The Internet of Way Too Many Things | Hacker News Reader

The Internet of Way Too Many Things

nytimes.com

393 pointsprostoalex257 comments

I just bought a home, and just started a considerable renovation. I'm putting in new water pipes, new electrical wiring, etc. I thought of putting "smart" devices (i.e. switches, alarms, thermostats, etc.) given the "advantages" these promise.

After considerable research, it's not worth the hussle or money. Let's put aside the fact that these are considerable more expensive, and won't breakeven in years (some devices smart devices simply don't breakeven).

The main reason I decided not to have any of these installed was due to how cumbersome they are to operate. Each appliance/brand has their own app/portal, which does not connect to other brands, making it impossible to have an overview of your "smart home". Even more scary, some of these devices are operated by startups, god knows, if they will be alive next year. Good luck getting that app to work with iOS 10! It's a true headache, it's even a headache for contractors, who have no clue how these work. It's going to take some time (and education) to have an OS that makes a smart home smart...

and don't get me started on the smart baby monitors, etc... if my siblings an I were brought up just fine in the 80's without being in a "smart onesie", I'm sure we can do just as fine today.

I remember when we bought our new house and the neighbour had an electric cat flap installed into the wall cavity (battery was still accessible). Then it broke. They had to cut it out and replaced it with a standard flap mounted externally.

I would still run cat6 as if I was going to use smart devices. You're already inside the walls.

All rooms will have gigabit ethernet sockets :-)

May I suggest adding also USB plugs to be able to load your devices without extra bulky part?

People suggest this a lot, but it only makes sense aesthetically (and even then only sometimes). From an environmental point of view it doesn't make any sense to do this.

Isn't the draw negligible nowadays? Even my cheap unbranded USB chargers remain at room temperature when nothing is plugged in. And you could always get sockets with switches.

It costs resources simply to make the device. They tend to cost much more than the simple bricks, which means they use more resources than the simple bricks.

And unlike the bricks which you have approx 1 per device, with outlets you need too many of them.

I don't agree that being costlier means they use more resources, but no argument about needing more chargers this way.

On the other hand, you could buy a single beefy converter (something that could manage a few amps) and then pass 5V DC cable along the regular AC wiring. Not sure about the efficiency of that, though.

Empty conduits seem like a better idea than cables. Tech changes way to fast to put cables directly into the wall (except for 110/230V~ power which seems to stay stable until now)

I don't know about that. Cat6 Ethernet started being manufactured in... what, 2001? 14 years ago? And few consumers have yet to find its support for 10GB Ethernet to be limiting or an issue. I can't think of what other cabling you might need to run, so if you're putting in conduits, it sure seems like a good idea to put in that Ethernet.

Except a lot of the automation devices don't use Ethernet, but other bus protocols, and maybe central low-voltage power. Which you might be able to send over Cat6, but I wouldn't bet on it, especially if you want to get it professionally installed.

I'd be very surprised if the standard IoT ecosystem that ultimately wins out doesn't use standard 110 V lines already in the walls for power and WiFi for data. Realistically I am not seeing it being worth it for the average person to spend many thousands of dollars to rewire their entire homes when the alternative is to simply get much cheaper devices that use the wireless network you already have and plug into the wiring and outlets you already have.

http://www.childtrends.org/?indicators=infant-child-and-teen...

Looks to me like infant mortality (under age one) has halved between 1977 and 2013. I understand the argument of "it worked fine for me", but, well, on a portfolio basis, you and I were dying a bit faster back then.

Outpatient care is a big field these days. Something that, with extremely little effort, can reduce the odds of death or disability, is quite tempting. A smart nappy/diaper with a disposable nutrition-analysing smart-chip is not that far off.

Maybe you are right... but a onesie that "knows that when a baby wakes up, the parents will, too -- so it turns on lights and music and even makes the coffee." ... is of no use to fight infant mortality.

That's not all it does, you just picked out the ridiculous part. If you'd quote the entire piece on that onesie you'd see that it actually has a bunch of features that very well might reduce infant mortality.

The author also invokes 'helicopter parenting' as if it applies to taking care of babies. Helicopter parenting is when parents disrupt other caregivers during the care for their child, it has nothing to do with being sure about whether your baby is dying. I am confident parents themselves can configure and determine when and when not to wake up when their baby is awake.

As a non-parent, do parents really drink coffee in the middle of the night when their baby wakes up? That seems like a terrible idea..

The article addresses this point directly, but because you aren't a parent, it may have gone over your head. The real problem with a smart-onesie isn't simply that it's useless, but that infants are restless, and any signal this device carries will be overwhelmed by the noise. When you're the parent of an infant, your #2 goal (after "keep the baby alive") is "ruthlessly attend to your own rest needs".

I fully understand, that's why I called it 'the ridiculous part'. I recognize that a device that wakes you up whenever your baby is awake would be crazy, but surely that isn't what the device is going to do? I read it more as 'when your baby is crying so hard you will most likely wake up, it will turn on lights and soft music to assist you in calming them'.

Mimo monitors breathing, temperature and sleeping position. All of these are factors in cot death according to easily searchable research.

I thought that a cot death meant that this remained unexplained. Now a baby monitor reduces cot deaths? I'm really interested to read about that claim.

It remains unexplained but things are correlated with it, and possibly have an unexplained causal effect.

No, baby monitors have been studied. It's not a big mystery. Monitoring doesn't make a dent in SIDS. Education does. "Don't put infants to sleep on their stomachs".

There are side effects of monitoring.

"Angelcare voluntarily recalled 600,000 under-mattress sensor pads after two infants died of strangulation when the cord attached to the pad wrapped around their necks" - http://www.slate.com/articles/life/family/2014/02/mimo_and_o...

Strangulation by baby monitor is correlated with having a baby monitor.

I'm pretty sure I would be the first to put all kinds of sensors onto my baby, it's toys and environment but I'm also pretty sure I would check on that stuff AND on the baby myself. Also considering the security problems.

Looks to me like a hell lot of problems added to what I would already have with the baby alone. My parents had me in their room and I survived. Others died. Maybe that's just the way it is.

There is no evidence I've found that any monitoring device improves SIDS outcomes, and there is evidence that it doesn't. Forget about the smart onesie: it's difficult to justify even classic baby monitors as a medical intervention.

The decline in SIDS over the last 2 decades tracks the education of parents not to put infants to sleep on their stomachs.

Small note, but there are other major factors in the decline of SIDS besides just not putting infants to sleep on their stomach, although they generally all stem from the idea of educating new parents about basic safety procedures that are not always intuitive.

As a father of two, my youngest being 4 months old, those features sound unusually stupid. When the baby wakes up at 3am, any device that subsequently turned on lights and music would be taken out back and shot. As for the coffee, my bog-standard Philips coffee maker has a built-in timer already, set for 6:30 am.

My baby doesn't need an app to let me know he's up. Generally the piercing fire trunk level scream does the trick. Now, does this smart baby suit help against SIDS? Nope. If there's science to prove me wrong, I will gladly revise my opinion. Honestly though, that baby suit with a built in coffee maker trigger and light turning on capability.. That's just dumb. Do we really want all the lights coming on every time the baby stirs? Is coffee making really what's needed at that moment? The potential for that technology is cool, but the execution just sounds excessively superficial. as far as infant mortality: what are the causes of infant mortality? Certainly not underlit homes and under caffeinated parents.

That's not fair. He didn't say "children should be raised to exactly the same standards as they were in 1977". He said "we were raised without the benefits of smart-onesies, and we came out fine". Those are two different arguments.

Meanwhile, the reality is that the bulk of the decline in US infant mortality is attributable to improved prenatal care. If you want to keep arguing about the value of modernizing parenting, can we start with statistics broken out by income level? Has infant mortality among the children of well-off parents declined sharply as well? If modernization is saving children, that statistic should reveal it.

It's not 'unfair'. (are you implying I was unduly harsh on the gent?)

Let's take sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Because of SIDS, it is now recommended in the videos I watched yesterday, that infants be put down on their backs with no pillows in the parents' bedroom but not in their bed. This has no bearing on prenatal care or wealth, but has an effect, which could probably be enhanced by a smart baby monitor.

It's not possible to lay an infant on its back if it's wearing a dumb onesie?

14-16 years ago, it wasn't even possible to get out of a hospital without having this explained to you in detail. I can only imagine what it's like now.

"Smart onesies" are silly.

Biometric monitoring for at-risk individuals is patently not silly. As a percentage, more babies are at-risk than young adults.

The question we should be asking is whether a smart onesie improves outcomes compared to existing best practices. If there's not a statistically significant difference and you divert money from things that would help, then pushing these onesies isn't benign, it's actively harmful.

The point as I see it being got at here is that changes in the approach to raising a child has resulted in fewer SIDS over the past 30 years [1].

Introducing new technology, or techniques, regardless of how absurd it appears, needs the data to identify whether it really does have an improvement in child safety.

Simply saying my generation (born in the 80's) turned out just fine so why change is actually incorrect. The rate of deaths was higher in the 80's compared to now and changes were made in advice that has reduced death rates.

Technology could be used to reduce this further, but we don't know until we have the data. Do I think it's likely that an IoT onesie will make a difference? Not really, purely because the cost and adoption rate would probably make it impossible to detect its impact as safety concious parents who would buy it would probably have mitigated most risks anyway. The chance of getting a significant number of would-be SIDS outcomes to be using such a device would, in my opinion, be extremely small.

[1] http://www.babywill.org/sids-information/what-is-sids/sids-s...

Again: the dominant factor in reducing infant mortality in the US has been prenatal care. Infant mortality in the sense described upthread is not about SIDS.

The latter half of your comment is a bit hand-wavy. "Purely" because of adoption numbers? What does a "smart onesie" actually have to do with SIDS? Companies have been selling ever-more-complicated baby monitors to parents for years using fear of SIDS, but SIDS is not a problem of monitoring.

So you disagree with articles like http://www.slate.com/articles/life/family/2014/02/mimo_and_o... "Selling Fear: Smart monitors cannot protect babies from SIDS, so what are they for?" Or the Policy Statement at http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/128/5/1030.ful... which says:

> Do not use home cardiorespiratory monitors as a strategy to reduce the risk of SIDS—Although cardiorespiratory monitors can be used at home to detect apnea, bradycardia, and, when pulse oximetry is used, decreases in oxyhemoglobin saturation, there is no evidence that use of such devices decreases the incidence of SIDS.84,–,87 They might be of value for selected infants but should not be used routinely. There is also no evidence that routine in-hospital cardiorespiratory monitoring before discharge from the hospital can identify newborn infants at risk of SIDS.

When you say "probably be enhanced", was that speaking only from optimism in technology, or did it have some other basis?

Same argument as "we rode on the back dashboard with no seat belts as a kid and we survived". Completely ignoring the hundreds of thousands of kids who didn't survive. Because the ones who were killed doing something dangerous aren't around anymore to tell you not to do it. Doesn't mean we should roll back the clock on car safety.

That's different because there's a clear mechanism and the data supports it. Is there a real study with a large enough sample size showing anything similar or is it just the usual convenience and artfully vague claims?

I understand your desire for hard data, and I'll admit I doubt it's there. However it's not that much of a stretch to follow from "babies survive better when people are watching them" to "it's easier to watch a baby when there are multiple people taking care of it" to "it doesn't have to be people, necessarily" to "what if sensors could do it" to "babies live longer because sensors are watching them when humans might not be".

Completely pulling numbers out of my ass for sake of argument, for every 1000 babies that survive just fine without baby monitors, there might be one or two that didn't, because mom and dad stepped away and didn't notice the kid stop breathing. Really, people survived just fine without seat belts. We kept enough of the population to survive and even thrive as a species even in incredibly dangerous cars. But now that we have them and we recognize their value, would we go back?

I was looking at the comparison like this:

we knew that many thousands of people were dying in car crashes and also that people wearing seat-belts survived crashes at a much higher rate.

we know that a small number of kids die but we don't have that same level of evidence that the proposed solution actually works.

That's an argument for doing more studies but not for buying a bunch of IoT stuff at steep prices.

Yes but this improvement was achieved by improvements (and increased uptake of) the traditional baby monitor. His point that the smart onesy is a bad idea stands irrespective.

> Outpatient care is a big field these days. Something that, with extremely little effort, can reduce the odds of death or disability, is quite tempting. A smart nappy/diaper with a disposable nutrition-analysing smart-chip is not that far off.

Or we could save the money spent on gadget nappies and instead use the money to pay for better/more nursing (and integrating nutritional requirements into patient care).

One of the companies that is solving this very problem is Xiaomi. Their method is quite crude - that is, they make everything themselves. But the end result is that everything they make - from an air purifier to a TV - is connected and operated via a similar / familiar OS called MIUI.

They give away their phones for very cheap, because the phone is the Trojan horse - it is the remote control for all the other devices it makes.

Xiaomi is the largest and fastest growing IoT company on the planet, and worth keeping an eye out for.

Yup, Xiamoi makes everything interoperable by making it themselves. And Apple makes HomeKit. And Google makes their own. And Microsoft makes their own. And HP makes their own. And...

See the problem?

I do. And you are right. I think we will get to a place where one company does it right, before we agree on an interoperable standard.

I'm cynica that will be the case. On the Internet TV front we have roku, apple tv, chrome cast, kindle fire TV-- all of them empty plastic boxes doing nearly the same exact thing, and yet there is no interop to speak of. It's just more walled gardens

I've been considering replacing my media PC with a Roku, so I'm curious why you would call them "empty plastic boxes" considering the Roku can stream from my local server and I block all outbound requests at my router (firewall). The advantage I see is the 5W power draw vs. my current 20W. I'm also unclear on what interoperability would mean for one of these devices. I don't think 2 Roku on the same network have any capacity to communicate either (maybe I'm wrong?).

I'm not krisdol, but I presume the "empty plastic boxes" is a reference to the fact that the amount of hardware necessary to stream video is now miniscule. My Roku is the size it is not because it needs to be that big to hold components, but so that it looks substantial to consumers and doesn't get lost in a ball of cables.

And interop for me would mean that instead of N proprietary platforms that must be targeted separately by software/content makers, there would be one universal platform with different manufacturers. The Amazon app on Roku, for example, is pretty weak; I presume it's much better with an actual Amazon device. And YouTube wasn't available on Roku for a number of years, even though you could get it on other devices, I presume because Google was trying to make their own device play with Google TV.

I agree with your take, but I don't see that happening; I prefer to take care of media acquisition on my own because I don't trust these companies to do any differently than the media companies they seek to, ultimately, replace.

Roku has the private channel feature that I think makes it more interesting than the other players, and I wish more effort was exerted to explore the possibilities with private channels. Have you used this feature?

It seems to me that if the streaming providers had better APIs, the device makers could make use of them; I imagine Amazon's devices have access to private APIs that Roku does not.

I haven't. I use the Roku to put things like Netflix and Amazon on the big screen. I remember trying a few different things to put content from my server on the Roku, but I could never get it to work smoothly; there were hitches both with the on-Roku software and with encoding issues. Instead I just bought an Intel NUC for that.

In a few years I hope I can replace them both with some sort of Android device, but for now I don't mind two devices.

I picked up a new Sky Now TV box for 8 GBP (with cashback). It's basically a re-branded Roku but you can't get all the channels. Still, quite the bargain considering it even comes with an HDMI cable. It has all the standard catchup apps such as BBC iPlayer but no Netflix (Sky are competitors).

It also has a developer mode which may be what you are referring to. I managed to side-load Plex onto it. If the Netflix app code was available then I guess that could be side-loaded too. Only one development app can be loaded at a time though.

I also looked at doing some development but the VBScript brings back too many bad memories. :)

http://digiex.net/guides-reviews/guides-tutorials/media-guid...

>My Roku is the size it is not because it needs to be that big to hold components, but so that it looks substantial to consumers and doesn't get lost in a ball of cables.

Are you sure its not because multiple-generations-removed miniaturization technology is cheaper, and the latest Roku devices are under $100? Or that perhaps it's a different economic driver, rather than so the consumer sees its physical size?

Regarding the second app, I think the issue is again non-technical -- content is not available across devices because it's a differentiator. It may seem an artificial barrier -- your Roku can decode any video stream -- but the structure of a system that created the content suggests otherwise.

Sounds like things are ready for interoperation except for the human/economic/structural element.

Assuming $50.00 for a Roku, electricity at $0.15/kWh, and 16 hours average daily usage, breakeven point is in ~3.8 years vs. an existing 20W solution.

16 hours daily usage?! Whoa nelly, that's a lot of TV watching! I suspect a lot of people on here (like me) watch less than one hour a day. The US national average is five hours, which is still startlingly high, but doesn't get you close to 16 hours per day even with multiple people in a household (as their viewing times will tend to overlap).

I suspect that stand-by power usage may be more important than active power usage for such a device. And I don't know how Roku fares for that, nor its alternatives.

The point of the disillusionment exercise was to carefully select parameters that favored narrowrail's perceived "advantage" in an improbable but still realistic way.

In other words, assuming a proverbial couch potato got a sweet deal on a new Roku 3 and pays up the wazoo for electricity, it would take a solid 4 years of usage in the prescribed manner before breaking even on a relatively small investment, rendering any perceived power savings "advantage" over an existing 20W system null...let alone other considerations like product MTBF, lifecycle, the next trending 6-second attention getter, interoperability, etc.

Get a small, open system. I own a CuBox, but something like a Raspberry Pi 2 would work just as well.

Install some linux distribution (I use OpenELEC) that boots into Kodi (formerly xbmc).

Seriously. No proprietary thing I have ever seen matches the features and usability of Kodi. It's an amazing piece of open-source software.

if all of these have youtube, hulu and netflix ...to the consumer that might be the level of interop currently required -- interop with their fav delivery platforms, not necessarily the devices themselves

Why not a good open-source standard? iOS did it "right" for mobile, but Android provided tough competition. And Apple benefited from the competition... it pushed iOS designers to keep their game up - and likewise.

Like AllJoyn?

[0] https://allseenalliance.org/

https://xkcd.com/927/

Like file systems and network shares!

weeps for the future he'll never see

What's wrong with CIFS?

We haven't seen this with instant messaging. For some inexplicable reason, the big players find great value in maintaining walled gardens.

Why would we expect things to be any different in the world of hardware?

If Xiamoi makes enough of the stack, the devices with a desirable user experience...it might not be a problem at all for both Xiamoi and the customers at this phase of IoT - the vertical integration level is likely required to get it off the ground and make it a good experience.

Eventually, a shift to a more horizontal and open approach will win out, but it seems hard to do that at the starting point of an emerging market.

Actually, Microsoft has joined as part of the "Allseen Alliance" and has done a great deal of work around Alljoyn.

One link is here -- https://ms-iot.github.io/content/en-US/win10/AllJoyn.htm

Also a colleague of mine has done a great deal of work with and talked about this work over the last year or so. Here is a link to one of his talks -- http://www.omggeek.com/elc-2015-alljoyn-101-make-smarter-dev...

Part of the issue with IoT is what do you define as IoT, the devices themselves, data ingest, management infrastructure, etc. The whole topic is pretty broad.

That is not a problem. That is competition. Imagine the opposite where a company has monopoly over the technology.

If you had to decide the brand of your power sockets, and then use only devices of that brand, would you call that competition?

There is a whole different dynamic to these devices in China. Air quality, water quality, etc. are part of middle class lifestyle in China, and many people do not trust the authorities to keep these parameters within spec. Multiple air filters in an apartment are common, and monitoring the performance of these devices is an obvious interest to their owners. This is a much more compelling home automation story than thermostats or smoke alarms that should be mostly invisible in the home environment.

I've never understood the desire to add smart technology to the smoke alarm. Once properly installed a smoke alarm should be interacted with when (1) there is a fire, (2) the battery is running flat. False alarms pretty much mean you've installed it wrong.

> I've never understood the desire to add smart technology to the smoke alarm.

Because very few things suck more than coming home from work and your house is burnt down because the smoke alarm wasn't heard by anyone and by the time the fire crews arrive it's too late. Happened to a friend of mine, house was beyond repair even though fire crews arrived 10min after a passing driver noticed the blaze.

A smoke detector is there to alert the occupants of the building so that they get out. If it was an actual alarm system that is connected to a dispatcher, the firefighters would've been notified.

Yeah, as originally designed perhaps, but what if you could add a bit of tech to make sure your pets are safe? Or you're not coming home only to inhale carbon monoxide? I don't think $99 is a ridiculous expense for such peace of mind, even if it's not proven to be full proof just yet.

My CO alarm sounds pretty loudly. You notice it the moment you open the door again smart it does not need to be.

How would you get your pet out in time if your CO alarm or smoke alarm went off when you were at work?

Perhaps coming home hours earlier from work and/or calling a neighbor would increase their odds of survival.

I find it odd that people are questioning the value of this life and death information while there are plenty of frivolous IOT devices.

Because CO kills surprisingly quickly -- unless your commute is in the order of a couple of minutes you'd be too late. Also you don't send a person into a house with a CO leak so asking you neighbour to retrieve your cat would be placing them in danger.

My point is that the smoke alarm and the CO alarm should be exactly what they are simple alarms that allow occupants to escape in an emergency. Adding IOT capabilities doesn't add to the alarm functionality in sensible ways. However, it does risk introducing vulnerabilities. I don't want my smoke alarm to start sending spam emails (this really happened with a smart fridge a couple of years ago).

You're being awfully pedantic. Have the neighbor shut your gas off. Have your landlord alert the neighbors. What if you just left for work? I can find a bunch of scenarios where the information can be useful, whereas you seem determined to argue that only the occupants (who might just be kids burning toast) should have this information.

The information is intended to allow the occupants to escape safely if required. In the case of a CO alarm no one should enter the premises until qualified engineers have made it safe. The the case of a smoke alarm the occupants are the only ones that can safely decide if it is a false alarm -- if there is a fire no one should enter the premises until the fire has been dealt with by qualified personal. What you are suggesting would mean adding a general purpose computer to essential safety equipment. Anything that adds complications and could affect the main function of the safety equipment would need to be considered very carefully.

I never suggested that unqualified personnel should enter an unsafe environment or people add anything to essential safety equipment. The Leeo just listens for alarms and lets you decide what to do with the information. It does not affect the operation of the safety equipment whatsoever.

In the case of CO2, is it better to have qualified personnel attempt to arrive at 6pm after you get home from work and hear the alarm, or sometime closer to when the leak occurred and you were alerted on your smart phone? (I don't think emergency responders are twiddling their thumbs in the evening or there's light traffic)

In the case of fire, is it better to call the personnel before the retired lady down the street notices the flames and smoke while your at work??

What is the Leeo?

A friend of mine, a great cook, regularly performs what she refers to as The Dance of Smoke Alarm Supplication, wherein she and a broom jointly try to persuade the alarm gods that everything is fine. When she heard that there was a smoke alarm that would pop up a notification on her phone first so she could mute it with zero shrieking, she was very excited.

It may be that her landlord installed it wrong, but landlords (and homeowners) install an impressive number of things wrong, so a business that didn't depend on "amateur does X perfectly" doesn't sound like a bad idea to me.

> A friend of mine, a great cook, regularly performs what she refers to as The Dance of Smoke Alarm Supplication, wherein she and a broom jointly try to persuade the alarm gods that everything is fine. When she heard that there was a smoke alarm that would pop up a notification on her phone first so she could mute it with zero shrieking, she was very excited.

The Dance of Smoke Alarm Supplication can still apply to smart smoke alarms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpsMkLaEiOY

I don't know why this was downvoted; I thought it was very relevant.

Ah, the Smoke Alarm Supplication Dance. Great term. My wife and daughter had the same issue. They like to cook and can tomato sauce. Our smoke alarm would go off very easily - lots of false positives. One day my wife is vacuuming the hall and the motor in the vacuum cleaner overheats and starts putting out thick, black smoke right under the smoke alarm. Nothing from the smoke alarm... Needless to say we quickly replaced both the vacuum cleaner and the smoke alarm and made certain to get one with dual sensors...

Yes the landlord installed it wrong.

However in what scenario does a landlord install a £100 smoke alarm when s/he can install a £10 one though? No landlord I've ever had would have done this -- given that over here bills are paid by the tenant a thermostat is usually not provided.

Homeowners can at least move them when they realise they have installed them wrong.

Some landlords will install a £100 smoke alarm when they realize that they can get real-time notifications that one of their buildings is on fire. Others will do it as a fancy feature to attract higher-paying tenants.

And when the price falls to £30, as happens with these things, a lot more will do it.

>Some landlords will install a £100 smoke alarm when they realize that they can get real-time notifications that one of their buildings is on fire.

Not even on fire, maybe people are smoking inside when they aren't suppose to be. Maybe someone burns their food commonly and that needs investigated before they burn the whole damn place down one time. I can see lots of reasons for that.

That's not true - you're meant to test your smoke alarm weekly. Also false alarms can be the smoke detector acting correctly to the presence of smoke, eg. Burnt toast.

In this case the ability to remotely check the alarm status from a self check, or to remotely snooze a false alarm while clearing the smoke can be very handy

OK so you find it easier to find your phone open the app and then press that button. I find it easier to press the button on the unit. I also find it easier to touch a £10 device with food covered/wet fingers whilst cooking than to get out a £300 smart phone and touch that with food covered or wet fingers.

I agree. They are so cheap. The ones I install are less than ten dollars. Won't name the brand. They are usually on the bottom of the shelf. Hidden away from worrisome consumers that equate price with function. Many contractors buy them by the case.

I usually install two, and run a electrical line to one.

Yes, an app is fine if you burn food, and have the disposable income? I would rather see home owners spend the money on running a line to their smoke, and CO detectors though.

Weeds grow fast too. Maybe I'll go buy some.

Run some plastic pipes with lengths of string inside them around -- then when you want to install new cabling you can easily drag the cabling through the pipes without damaging your walls.

I agree with you on everything except the smart onesie. If used intelligently it could be very useful. For example, if your kid's temperature drops every night and then they wake up then maybe they are cold. Or something.

I've started working on exactly this problem. I don't think that sticking everything to a specific vendor is the right solution, and hoping that everybody is going to adopt the same standard is just not going to happen.

I'm building a simple open source API that will connect all your devices together regardless of whether they have a fancy API or not. [1]

I just started working on it so it's definitely far from done, but I think that this might be a step in the right direction.

[1] http://github.com/hjem/hjem

It always concerns me when a programmer reads a customer problem and offers a technical solution. It could be that an open-source API really will solve the problems he mentioned, but if you want adoption, you'll need to get better at explaining how they customer's life is going to get better.

If I say, "X is too much hassle" and someone replies with "Good news, I put a bunch of PHP up on Github", I'm not seeing less hassle. I'm seeing more hassle. Now I don't have to just worry about a half-dozen vendors, their possibly-janky products, and their willingness to spend 30 years supporting something that fell out of fashion. Now I can also worry about trying to glue all that together with somebody's hobby code that, if the average open source project is any guide, will be swiftly abandoned.

Well I don't think OP was trying to help everyone immediately, but he is at least making a start.

The beta API someone threw up on github obviously isn't going to help the average consumer, but it might be the start of a community of enthusiasts. Maybe one day those enthusiasts build a robust system with wider adoption and a company behind it.

If you want something that 'just works', then github is probably not the first place you should look.

> If you want something that 'just works', then github is probably not the first place you should look.

Yes, and that's my point. The expressed problem was that somebody renovating a home looked at a bunch of the options and said that they were too much hassle, too much risk. When somebody says, "This technology doesn't look like something I want to deal with for 20 years," it seems to miss the point to add, "Hey, here's some source code to something even less likely to last 20 years."

I'm not saying it's bad to try write code for fun. I too have a GitHub repository with some dubious home automation code. [1] But as a developer, when a user talks about a problem, I think it's vital to truly listen to the problem and then only talk about a solution if it actually solves something for them.

[1] Basically, redshift for my house: https://github.com/wpietri/sunrise

That's why you make sure they use one of the standards based protocols, then buy something like a smartthings hub which is open enough that you can write your own apps if the vendor decides to abandon theirs. You don't need the vendor to update their app, you just need them to operate with the hub, and then talk to the hub directly to control the device.

Ah, yes. Not only do I pay $50 for my light switches, I also have to write my own interface before they behave differently from $10 light switches. What an incredible value proposition.

That would be the case in the most extreme circumstances. And likely in those circumstances, you'll make money. Much like the general Linux ecosystem, someone else has the same problem, is in college/has no kids/has a ton of spare time, and has already written the program for you.

Out of my entire household, I've written one app ever, and it was because I wanted an alert on my sump pump based on an amperage draw on an outlet... and even that was based on someone else's code. I just changed the amp draw variable.

What outlets do you use for monitoring current draw?

I haven't seen anything commercialized yet. As far as I know the only way to do it at this point is to still build your own. There are lots of options, but for something simple you can go with something like this:

https://learn.adafruit.com/tweet-a-watt/

You only need one person in the world to write an interface and then sell it for a open source bounty, via something like Patreon.

This makes it sound like I'd need to be sysadmin/devops for my home. I get paid to do that sort of thing at work. I certainly don't want to be doing it at home.

I renovated my house a few months ago and also had to decide whether or not to go "smart" on the lighting, switches thermostat, etc. Did a lot of research and came to the same conclusion that there was little benefit and large chance that I would have obsolete technology next year.

However, I did go for an electronic doorlock (with finger print reader) and after just a few months I can not imagine ever going back to having regular keys again. If you have a family with small kids and cleaning ladies that need to come and go this saves so much logistic hassle. No need to wait for a delivery man, just give him a temp code to put it in the hall, etc.

There are definitely a few great IoT things, but just like we once imagined a PC would be used to store recipes, we just have to find out what the truly useful IoT things are.

In general, fingerprints should not be treated as a password or key. They unfortunately are being used as such by Apple and Samsung and these fingerprint locks. A key is something you keep private, but you leave your fingerprint on everything, including the doorknob you're trying to keep locked. Additionally, once compromised, the key cannot be revoked. I don't doubt it is much more convenient, but I would personally never trust the security of my home to one. The one area that electronic locks clearly win out on is with auditability. You can show when the door was opened and by whom, if they each have separate keys. And when a key is lost, that specific key can be revoked, rather than changing the entire lock.

The only type of people that door locks keep out, are mostly honest people. That's why fingerprint locks are mostly about convenience, not drastically boosted security.

If you have a normal door lock, a professional thief of the sort that would be able to (or try to) steal + use your fingerprint is already a threat. It's no worse than the ways a pro can break into your house without a fingerprint lock.

If someone has procured your finger print, and is now targeting your house, you've got much bigger problems than what a key lock can prevent. It means you're being specifically targeted, they've cased you and your house.

I don't think you become less safe with a fingerprint lock compared to a regular key. Someone trying to fool the fingerprint reader with a fake fingerprint on our house door is really not a realistic scenario compared to the scenario where a burglar simply uses a crow bar. In any case, it's not more likely than someone trying to use a fake key.

But if you don't like fingerprints you can use the RFID chip of your phone (my kids are too small to have those), fingerprints are easily revoked from the lock.

All security is an economic equation. All of it. Anything that increases the overall time/energy cost for an attacker represents an increase in security. Security is also heavily defined by lowest energy failure points and the human interface cost/benefit factor (because security itself often takes time/energy, so there's no point in expending more then whatever is being guarded is worth). In this scenario, both come into play in a way you're not giving credit to. I can't speak to your situation, but large numbers of us do not live in heavily armored homes packed with alarm systems. The door lock is essentially a mixture of minimal energy cost/social message ("nobody is home and you are not invited to just wander in") and a canary system (if someone does break it, it'll be obvious it happened).

It's become trendy any time someone mentions biometrics to talk about "finger prints being everywhere" and all that, but it's always incorrect to do so in a security discussion without considering overall economics. The fact is that, at least for now, it is not trivial to find, lift, and duplicate a fingerprint to the level needed to fool a decent reader (ala Touch ID). Long before it's worth doing that, a typical crook would simply break a window (including a door window should any exterior door in your entire house have any glass) or, likeliest of all, simply go to another house. Much of the low level crime that takes place is because a crook is interested in getting someone, not you specifically. It's a numbers game, it's not worth it to go to a lot of effort against one somewhat more secured building when the one next door may be wide open. Conversely, if you're subject to an actual persistent targeted physical threat then you've got vastly bigger problems then most are equipped to easily deal with. You have to make sure keys don't get stolen/duped, that hidden cameras aren't installed, that professionals can't pick or use more advanced subtle physical bypasses, etc etc.

Finally, it's necessary to compare to what the actual practical alternatives currently in place are. "Key under the mat/behind the flower pot/fake rock on lawn/..." or some variant is how a huge number of homes currently deal with fallback entry. Even if in general a copy of keys are carried around, being able to get into one's home no matter what is important enough that many people will at keep least one copy on premises in case they forget/lose theirs or a guest needs to get in or something. That's not a high baseline to surpass.

So there's nothing inherently wrong with using biometrics in scenarios like this. They're convenient, audit-able, cannot be lost or forgotten, and are often at least as good against expected attack scenarios as what currently is in place. There are certainly ways to make it even better, or promising alternates. Using a different factor (like a pin or electronic) key as the primary option with biometric fallback (in an electronic system fallback usage could be used as a trigger), time fencing, combining it with another option for MFA, or in the future directly improving "something you are" (such as with implants) all could be considered. But right now it's perfectly appropriate security for many homes. If anything my major concern would not be security but rather reliability, so I'd never use it exclusively. But it's silly to just write it off purely because it could be bypassed with sufficient time/energy/expertise.

I agree with nearly everything you have said except for:

> and don't get me started on the smart baby monitors, etc... if my siblings an I were brought up just fine in the 80's without being in a "smart onesie", I'm sure we can do just as fine today.

I even agree that the baby monitor mentioned is a little over the top (I don't care for the lights/music/coffee aspect) but it's important not to write things off just because "I was raised just fine without X". That logic doesn't hold for most things. And for high-risk babies that onesie is probably multitudes of times cheaper than expensive medical equipment to do the same level of monitoring.

(Sad Personal Anecdote Below)

My youngest sister died when she was very young (<2 mo old) due to a medical condition (birth defect). Now this isn't to say that this product would have saved her life. In fact I'm nearly 100% positive it wouldn't have. My parents were already awake due to me waking up from a bad dream and so my mom caught her stopping breathing probably almost immediately and we lived next door to a doctor who was over within minutes before she was rushed off to the hospital. She still died but I can't help but think that while she couldn't be saved there are other babies and young children out there that could be saved from such a device. Also there is nothing to say that constant monitoring wouldn't have caught signs of this a little earlier allowing my parents enough time to get her to professionals. All I'm saying is don't write off this just because you "got by fine without it".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

I'm not sure how this plays in at all... Could you please expand on that?

I'm not the person you responded to, but survivorship bias is what you were originally responding to -- a claim like "we survived without the baby monitor, so it's unnecessary" falls flat because the people that didn't survive without it aren't here to tell you it would've saved them.

Eh. We still know about people who didn't survive.

Survivorship bias is when you are only seeing the successes.

The claim showing survivorship bias is from this comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10181767):

> ...if my siblings an I were brought up just fine in the 80's without being in a "smart onesie", I'm sure we can do just as fine today.

There's no one here to say "I died because my parents didn't realize I stopped breathing". Yes, one can look at statistics, and see how many deaths would be prevented by this device, but the comment didn't do that. It's survivorship bias.

Well, you'd know if your siblings died, but you're right, there's some survivorship bias in the "and I" portion.

The main issues, though, are very small sample sizes and the difficulty of knowing if people really were "just fine" compared to what they would have been otherwise.

Sorry to hear about your sister, that's horrible. I absolutely agree that there is a role for these devices in monitoring medical conditions.

I have a sister who was born with a tachycardia condition which recurred in high school. I got her one of the Garmin wrist watches with a heart rate sensor so she could monitor the condition over time. Obviously it doesn't fix anything on its own, but it can help to understand the problem and feel more in control.

Can anyone speak to the difficulty of homebrew automating some very simple processes?

For instance, I have no interest in buying into an ecosystem or any sort of smart appliance - but I would love to have low-watt floor lights turn on as I half-asleep stumble to the kitchen for a glass of water at 3am.

I want my idiosyncratic needs to drive 'smart' home additions - not the shared needs of target population Y.

Is there a community around this sort of thing I could link up with?

I think the safest way to go is to purchase products with open standards, namely Z-Wave and Zigbee. They're open protocols that can be used with any number of HA products; SmartThings, Wink, Vera, etc.

You can purchase Z-Wave thermostats from Honeywell, switches from Leviton, locks from Schlage and so on. I use OpenHAB in my home, which is an open-source home automation server. It can run on anything from a RPi to a blade with just a few necessary additions (namely a Z-Wave dongle and some sort of network connection.)

OpenHAB requires a fair bit of programming knowledge and the learning curve can be steep for some, but overall it's very functional. A few things I do in my house:

- When the garage door opens and it's after sunset, the hallway lights turn on and set themselves to 50% brightness.

- When I start watching a show on PleX, the living room lights fade out. If the show is paused, they'll come up enough for me to navigate around and refill my drink.

- When both my girlfriend and I are gone from the house, the A/C shuts off. When it detects we're within 1/2 mile of the house, it'll come back on so it's comfortable when we arrive.

There's a million other things you can do with OpenHAB. It has hundreds of "bindings" to different HA products and supports HTTP endpoints, etc. Proprietary standards are bound to go away eventually, but open standards with open-source software will always be around.

A great place to start is Node-Red: http://nodered.org/

Its a node.js browser based programming environment that allows you to connect anything to anything. You can run it on any desktop platform, as well as Beaglebone, Raspberry Pi, etc.

There are all sorts of nodes for networking, such as push notifications, social media, protocols like MQTT, or XMPP. You can make system calls, which means you can kick off python, bash, C, or other scripts/programs. That means you can cURL anything, and process it however you want. If you're on a Beaglebone or Raspberry Pi, this also means you can access GPIO/ADC/PWM/whatever you have drivers for.

There is also an interface for Arduino, but this requires a PC to run the actual server, and the Arduino is just a peripheral. The embedded linux boards can run the entire thing by themselves.

Great. Thanks for the suggestions.

Yeah, and the more long-term players in the automation space give you reliable parts with long-term availability from different sources... but they are even more expensive, don't integrate well with fancy gadgets (apps) and, biggest show-stopper, don't make the configuration tools easily available, so you need to call a tech for nearly everything instead of doing it yourself, which is stupid for a private home.

There is a standard for home automation with thousands of devices in the market. It's called KNX. The problem is that setting up a KNX network is extremely technically involved, and the nice looking devices cost a lot of money. I looked into a smart doorbell for our new home. The KNX system cost nearly ten times what the ring video doorbell cost and required me to put in KNX wiring. So I got the ring doorbell, even though it's a closed system.

It sounds like KNX isn't good enough then, and may never be if the standard truly does require special wiring. Another standard with cheaper devices and that operates over standard WiFi would probably have a much better shot.

KNX can be used over wifi, it is both a protocol and a wiring standard. Many KNX devices are not wifi-enabled however, which means you still have to use some wiring to connect things. I agree KNX is not good enough, even if it's the only home automation standard worth anything. The biggest problem however is not the wiring, which is preferable to wifi due to the reliable connectivity, but the consortium-made KNX ETS software. You use that software to change the configuration of your devices, it has no alternatives, and it is absolutely horrible.

Anyway, if all those IoT smart home vendors would just implement KNX support, and a group of open source developers would get together to build some proper management software to replace ETS, it would stand a chance. It at least has the benefit of being an ISO standard and having lots of device choice in the market.

While smart devices are inchoate at present, and likely to be difficult to get right (I see why you're not interested right now), I think it's a mistake to dismiss the concept based on current tech.

Long term probably most of the devices/materials we own will be networked in some way, acting as sensors, reacting to local conditions by changing, updatable with software. That's all a bit fuzzy, but specifically things like heated floors and lighting which sense presence, windows which react to lighting conditions or insolation requirements, voice controls, panels which turn into display surfaces or speakers and a desk which could charge and update objects wirelessly when placed on it would all be very useful and far more powerful if driven by software which was updatable. Software will eat the world, one object/material at a time.

I don't know if the revolution will be in one OS which runs your home (though corporations would love to sell you that), it might be more in our tools, clothes and structures gradually becoming networked and part of a global computer. Specific operating systems seem to me to be declining in importance as the network grows and a constellation of devices which talk to each other arises. There are of course potential downsides like security and privacy but I think those will be outweighed by the obvious benefits.

Do we need any of this? No, and our ancestors lived without it. Will we want any of it? Probably, if on balance it improves our quality of life.

i think we are in the trough of disillusionment with regards to IoT devices

> After considerable research, it's not worth the hussle or money.

Agree. There is no point in making a 75% smart home. A 10% smart home is fine, it feels like a nifty gadget here and there. It can be clever to automate just a few things, maybe get a nest or make it possible to start watering plants remotely when on holiday. But the dream of the full smart home isn't here yet. If you have 9 lights switchable on your phone, that tenth light just feels like a hassle. If you try, you end up spending more time fiddling with your smart stuff than you would ever spend walking to light switches.

I have a shortlist of demands for "smart home" things (specifically the simplest things like switches and other fixtures).

1) It should be as reliable as a regular dumb switch. It can't work 99% of the time, or take 100ms from switching to lighting.

2) It should require no extra cabling. If I can run ethernet over my power lines already, surely I should be able to reliably route around some smart home packets too-

3) It should work as far as possible with existing fixtures. I don't want to replace my switch, I just want to add a smart relay behind the switch. Switches are pieces of interior design, I don't want to be limited to a choice of 2 colors of extremely expensive "smart switches".

4) I don't want any products backed by a single/small company. It should be a reasonably big consortium or an open standard. Z-wave checks that box, barely (and it fails horribly at item 1).

If I were to build a house today I would probably try to make some good decisions in "dumb" power cabling such as trying to put all lighting together behind some central master relay to be able to do the hotel style switch-all when leaving, and also put Cat6+PoE sockets everywhere (both high and low on walls) as to be able to put sensors (motion, smoke, whatever) without ugly cable routing or using wireless.

> if my siblings an I were brought up just fine in the 80's without being in a "smart onesie", I'm sure we can do just as fine today

That's really the same argument as "we were brought up in asbestos houses with smoking people and we're fine..." isn't it :)

I thought I'd done my research when I built a dedicated movie theater in my basement, around 2004 or 2005. I hung a decent projector from the ceiling and wired DVI through the walls and ceiling. What I should have done was put an accessible conduit so it was replaceable. because.. only a few years later the projector was destroyed in a lightning storm, which also took out a fridge, toaster, a bunch of GFI outlets, router, etc.; and by that time, decent 1080p projectors were affordable ... and were all HDMI.

- conduit for those cool hidden in-wall wires like HDMI for your wall-mounted TV, etc.

- whole house surge protector

Your PoE idea is pretty good, ethernet has been around and will be for a while, and wireless will never really cut it all the time.

The light switch stuff has actually worked out well for me with a specific case. Living in apartments with basically no interior lighting at all. There'll lights in the kitchen and that's about it. You're expected to use lamps and there might be one or two switched outlets. The smart home stuff combined with some battery operated controllers that i can double sided tape to the wall I can add my own switched lamps that have wall switches without tearing the walls out to run my own wiring. Makes things much closer to a normal place. Other than that it didn't tend to get used nearly as much but it was fun being able to turn off the lights on someone from work.

I think there needs to be some sort of open source implementation against an open standard. These look interesting and MQTT is pretty popular.

https://home-assistant.io

http://www.stavros.io/posts/messaging-for-your-things

What about doing it with Z Wave enabled devices. I'm thinking of starting 'automating' my home and everything points to having a Vera Light and Z Wave stuff.

I've started down that road with Philips Hue lights. Admittedly expensive, but nice and I can build up the system over time. They're Zigbee and Philips are very very open with them. Incidentally they do the best warm-white I've ever seen in an LED bulb, which is nice.

I'm actually looking at one of the Hue Tap switches now; they're a battery-less switch (kinetic power) with three buttons (I think) that you can customize. So I can, for example, put one in my bedroom and have a button on it that turns all the lights off in the house for when I'm about to go to sleep, etc. No need to run cables through walls and have switches where you want.

Commentary about the silliness of the avalanche of IOT devices being created right now aside (99% of consumer internet startups are based on dumb ideas and fail, but that doesn't mean there is no market or trend!), it's inevitable that this stuff is going to get traction in the market and it's a vast market. I doubt it's going to happen based on a bunch of edge-case $99 devices though.

The big trend here is the cost of wifi enabled microprocessors dropping down to nearly nothing. Last year we were excited about raspberry pi dropping prices down to $30 for sensor-enabled hardware on the network.

This year you can buy a wifi-enabled microcontroller for _$3_ (search esp8266). And that's not even in volume. At that price, pretty much anything consumer electronics companies build can be addressable on the network.

Add to that voice control, which is crude but usable and built into every phone already and improving quickly. The idea of walking into your house and looking for a light switch is going to feel like walking up to your TV to change the channel did 30 years ago when the remote went into wider use.

I find the economic arguments about not saving money using IOT devices a little amusing, on HN especially. My guess is that almost everyone reading this forum spends a shitload of money buying techno gadgets for reasons beyond "it saves me money."

Well here is an interesting argument for voice control: it's more hygienic. All touch points are potential sources for disease. On the other hand, maybe we are increasing allergies by making the environment too sterile.

What hygienic technology will replace touch screens?

Is that actually a problem?

That sounds like a made up solution. For the vast majority of people, simply touching something that someone else in your home has touched isn't going to cause you any sort of problems.

Possibly not in the home, but in the office or public places? Definitely.

Yet we use public transportation in many parts of the world and few bad things have happened. We use door handles everywhere. Etc.

Door handles are a big problem in hospitals. I'd take the bet that they are a bigger problem in public places than is generally acknowledged.

Interestingly this is actually a solved problem that we have forgotten the solution to. Copper naturally kills most pathogens. Brass door handles therefore act to prevent touch based spread of pathogens -- but plastic is cheaper.

I think it's not the price but the looks. Copper tends to oxidize and form an ugly green-ish hue of copper oxide, while proper plastics or other non-biocidic metal will not degrade in looks.

Brass works fine too.

I do actually say use brass rather than copper in my OP for this exact reason.

In hospitals you have sick or very sick people and people with open injuries. You can't take hospitals as the common scenario.

> Possibly not in the home, but in the office or public places? Definitely.

Not in the slightest. Hard smooth items do not tend to harbor bacteria, especially those that are touched a lot.

You really only need to worry about soft or textured items, in particular things that are touched only rarely.

How is living in a sterile plastic bubble good? Our immune systems need bacterium to fight or it will weaken.

I'm not saying go rummage through medical waste, but some exposure to dirt is normal - or at least has been for hundreds of thousands of years.

A damp, soapy sponge cleans smartphones pretty well. And a damp cloth to rinse before drying.

Still waiting for waterproofing to become a standard smartphone feature. Then we can start debating handwashing vs dishwashing, and also use the phone to record the washing cycle on video from inside the dishwasher.

Apparently, it's already standard - in Japan.

"...wifi-enabled microcontroller for _$3_..." have been available (in volume) for, at least, a few years now. I'm not sure why, all of a sudden, this is such a promising solution on the most trivial of problems.

As an engineer in this industry, these companies often seem like carpetbaggers, attempting to enter niche markets they know little of, with a solution who's only merit is it's hype.

The ESP8266 is making waves because a) it's substantially cheaper than anything else on the market, b) it integrates the WiFi MAC, the entire RF system from balun to baseband and a useful microcontroller and c) it is fantastically easy to use.

Espressif will sell you a single ESP8266 for less than $2; the ESP8089 is less than a buck, again in single quantities. TI's 1ku pricing for a CC3100 SoC is $6.70. Nordic's cheapest 2.4GHz SoC is about $3.50/1ku, and that doesn't do WiFi. The cheap Espressif chips really are a big deal IMO, in the same way that cheap ARM A-series processors from Rockchip and Allwinner have radically changed many consumer markets. You can run an HTTP server on a chip that is price-competitive with an ATTINY88.

The important part is what you parenthetically dismiss (in volume).

I know they've been around in volume for years, but most of the stuff I build doesn't come close to triggering that kind of volume. Therefore, the guy who wants me to send data from his forklifts to a central server in the warehouse can get it done at a cost he can more easily stomach when the hardware cost is under $20 as opposed to being around $100.

Price matters!

"My guess is that almost everyone reading this forum spends a shitload of money buying techno gadgets for reasons beyond "it saves me money.""

My guess would be that the HN reader is more discerning and sophisticated than that.

I am guessing that a lot of HN readers are considering questions like:

- how many different sources of data egress do I want in my home ? (as few as possible)

- how many different wireless network topologies should be running, and overlayed, on my home ? (perhaps zero, other than wifi and cellular)

- how fragile should my appliances be to things like DoS, firmware compatibility, licensing, network connectivity, etc. ? (not fragile at all)

Think of your current interactions with your printer. Think of how often that works flawlessly and how often it doesn't and think of the underlying business models and network models that make it so (god-damned) fragile and user-hostile. Now imagine everything works like this. That's the Internet of Things. I suspect many HN readers are quite wary of it ...

The business model part of your comment scares the crap out of me the more I let it sit.

Case in point, printer manufacturers are now nlargely no longer selling individual b/w and color cartridges. They now sell them physically connected as a single block and when one color goes, you gotta toss the whole thing. And God help you if you try to refill with generics and void the warrNty.

Now picture that applied to your home, with companies doing their damnedest to lock you into their overpriced proprietary consumables. Familiar with Simple Human? Case in point and they aren't even a Smart Device. Imagine if they refused to update unless you switched to their SaaS model like some certain software companies have.

Reminds me of Keurig introducing DRM into their new 2.0 coffee brewers.

It uses a scanner to authenticate the k-cups, and refuses to brew cups it determines as non-authentic.

+1 for knowing how to spell 'wary'. Seriously, I've discovered a horrifyingly small number of people spell it right.

I went to an Internet of Things meeting in SF about two years ago, and it was about like this. A Samsung executive was touting an Internet-enabled refrigerator, which was basically just a refrigerator with a tablet built into the door, with no special sensors, costing more than a refrigerator plus a tablet. I asked him why they'd built the product, and got an honest answer. He said the market was three types of people:

- People who just had to have the latest thing - early adopters. - People who like to show off their houses to other people (the granite kitchen counter crowd) - People who just like to buy expensive stuff and will buy the most expensive thing.

I talked to a HVAC engineer there. The room we were in was an old industrial building in SF. It had skylights with chains and toothed pulleys for opening them, openable windows, curtains for both, ceiling fans, both spotlights and light cans, a video projector and powered screen, and a standard HVAC system controlled by a standard thermostat. Controlling and coordinating all that would be a good "internet of things" application. He pointed out that companies which installed that sort of thing wanted it to work, and not generate service calls. Engineering, installing and connecting all the motors and sensors to run that room properly would be a big job. Motorizing the old skylights alone would need custom engineering.

That's the problem. Internet of Things stuff that's actually useful requires more than buying some plastic gadgets. Just an HVAC system for the home able to open and close windows would do more for heating cost and air quality than Nest's gadget, which, in the end, just turns heat and A/C on and off.

> early adopters

I think for the NH crowd, this is us. Previously it was innovators fiddling with Arduinos and servos. Now the products are being made from those prototypes. It will be about 5 years until we see more adopters, when the products are refined and start to become useful. Good product design for people essentially.

what do you mean by "granite kitchen counter crowd"? is it the case that granite counters are not particularly functional and primarily there for show (i'm genuinely asking).

That's exactly what I got from that.

Well, a real stone countertop is probably more functional than formica because it won't age as quickly and thus lasts longer. I'm not sure if the increased cost justifies that.

When I hear "granite kitchen counter crowd", I think of people who spend a lot of money on their house to have nice things, either because they genuinely like the aesthetic or they want to keep up with and show off to the Joneses.

Granite looks great, at least initially, but is expensive and can have issues with discoloration, cracking, etc. Corian-type materials are probably more practical. Granite isn't a terrible material but it is often the choice for kitchen remodels done mostly for show.

It'd be great if the refrigerator could track the expiration dates of the items inside using RFID, then notify you if anything was getting old.

For made at home items and non-tagged items, they could also make RFID stickies, where you scan them when you put the item in the fridge, give it a name or take a snapshot with the built-in camera, set your own expiration date, and it tracks how long it's been in there.

If you focused enough on usability, you could make the whole thing feel streamlined and natural. The fridge itself could dispense the RFID tags, and you could just reuse them by reloading it with the old ones, for example.

Please tell me that was a clever sarcastic comment about the whole smart refrigerator idea. Sorry but obsessive compulsive tracking of what exactly is in the refrigerator isn't really a problem for people who are already exacting about such things. Most of us fall more into the camp of "Does it still smell OK"? That's the messy analog reality of so many things around the house that supposed consumer IoT solutions mostly ignore.

Nope, but then my sense of smell has been broken for years, so I don't take it for granted that you can just sniff things.

My main concern was finding a way to keep the things that end up in the back of the fridge from staying there for weeks and weeks. I waste more food than I care to because I'm the opposite of what you're attacking me for being -- I'm the guy that puts stuff away and forgets about it the next time I go to eat. That, and it's hard to coordinate with my fiancee on meals when she works midnights.

Anyway, I'm sorry for offending you with my ideas. I just think a smart fridge could actually be handy for wasting less food without having to be obsessive compulsive about tracking and without being a great judge of freshness with my nose. You just glance at the fridge and pick out things to eat before they go bad.

My printer does this with printer cartridges, and I wish I could make it stop. Can I just print until it looks funny and replace it then?

Consider a phone app which reads product barcodes and orders more of the same thing. You shop by pointing your phone at the empty container and telling it how many. Smarter developers might also have it recognize common fruits and vegetables. That might be useful.

I'm surprised Amazon doesn't already have such a device. They have a voice input thing and a push to buy thing. A kitchen appliance which looks and works like a price gun is a logical next step.

Yes, that actually sounds useful.

One of the problems with solutions like the omniscient fridge and printer is that they sound helpful but are not helpful in practice. They could benefit from testing.

Also, a structural issue: the incentives of the manufacturer (buy more stuff) are not aligned with my incentives (eliminate routine tasks).

I'm reminded of the online coke machine: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/history_long.txt

I'm also (many times a day) reminded of some Douglas Adams bits.

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

And this (though you should read the full thing):

Another problem with the net is that it’s still ‘technology’, and ‘technology’, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’ We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‘crash’ when we tried to use them. Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs...

So, since Douglas was writing (a) a lot more of us are operating in the 15-35 category where technology is cool and (b) a lot more of the stuff around us is technology in the sense that it doesn't quite work yet. It's become pretty much standard in startup-technology land to make the case that some technology "tick all the boxes," saving time, money and generally being ultilitarian and awesome. people who want to buy tecnology because its cool, play along. They need some way of justifying an internet-of-things coke machine, which they want because it's new and exciting.

Internet-of-things is still at the stage where we're throwing things against the wall. Most of it is not useful, or barely useful and the people who buy it, do so because they want to... for fun.

That doesn't mean none of it is useful or that some generally useless thing isn't useful for you, it just means you have a two legged chair.

Well said. Less on your point specifically, but I find this article to be such a trite argument. "Here's a list of things I think are garbage. People still want them though, and I think that's stupid! Here's a list of things I think would be cool instead. People should want those things, and someone should make them!"

>Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs...

Nonsense. A modern CPU has so many parts, no single human can understand its circuitry. And the complexity is ever increasing. The chair comparison is extremely poor; we live in an environment that is ever increasing in complexity and even today, most people don't understand the array of modern technology they're surrounded with and I don't see that trend stopping. You grow up with chairs; you know how a chair works and could build one. You grow up with x86 CPU? Ha, try to build one.

You'd be surprised how hard it is to create your own safe and reliable chair from scratch. I certainly don't think "most people could build one".

I've built a bench and stuff like that before. Very comfy and reliable for many years now. And I don't have any formal training in woodworking. It's really not that hard. However, even after years of formal training in electrical engineering, you will struggle very hard to build a modern CPU. An attempt to compare the difficulty of the two appears to be ridiculous (I have also built a CPU, though only a very simple one on a FPGA. I don't even want to imagine the amount of work and skill necessary to design a modern, say, Intel CPU).

For anyone not familiar with the Hype Cycle http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/methodologies/hyp... we're still in the "Peak of Inflated Expectations". I would have hoped we'd have hit the "Trough of Disillusionment" by now but it seems to be powering along quite nicely.

One of the big problems with IoT is the cost of the connectivity bit of the hardware. You want these things to be low powered but that costs money. You want these things out in the field, but providing constant power is a nightmare.

I've been looking at Automatic Number Plate Recognition networks using Raspberry PI2s, transmitting only the number plate to do transit route analysis. By the time you've added a battery, a GSM module,and a solar charging panel, it's suddenly become a £150 piece of hardware.

IoT is so so interesting, but I think the hype around it is driving money into the domain and people are just ramming the devices anywhere they can.

Interesting - what software are you using to do the recognition (if I may ask)?

This at the moment https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr

If you give me a vehicle database, I can tell you how many red cars are used on a route :) The more interesting calculations are based around CO2 emissions. I have the make and model and average speed between two points. I know roughly your emissions outputs.

Accuracy is an issue but as long as ALL your ANPR devices read a number plate exactly the same it doesn't make too much of an issue.

I first heard of the hype cycle today - but it was mentioned in an article on microservices. An example of Synchronicity if ever there was one! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity

The Hype cycle seems to be a variation of Fisher's Personal Transition Curve http://www.businessballs.com/freepdfmaterials/processoftrans...

As someone actively working in the smart home space, I refrain from calling our business IoT for exactly this reason. I've even challenged the team to stay away from smart home. We do very little "smart" home stuff and instead rely on cleverly designing a set of devices that don't require an application or future technology (AI, voice control) to work properly. They also don't take up space in your home and combine the functionality of two or more devices into one.

I'd like to think I've been a bullhorn for the "IoT is stupid" movement, but I think the author did a great job of calling it out as well.

Hi :-)

This is very interesting. What exactly are you doing then? Designing (software, hardware, both?) dumb devices for home?

Parent poster's bio link points to https://www.hellotwist.com/ which does multi-room speaker systems.

What I was going to say before thinking to check the link, is that there must be a wealth of applications available to the instrumentation engineer, using modern microcontrollers without making the full step to Internet of Things.

The smoke alarm with the "I'm cooking for the next ten minutes" button. The simple alarm clock that knows weekends from weekdays, or even your work shifts. The thermostat with a few dozen more available states than the traditional ones and a sane interface. Electric showers that deliver a pleasant showering experience. Smart dumb devices.

Twist seems like a pretty clever idea, especially by integrating it all into the lightbulb.

Can anyone think of potential downsides to this approach? Other than the audio probably not being of very good quality compared to a serious speaker system.

We've used a really high quality audio driver and have some future products that'll help round out the system (aka subwoofers).

For reference here is the data sheet of speaker we use: http://www.baysidenet.tv/catalog/pdf/Peerless/30n18al04-04.p...

We also have a half a dozen other products designed to fit into this form factor, all of which provide a superior lighting experience to what is available on the market today.

I'm sure it's good, but I don't think you'll win the audiophiles over.

Tried to go on your profile to know more..can you provide a link of what you're building?

Apologies was traveling all day yesterday.

We are building Twist (www.hellotwist.com). The long term vision is a smart home platform for Apartments (and more specifically, renters).

In the short term, we've built a great multiroom audio system that doesn't take up valuable space, add to your clutter, or require setup / installation.

We've leveraged the light socket to deliver a quality lighting and audio experience that anyone -- even small spaces -- can benefit from.

I work at a market research/consulting firm that specializes in the embedded devices market. This means we cover any semi-specialized device with a CPU that is not a desktop, laptop, or tablet.

The consumer-facing home IoT stuff (Nest, smart-fridge, smart-car etc.) gets a lot of press because it's exciting and it appeals to the least common denominator - anyone from an electrical engineer to a nanny can see how these devices might affect their lives.

Most of the (pretty astronomical) growth of the embedded device market is driven by the applications of industrial connectivity. Think aerospace & defense, automotive, medical, municipal, retail automation. The industries that don't make for sexy headlines.

Ultimately, I believe the entire IoT movement is going to contribute substantially to the economy in the form of cost-savings. Companies will be able to access and analyze a lot more data which will hopefully enable leaner operations due to process refinement and resource conservation. It's a good time to be in the security and analytics business.

While cost savings are great for the bottom line, we also need to find a way to create new markets and generate new, useful products. Hopefully the government has invested enough in R&D to enable the next internet to begin to take root sometime soon, whatever that may be.

From my perspective, it would make sense that virtual reality would be a huge paradigm shift in the way that we create and consume information, which seems to be an underlying theme driving many advances in technology and overall quality of life.

IoT seems to be the maturation of internet connectivity - what's next in the world of technology?

As an analyst, which vendors do you see most well-poised to take financial advantage of this change, from a supplier perspective? ARM? Texas Instruments?

On a similar note, I was really impressed by Microsoft's team that manages this for their whole campus. There was an article a while back that described the challenges they faced, like heaters and AC in the same building competing to keep temperature within a certain range, and the huge benefits they realized when they hooked it all up to a central sensor/management system.

The Internet of things is starting to look like 'Sky Mall'. Time will show if the concept gains traction with the majority of people. At this point I don't see the single mom working in food service for minimum wage buying her children electric onesies.

We should be working on improving existing technologies. Not dreaming up a million more that all inherit the same flaws as the ones we already deal with.

Yes. And "Sky Mall" went bankrupt in January 2015.[1]

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/in-flight-catalog-skymall-files-...

Ouch. Even as a kid I always wondered 'Who the hell shops out of these catalogs, and who came up with these products?'

Sky Mall provided at least 30 minutes of trolling fun on a flight. :)

Note that most of the products/catalogs still exist. Sky Mall was basically just a catalog of catalogs that basically picked some of the more out-there examples from a variety of companies in the Brookstone/Hammacher Schlemmer/etc. vein. I've actually occasionally found useful products from these companies but they're mostly just oddball stuff that's somewhat amusing but not very practical.

Home automation always was and continues to be a puttering around hobby or suckers game.

A friend bought a house that had a late 70s state of the art home system. Central radio/vinyl/8track player, intercoms, and a broken CCTV setup. Also cool stuff like central vacuum.

The big difference between that house and the modern gadgetry is that the 70s stuff was hard wired and still works. None of the IoT crap that is on the market now will be completely unusable in a decade.

My house also came with a 1970s central vacuum system (among other things).

It still works amazingly well for a system that is 40 years old. I've only used it one time, just to test it out, because it's obnoxious to drag a long hose around the house and connect up to each port. In my opinion the concept was bad from the start because of that one thing.

I want to bring an alternate viewpoint into the discussion. For some a product like Leeo may sound superfluous and may not seem to justify the added value it provides for the rise in cost(99$+). (Note there is some added value however trivial it may be). For others they may say no to a product like https://nest.com/ or this https://on.google.com/hub/ based on their financial flexibility and their lifestyle (which you may see as 'obviously' needed).

I do think in this case, the best judge is the free market. If any product maker provides added value at a price point where there will be enough buyers and they see profit, their business will run successfully, else it will fail like any other business. How can my opinion decide what is a good product, it is the market that should decide it!

There are lot of independent products that solve mostly one problem - cars for eg:

Every product design does not have to solve multiple problems, it is just that the users need to feel that it justifies its cost based on the value it provides.

While I kind of agree with the author's position in general, I found the singling-out of the Leeo (which I had previously never heard of and thus have no horse in the race of its success) a bad example.

The way it is described in the article actually sounds pretty ideal to me in that it is not trying to insert all sorts of "intelligence" into the simple, well-understood solution that already exists in the form of a simple smoke alarm. Rather, it is merely augmenting that solution in a way that is helpful but less mission critical, without integrating extra "intelligence" in a way that is likely to cause software-related problems.

See bradfitz's video for an example of how "intelligence" can hamper something like smoke alarms if the entire system is integrated and "smart".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpsMkLaEiOY

Internet-enabled house jewelry? Feh. It will be fun for a week, then boring.

Here's what I want: stuff that will make me a better neighbor and citizen of the world.

Specifically: Realtime smart energy and water consumption meters. Wouldn't it be great to get some sort of alert if there was a pipe burst or even a water trickle? Wouldn't it be fabulous to track electricity consumption? That could generate the creation of sets of light bulbs each of which consumes a different prime number of watts. Then your smart meter can say, "hey chump, you left a light on in the attic. Turn it off."

Combined with a smart grid and demand-pricing of public utilities (yeah, fat chance, I know), this kind of thing could make a dent in my carbon footprint.

These already exist in the UK the utilities companies were giving them away about ?10? years ago. Some people noticed quite how much energy the kettle took to boil learned to only part fill it. However, mainly people got them, played with them and then forgot about them.

Please check out wattvision.com and let me know what you think, we share in your vision. Key features are that we work with existing utility meters and smart meters, and are consumer installed (no electrician required), and update our live data every 10 sec or so.

About ten years ago I sat through a funding pitch for a monitor that detects sudden changes in residential water flow rates. Cost was about $250/home, and part of the pitch was that insurance companies would help cover the cost to save catastrophic damage. Apparently washing machine hoses burst on a regular basis, and such an event in an unoccupied home is very expensive. I haven't heard anything about that problem/solution since.

When our washer hose burst, and the adjuster said it's the most common insurance claim, I asked why the insurance company doesn't just send out new washer hoses every five years. Seems like it be more cost-effective than a $250 device that I'm sure doesn't work as well as the maker claims.

And yeah, I previously never gave washer hoses much thought, either. Go change yours this weekend. They're cheap, and a hell of a lot less trouble than the alternative.

Yeah, with respect to water, the simplest solution is probably to have valves that you shutoff. I have them on both washing machine and [EDIT] dishwasher but don't routinely close them. It probably should be part of my routine at least when I go on trips.

The problem is that as soon as you introduce control systems, you also introduce new failure modes. What happens when the smart thermostat crashes in winter which probably happens more frequently than a really dumb mechanical one? Of course, it's not like your heating system can't shut down for other reasons as well.

It's hard to figure out how to plan for rare failures. Ultimately you probably want someone who checks in on your house because smart systems can only handle so many eventualities. But that's may be costly.

You can get moisture detector for some smart home systems/alarms, that is installed under laundry/dishwasher. Also that is why all houses at least here have to have faucet/valve for laundry/dishwashers, and that is supposed to be kept closed when the machine is not in use. My faucet in kitchen for dishwasher actually has a simple electronic valve, that automagically closes the valve after several hours.

Is it common to have washing machines in rooms without floor drains?

Townhouses. I live in one and my washer is on the second level, off the kitchen. It sits in a pan with a hole in the bottom that goes to a drain pipe. That might save me from a slow leak, but could never deal with a catastrophic failure. I do have a shutoff valve and I keep it closed when I'm not actually using the washing machine.

I've been longing for a nice looking wifi-enabled flow meter I can attach to all my faucets that have a readout of how much water I'm using and tie that data to current water rates to show me the cost in cents/second or something. And the obligatory display of a dashboard via website or app.

Great way to help people in a home, especially little ones become water conscious.

Is water really that expensive? has anyone in a developed area ever actually run out of water? Even in California, people are still flushing toilets every day. The obsession with water conservation doesn't seem like it's based on anyone actually ever having run out of water. For example, where does water actually go when it's "wasted?" Does it disappear?

The short answer is, any water saved is a good thing. I see houses over in Los Altos Hills and Atherton and such, and these are large estates with the greenest grass you've ever seen. And I'm sitting here feeling like a schmuck for taking a short shower.

But every little bit helps, and the meter would be a good reminder to not be wasteful.

Surely an area does not need to completely "run out of water" for consequences to occur. Wikipedia has lots of examples of developed areas having less than typical rainfall and encountering problems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_Australian_drought

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_droughts

This won't address your existing home, but investing an extra $10k in basic building materials during construction to create good insulation will have a much bigger impact on heat/ac saved than any tech solution. It's not complicated to build a home that is passively warm in winter, cool in summer - building companies just don't invest in it. Long term I think that will be a major shift our global society will have to make.

The other thing is...your carbon footprint is impacted much more by buying goods that are shipped from overseas, taking trips in airplanes, and the unseen costs of all the products in your life than it is from the relatively small consumption of your home's water & electricity.

FWIW I find the Whistle to be a good product. I can easily find out when our dog walker dropped our dog off, and therefore how long she has been alone. At the risk of stating the obvious: just because the author doesn't have the problems that these devices purport to solve doesn't make them superfluous.

I agree, Whistle is a great product for dog owners. However I'm not sold on the "social" features, to me it's just another example of something that tries to be a social network when it shouldn't.

Agree, we use it to coordinate dog care between housemates, but if they stopped all work on networking with dog owners and just made the damn thing sync more often, I'd be thrilled. I hate walking the dog at 1AM because it took 3 hours to upload the data so it looked like he never went.

There is plenty of merchandise that people buy that they don't need and can do without. Many of the products in the article are just technology variations and extensions of the type of products that sold for years in Sharper Image, Brookstone or Skymall. (Or on infomercials) [1] Just something attractively priced, that if marketed correctly, will find a small or maybe even a large market because it's in front of people and an impulse buy (as opposed to buried on a shelf at a Walmart. Focus people and single out the product in other words.

[1] There was a commercial last year that I watched for a striped screw removal tool. The price was attractive and I thought "hmm you never know when you might need this". I then searched Amazon and found and purchased the most highly rated product of that category (wasn't going to order from an infomercial). I knew this product existed prior to that of course (my Dad used them when I was a kid) but until I saw the infomercial I had no motivation to seek this particular tool out. After seeing the infomercial I wanted one so I bought it. It actually did come in handy when having to pull a stripped screw from a washing machine.

I'd love to point to this post for all the snarky comments people make about how advertising doesn't work on the HN crowd ;)

It's been posted before but on this topic check out

http://weputachipinit.tumblr.com/

Some of these products strike me as being created because one of the owners of the startup thought it was cool, not because they went out and actually tried to identify peoples' household problems and figure out ways to solve them.

I also get the impression many of these things were dreamed up out of minor inconvenience.

That may be true for some, but I suspect most of these internet-based devices are little more than an excuse to get on the surveillance-as-a-business-model bandwagon. All you need is a clever excuse to gather a new type of data that isn't currently being collected, and you have something to sell to "big data".

Fortunately, even the non-technical people I know have started to wake up to these scams, and are now avoiding any "smart" product.

There are always two kinds of developments. One is where you have a huge problem and people try different things to solve it. The other thing is where you have new capabilities and don't know yet what to do with it yet. One is not worse than the other. Given some time there will be reasonable usecases. Think back to the first iPhone and Android. Nobody really knew what to do with a smartphone yet. Now everybody has at least one and uses it way too often. Internet of Things are just one of the next areas. Let's just calm down and let the market work out what's reasonable.

Home automation is the least likely IoT category to succeed, at first, anyway. The low hanging fruit is in things like public infrastructure monitoring by instrumenting the municipal maintenance and transit fleet. Many enterprises are going to find they can do with a lot fewer desks if they instrument their work environment and spread workers out into co-working spaces.

The people instrumenting these environments are also more-capable of calculating the benefits. Without analysis, it's just shiny toys.

> I asked a young man working at the Target store how visitors felt about their every action being tracked and he said that they’d come to accept it. And that was that.

I think this is completely true. I've done research in this area, and people under the age of about 22 have no concept of privacy whatsoever (it should be noted that these people were 12 when Facebook started and basically hit their teenage years just as Facebook opened up to the general public).

Here is one of the anecdotes I collected: when one of them arrived at college, she posted a picture of her school ID and her key and said, "I've arrived!". I pointed out that with just the info in the photo someone could make a copy of the key and get into her dorm room. She said, "eh, that won't happen".

Another common one: people posting that they're going on vacation or posting pictures from vacation while still on it. Sure, your friends might not break into your place, but what if their laptop gets stolen and the thief sees you're not going to be home for a week?

I have never locked the door to my house in the 3 years of living where I do. I also commonly leave my keys in the ignition. I live in a small town and made that choice for such reasons, but if you are willing to give up on employment choices it is viable.

In fairness, she's right--that won't happen. That's a pretty good example of private stuff where the characteristic of privacy doesn't really matter.

Who's going to go through the trouble of taking a key blank, grinding it down to shape, somehow gaining entry to the building, just to break into her dorm with the actual key? It's a dorm room, it's going to have a cheap dorm bed, a macbook, nothing of value worth stealing, and if you really wanted to break in, you could use a bump key.

And breaking in to rape her or something else malicious that isn't property-related? She's at far greater risk of that happening from the frat boys down the road.

No, she's right, the key privacy doesn't matter.

My favorite question for any smart home product is "what happens if company X goes out of business?" Had to learn to ask that the hard, expensive way but now all my connected things have the ability to run off the local grid.

I walked through Target's Open House in SF a few weeks ago; I'd recommend visiting if you're in the area. It's pretty slick product display space. Each "room" has a projector which gives an overview of four or five products in a room, and how they tie together in your life. One of the rooms had a Kinect mounted above next to the projector; not sure what it was being used for.

The main lobby has a couple long tables with all of the products on display which were demo'd in the rooms along with some interactive Surface-like table which detects if you get near it and moves floating sprites around. They had displays on the wall listing the most popular products, and a few sales people to answer questions. IIRC there were approx 40-50 products displayed. Kudos to Target for setting the space up.

Everything being sold felt they'd fit perfectly inside of a Brookstone, or Sharper Image when they still had retail stores. Most of them were "vitamin" products rather than "aspirin", which gives way to some of Allison Arieff's criticism in the article: "What the products on display have in common is that they don’t solve problems people actually have."

That's very fair to say. There were a few items which did solve real problems, like Nest which can help reduce heating costs, but most things sold didn't fit into that category. Many were "neat" things which you could entice someone with disposable income to splurge on.

Refuel looks like it would be much better pivoted towards the beverage industry. The BBQ going out is not a problem, beer running out is a party-killer. It looks for all the world like a WiFi-connected scale that tells you when the weight of the tank is getting a bit light.

We're poking fun at these, but this just caricatures the entire bay area startup scene. There are so many companies solving rich-people-problems that really shouldn't exist or at least are highly unlikely to scale.

I had the exact same thought for beer kegs when I saw that thing :)

Funny enough, the Refuel immediately jumped out at me as a product that would be super useful for me. Not because I care a lot about being able to BBQ without running out of fuel, but because I have a propane-heated cabin in the middle of nowhere. Being able to look at the weather forecast and the amount of propane in the tank would make planning a lot easier.

There's also a few different people that share the place, so we don't always know what the other people have done/how much they've used.

Of course, there's no wifi at the cabin, but there is a nearby 3G tower... If I could remotely monitor both the propane tank and the water tank, that'd be awesome!

Why not have a second tank? Then if the first one is empty use the second and refill the first. That's pretty much guaranteed not to fail, unless you have someone that doesn't fill the tank. But that's s different problem. That's what I do at home and it is only for the occasional grilling, not anything like "we can't eat / have heat unless this works"

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is also in the works, with standards efforts kicking into high/er gear.

The two big contenders seem to be the American-led effort/s that has come together for IEEE P2413[1], and the German-led effort known as Industrie 4.0[2].

See also: Industrie 4.0 vs. the Industrial Internet[3].

[1] https://standards.ieee.org/develop/project/2413.html

[&] http://www.industrialinternetconsortium.org/

[&] http://industrial-iot.com/2015/09/ieee-pursues-standard-refe...

[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plattform_Industrie_4.0

[&] http://www.zvei.org/en/subjects/Industry-40/Pages/The-Refere...

[3] https://www.mapi.net/research/publications/industrie-4-0-vs-...

Most factories have had in-house networks for decades. Ordinary CAT-5 cable works quite well in electrically noisy industrial environments, because it's a differential signal on twisted pair. In industry, the big problem is getting all the gear to interoperate.

There's also what's called "machine to machine communcation", much of which takes place over low-cost wireless pager networks. Many industrial air conditioners, elevators, and vending machines are regularly sending their short, boring, but important messages to a server. There's even M2M over Iridium two-way satellite paging, for oil wells and such. That works anywhere you can see the sky.

You're right, of course. However, the IIoT / Industrie 4.0 is about taking it all to new levels of interoperability and integration.

See: http://www.mmsonline.com/articles/7-things-to-know-about-the...

That says: “actively drive the reshaping of industry, as it combines aspects of the physical, virtual, IT and cybersystem worlds to help create a new working environment of integrated productivity between worker and machine. It represents a highly dynamic point of achievement, where every company, whether large OEM, major tier supplier or small job shop, can benefit from the technologies and the communication platforms emerging in the market today, some at the speed of light.”

Is there a non-bullshit version?

There's some good stuff in there as well – I leave it to you to sift. In all fairness, the quote you gave isn't by the post's author, but rather consists of the words of a VP at Siemens (as quoted by the post's author).

See also the links in my parent comment.

You can read more about the reference architecture model for Industrie 4.0 (RAMI 4.0), published by ZVEI:

http://www.zvei.org/Downloads/Automation/5305%20Publikation%...

Interestingly, they've settled on OPC UA as the standard for the communications layer.

The reference architecture (IIRA) for the American-led effort can be downloaded from the Industrial Internet Consortium:

http://www.iiconsortium.org/IIRA.htm

Last year, the OPC Foundation seemed to be "lobbying" for OPC UA to play a similarly key role in IIRA as it now has in RAMI 4.0, but that did not come to pass.

I expect that IEEE P2413 will use IIRA as a starting point. Perhaps OPC UA will be "blessed" as one of several options for the communications layer, but we'll have to wait and see.

See: https://standards.ieee.org/news/2015/iic_liaison.html

I'm glad the "Internet of Things" is being held to task by a mainstream media outlet. The Internet of Things is just a marketing term being pushed onto consumers by Cisco, Qualcomm, Google, etc., because selling more radio chips and putting more sensors in the home directly benefits these companies.

But it's offensive marketing because these companies haven't even bothered to frame the issue in terms of solving people's real-world problems. You want to sell an overpriced thermostat or smoke detector? Fine, but don't tell me it's a revolution.

A lot of smaller players are getting swept up in the hype, and wasting time and money thinking consumers will jump at the opportunity to pay 10X the price for something that interacts with their phone. Prove me wrong, but I'm not buying it.

>Like you, I once had many products that each fulfilled a separate function: a landline, a cellphone, a camera, a video recorder, a stereo, a calendar. Now, I have one product that does all of those things — a smartphone. This level of product integration was a revolution in product design.

Is the smartphone really a revolution in product design or just the inevitability of technological convergence? There is essentially no fundamental difference between products listed. Sure, the user function may differ, but the actual implementations are all based on the same phenomena: stored information manipulable through electromagnetic fields.

How early on was a device like the modern smartphone conceived? I'd wager not long after the discovery of silicon transistors.

Two points that jumped out at me:

>>Privacy and Security. Every one of these items is connected to the Internet

And we've seen how this has been handled by companies recently. Their idea of security is somewhere between non-existent and EPIC FAILURE status. No thank you. I have enough problems trying to lock down my Windows PC.

>>>I asked a young man working at the Target store how visitors felt about their every action being tracked and he said that they’d come to accept it. And that was that.

Maybe the young man's generation has accepted it, but those of us who have seen first hand what can happen when data gets in the wrong hands, it's not even remotely ok.

To smooth over this point just confirms PT Barum was right all along.

Like a lot of tech products I think these devices have a niche appeal, despite the fact that of these doohickeys are answers in search of a problem people will buy these products (Target hosted this expo after all).

Unlike a selfie stick or edible gold pills however there is a deeper ethical issue inherent in selling products that transact so much data about your life (and metrics about your family and home) for the purpose of creating marketable data sets about every mundane aspect of living. Not to mention how vulnerable a person or family becomes once these devices are integrated into their house, children, car, BBQ, etc since so little attention is given to making these devices secure.

As someone who is building IoT devices (www.flair.zone), I would say that many of these complaints resonate with me. There have been two motivating factors behind what we are doing: Building the Internet of Useful Things and not building the Internet of Expensive Things. So far that has worked well for us and we haven't even launched officially.

Nest (as a company) is an interesting case to examine with respect to this article. The thermostat in it of itself was a much needed upgrade for some and dropcam has a ton of potential for more complete automation triggering, but the protect was pretty marginal value add if you ask me. Fires just aren't that big of a problem statistically and while a smoke alarm that can call the fire department is great in theory, in practice people are leery of false alarms when it could be incredibly expensive. And the 'works with nest' integrations are fascinating: its largly a bunch of companies that want to be associated with Nest and its percieved superiority from a brand/acquisition/something(?) perspective and then integrate these super low value add enhancements. Like the Whirlpool integration: '[if we know when you are getting home, we can refresh your clothes so they stay wrinkle free]'. Such a ridiculous proposition for an integration.

Leeo was particularly crazy. It was a case of 'top tier founders' that all the VCs in the valley love with 30M in investment before leaving stealth mode. Everyone assumed they must be onto the next big thing but it was in fact a giant let down. I am sure the pitch was great: we are going to put a microphone in each room and have voice command in every room but somehow they lost sight and it just became a smoke alarm relay. The other angle maybe was that they could convince insures to subsidize them like (GE/Wink)? I would love to see the total number of dollars invested into residential smoke detectors by consumers annually, the number of house fires in the US/World (and aggregate damage/loss of life) all compared to the stealth mode investment of this company...The internet of things will happen and some devices will add substantial value by better managing energy adding real convinience but the author correctly found some really questionable value add and called it out.

Leeo is for people who don't see a need to replace their existing smoke/CO detectors and just want some peace of mind when they're away, but the pets aren't. I bought one used for $70 because I think it definitely has a place in a "smart"/monitored home. Just like dropcam. Heck, dropcam should be able to listen for your smoke detector. Might justify some of its cost.

This is why we started EarthData.io. It hasn't flown due to me failing to raise money, but I still believe that the premise of every 'thing' accessible to every 'app' in 'near-real-time' where this all heads.

As long as the connected devices are all connected via their own, standalone cloud, whether it's proprietary, open source or purchased, we're not going to see the true value of IoT and the ROI of connectedness will be squelched. Yet this is how the device manufacturers still view connected devices: A marketing lever to lock their customers into their hardware.

About 15 years ago I was working with a developer that was adding scripting support to their hardware / software combination - an X10 module controller. He was expounding on the greatness of his smart home system, for example, the lights would go out when he got into bed. I asked him what he would do if he wanted to read in bed. He seemed genuinely confused and replied that the bed was ONLY FOR SLEEPING.

All the automation, setup, scheduling and monitoring we are building now needs to be able to deal with people not being consistent. cf self driving cars.

I'm excited about IoT, and have ordered some ESP8266 development boards to play with.

With that said, don't get me wrong, but some of this stuff has to be failsafe, and making it smarter, makes it more complex. More like software, if you will.

I don't know if there are enough engineers out there, with the knowledge, discipline and experience designing failsafe products, to support the entire IoT industry.

I'm pretty underwhelmed by the IoT myself, but I don't see what the author's goal is here.

Is it not obvious that if things are too expensive or not that useful, folks won't buy it?

Does the IoT really raise that many new issues concerning integration, usability, sustainability, and privacy? I haven't studied it, but my intuition is: not really.

When I saw the Kolibree, the "smart" toothbrush, I realized we had passed the inflection point on the declining marginal utility curve for this stuff. Too much of IoT are solutions in search of problems. It's not too long before we see app-controlled "smart" implantable uterine devices.

It's gonna be like "Beauty and the Beast" up in here. You have far too many opinions Cogsworth!

Lot of useless gadgets here .. but the Internet of Things is(will be..) much more than consumer-facing objects.

The iceberg analogy never gets old ;)

Industry, Agriculture, Logistics, Cities, etc .. all have a lot to get even more smarter.

Most IoT stuff won't be about pet tracking or fancy BLE devices talking to your smartphone.

You're redefining "IoT" to include industrial controls, which have been around for 75+ years.

And in 2007, this was the cover of the economist: http://ubikwitus.blogspot.pt/2007/05/economist-covers-coming...

There sure are a lot of stupid smart devices, yeah. There's a few useful ones out there, too. Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is crap") has not been revoked by the magical act of putting sensors in things.

It's the Internet of Way Too Many Insecure Things That Never Get Updated that worries me most...

When your house has one door and two windows it isn't very hard to lock your house. Having gadgets you forgot about is another story.

I'm reminded of the 'Home of tomorrow'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RRxqg4G-G4

Everytime I hear "Industry 4.0" in Germany, I cringe!

Sounds like https://www.shodan.io

100x the self-emptying dishwasher : ).

I know somebody that bought two dishwashers and took the clean stuff from one, used it and filled up the other.

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