire despite 95% of their "smart home" devices home being static. It seems like such a colossal waste of time and effort in my opinion. Wires are not complicated, and if you put in even 1/10th the effort into using wire as they use in avoiding wires you can make them look nice. Don't like the look of bare kinked wires? A $5 piece of decorative conduit or mountin…
I expect a lot of it is that manufacturers want to sell easy to install devices. Batteries are a lot simpler than wires.
For something like a door lock, having everything on the lock also makes the integration really easy. Solenoid type electrified levers more or less don't exist as residential products, even though that seems to be the way to end up with a nice looking installation.
Re: I let lasers power my smart home – and I don't want to go back
#6> One morning last month, I walked into my kitchen to get a glass of water, but my smart faucet was out of battery. Not sure what on Earth that is, but it doesn't sound too smart to me.
Especially when mamy US homes have AC power available under the sink. So strange that a smart faucet product wouldn't use that.
Re: I let lasers power my smart home – and I don't want to go back
#7> One morning last month, I walked into my kitchen to get a glass of water, but my smart faucet was out of battery. Not sure what on Earth that is, but it doesn't sound too smart to me.
Oh! I have a relative who just installed one of those. It’s hands-down the most infuriating thing in the house.
The gimmick is that touching anywhere on the faucet body or its handle toggles some kind of solenoid to cut or resume the flow.
You still use its physical handle to set the flow and temperature—but the act of touching that handle registers as a “cut off water” capacitive touch.
So any time you try to turn on the water, it spits for a fraction of a second then cuts off the flow. Then locks out your subsequent touches as some kind of demented debounce kind of thing.
Same thing if you try to pull out its retractable head to wash down the basin.
I couldn’t wish a dead battery on it fast enough…
Re: I let lasers power my smart home – and I don't want to go back
#8[deleted]
Re: I let lasers power my smart home – and I don't want to go back
#9Huh, interesting to see this technology get closer to mainstream. This is basically an IR laser plus a solar cell. Efficiency isn't great (5W base station laser -> 100mW receiver) but that doesn't matter much for low power devices.
The company claims to have some sort of unique patent involving retroreflectors in the receiver ensuring that if something disturbs the path, the laser beam is destroyed. I haven't been able to find any other technical details and of course search engines are mostly useless, so if anyone manages to dig deeper into how this works I'd be very curious to hear it.
Re: I let lasers power my smart home – and I don't want to go back
#10> One morning last month, I walked into my kitchen to get a glass of water, but my smart faucet was out of battery. Not sure what on Earth that is, but it doesn't sound too smart to me.
Oh! I have a relative who just installed one of those. It’s hands-down the most infuriating thing in the house. The gimmick is that touching anywhere on the faucet body or its handle toggles some kind of solenoid to cut or resume the flow. You still use its physical handle to set the flow and temperature—but the act of touching that handle registers as a “cut off water” capacitive touch. So any time you try to turn o…
I have one that I actually like, but it works a bit differently - instead of being capacitive on the faucet - which is infuriating, there is a sensor in the toe kick area under the sink, so if you wave your foot there it turns the water on/off.