I am pretty sure that people actually want network connected hardware instead of Internet-connected hardware.
And perhaps they also want a way to access their hardware in their home network in a secure and private way.
And perhaps they also want a way to access their hardware in their home network in a secure and private way.
* They go out of business or decide to drop the product line * Their servers go down (do you know if they're running a HA config, or merely a single server?) * They decide to make v2 of the product and stop updating/supporting v1
On top of this, your home internet connection can and will go down. Depending on what exactly you're doing this may or may not be a big deal: for example, not being able to remotely see your garage door status probably isn't important. Not having your motion sensing lights or timed schedules work, however, would be a pain.
There are many products from startups that are hurting themselves because of this. I, like many geeks, love this kind of stuff, but like you, I won't purchase or make my house rely on anything that has these risks, and I steer friends and family away from these products as well.
Developers: At least make your internet connection optional and allow the gear work without it. Even better, open source your server software: we can see how secure it is, plus if you go out of business, I can at least run it myself.
That's part of what makes it a weak link!
>your home internet connection can and will go down
Yup
I used to always follow the newest automation releases, but I gave up, because they were all closed-source, internet-required devices. Screw that.
If the internet disappears lots and lots of things become useless. Something becoming less useful I can take. But when the internet goes out and I suddenly can't access the camera feed for my home security system (Arlo) on the same LAN, it feels like something is incorrectly designed.
The reality though is that an event that took out the internet would take out lots of other stuff. Your $50000 car would suddenly have a lifespan of hours if you can't get fuel anymore. Grocery stores would empty out. All the slack in the system has been JIT'd out for the sake of a fraction of a percent more profit. It makes me a little nervous.
It doesn't even have to be as extreme as that. If the device depends on "the cloud" (e.g. some company's servers), your device is useless once those servers are shut down. A good example of this actually happening is Zeo, they made a sleep monitoring device that was much more capable than all the fitbit garbage we're left with. Unfortunately they went out of business, their servers were shutdown, and their devices became useless to anyone who couldn't do a fair amount of hacking.
Companies going out of business or discontinuing products is a common occurrence. Products should be designed to be tolerant to those failures.
Somebody took out a local connection with a backhoe? There go your TV/movies, Xbox One, VOIP phone, security cameras (if you've got the GP's system), etc.
For the tinkerer or early adapter, there are steps in the right direction. For the "everyday" person, this tech is still a few years away, in my opinion.
I've worked helpdesk for users and being exposed to regular, everyday, computer users I can attest that the consumer doesn't know the difference because they don't care enough to learn.
One of my first questions was: "Did you try pressing the power button?" I would get silence....then a quick "Thank You" ... then a dead line.
Another anecdote: My mother is a programmer (DB2, Cobol, SQL) for a financial institution. She is of middle class in NYC and educated. She still uses an iPhone 3g and the iPad i got her for her birthday, three years ago, has been turned on exactly 5 times.
That's the everyday user...and you want her to automate a home?
And frankly, when I call help-desks, I play dumb, because it's easier then convincing them that yes, I did check that it was plugged in, yes, I did power cycle.
Your mother's lack of using her iPad is not an indication of her inability to figure out things outside of her wheelhouse, it's the lack of compelling use case for the iPad for certain people.
Home automation also lacks a compelling use case. But security does not. The reason securing consumer networks is so hard is not because "users are lusers", it's because security professionals have no idea about UX, UX professionals have no idea about security, and they both treat each other like shit.
I didn't work a help-desk for a bank or large corporation but for a hospitality group where I "touched" every user and store. I had a more intimate relationship with all of our staff because they depended on the technology which made us money.
>And frankly, when I call help-desks, I play dumb, because it's easier then convincing them that yes, I did check that it was plugged in, yes, I did power cycle.
This isn't an option in my job since if a Manager "played dumb" while their POS is down, its really their neck on the line. It was in the best interest of the user to have the system working as they earned bonuses on throughput and other metrics.
It seems that you're attempting to justify your previous points, until this:
>Home automation also lacks a compelling use case. But security does not. The reason securing consumer networks is so hard is not because "users are losers", it's because security professionals have no idea about UX, UX professionals have no idea about security, and they both treat each other like shit.
This is a great comment and I completely agree with you; between compelling use cases, complicated UI/UX, and initial investment of time to set it up, most people aren't tempted to enter this realm.
The most compelling use of simple automation are Android NFC stickers (http://www.amazon.com/NFC-tags-Writeable-Programmable-Money-...). I got them for my brother-in-law and he uses them to close his garage door or get weather in the morning, etc. simple and effective.
No. I want to automate mine. Here's a thing - every company tries to jump for the big market of "normal people" immediately. They got used to completely ignoring the tech-savvy with mobile tech over the last decade. So they fail making something compelling for regular users, and refuse to make something for techies.
Or, at least, that was the perception at the time. The company I worked for thought it meant they had to go after hotel installs. But that meant partnering with the devil himself, as we were just an engineering firm and didn't have any sales in house. It became a race to the bottom and we ended up spending an inordinate amount of time trying to fix issues with substandard hardware. Literally. There is a standard, and the hardware our sales and distribution partner was demanding we used did not meet it. We were no longer partners. They became our slave drivers.
I was happy the day I got fired. Apparently, we were supposed to be happy with our lack of progress and just show up to work for 80 hours a week and keep doing this forever. Apparently, I was too argumentative.
They're 12 years old now and still call themselves a startup.
There are plenty of resources for home automation, I posted this previously, and if you have an Android phone, this works really well for simple tasks: http://www.amazon.com/NFC-tags-Writeable-Programmable-Money-...
If you want more advanced home automation, RPi are great. I use one to control my auto-sprinkler for tomato plants when i'm away on Vacation, for example.
People have other stuff to worry about. They've got their own lives, their own jobs, their own hobbies. Things like LAN/WAN, VPNs, and SSH aren't important enough to make everybody have to learn them. Somebody needs to understand it, sure. But not everybody; it would just be a waste of time and effort.
Let say you want to know if people are having less sex (well, it may come out from the search or browsing history but maybe not) and you want to use this information to target advertisements of services or products.
So how would you do that using cloud connected sensors?
Easiest method is to use CO2 sensor in the bedroom (assuming that this is the place where usually people do have sex). Rate of CO2 production is correlated with the rate of energy usage and spike in CO2 levels around certain time may mark people having higher bodily activities (and when located in the bedroom it usually means sex). Change in the frequency of these spikes may mean the change in the frequency of having sex. As ads do not have to be that precise, this is probably enough data.
Another method is to use a temperature sensor. As higher bodily activity would consume more energy, it should then rise the room temperature that could be detected with sensitive enough temperature sensor. This method is more evolved as the spikes in the temperature could be also caused by the rise in outside temperature or the temperature difference might be very small when windows are open, or may be caused by fall of temperature outside that heating system tries to over compensate.
But it is likely that there exists distinguishable change profile and it is likely possible to mitigate outside effects with additional sensors.
That is to say, there may be applications of sensing that benefit corporations financially, but don't help their users... Imagine an automaton that provokes couples into divorce though advertising, using sensed data (Instead of "You've got mail!" "you're having less sex!") as evidence.
This could be is also an answer to the question "what do I have to hide?". Well, everything as you do not want to be singled out.
I would assume that a candle would produce more or less constant output in heat and CO2 and you likely will light it before having sex and not in the middle of it.
I would also assume that two exercising humans will produce more output than a candle.
So it would produce some bump in the baseline but you still would have a measurable spike in it.
You could also distinguish the candle from the light bulb when you have CO2 reading.
Of course it would be also better if you could execute controlled tests i.e. you could control the heating and possibly the ventilation. As the temperature sensor in the room is usually in the form of thermostat then the first one would be viable.
A fireplace would deplete oxygen from the room but (unless one without exhaust) will not increase the room CO2 concentration. But it will likely introduce an additional airflow. So this would be more complicated case.
But you likely could trick the users in the configuration phase to give you additional information to make strange cases more explainable. I.e. you could ask such harmless question like do you have a fireplace.
“We can open the garage door from anywhere in the world,” she says. “I’m not sure why we’d need to do that.”
But I think there is also some ambivalence about even having the garage door connected there. I think lots of people would pay a little extra for a garage door that they can check from their phone, but it is something that has to be really easy to install and use, and the number of people who would pay is going to drop off quickly as the price goes up.
Heating is more worthwhile to improve, but harder.
Maybe I should write up an initial version in Python, although it wouldn't run on embedded devices. It would at least be a good prototype.
BTW: I have several ESP8266 building blocks on my Github site https://github.com/hwstar with are home automation related. These include AC control, AC energy measurement, and DC voltage and current measurement. I'm not a GUI/android/ios programmer, but would like to work on open source software with someone who is.
If you want to take a look at what I'm building, I'll publish it at https://github.com/skorokithakis/stringphone when I have some code.
In my opinion, device-to-device encryption is much better, and you don't need all the overhead of TLS. I've actually finished a first draft of the prototype and am looking for people to kick the tires and discuss it. Would you be interested?
Post the code on Github and document what it does in the README.md file.
On a LAN you can simply use zeroconf with multicast DNS to do service discovery, like how Apple does with Airplay. Or am I missing some requirement?
One of the nice things about mDNS is that the only co-operation you need from your gateway is that it forwards multicast correctly which you can usually expect the switch silicon to do.
Are you saying that there are many gateways/APs that do not forward multicast according to spec?
Or are you using something like IGMP? In that case I agree, there are alot of devices that won't play ball since they don't send JOINs or have other peculiarities.