Ex-Mozilla team behind smart home hub Sense refunds backers, focuses on software | Hacker News Reader

Ex-Mozilla team behind smart home hub Sense refunds backers, focuses on software

techcrunch.com

67 pointsrdoherty18 comments

Definitely interested in the software platform. Have been wary of Echo and Google's new thing due to privacy concerns... you're literally bugging yourself. Having all the logic run locally is a nice breath of fresh air.

Although I wonder if Emerson will force them to change the name, they have a smart thermostat called Sensi. Sense is a really unremarkable and un-googleable term anyway.

Your reasons were the same that i had for not wanting to get an echo or google's device. Let's hope this software platform takes off AND that hardware device makers latch onto and run with this!

Right now this seems mostly to consist of javascript wrappers around existing platform libraries? E.g. to let me read a gpio pin or blink a led? Not that it's a bad thing but it seems a little skinny as a thing right now, and the pitch seems to be that more and more platform stuff arrives. Smells more like a replay for firefox os less innovating on the platform? Any insights?

Well you gotta start your platform somewhere!

I really hope this gets off the ground. I really like the direction Mozilla (and ex-Mozilla teams) takes on a lot of projects - this, Firefox OS, etc. They just seem to have trouble moving from the initial concept stage into a 'production' mindset for much of their work.

I just took at look at the linked repo and thought the same. I've tried the node on embedded devices recently and most likely would not go that route again. I would at least recommend to do it in Typescript. However I still think that a big bunch of JS with the usual amount of external dependencies can turn quite fast into an unmaintainable mess if you are not super careful.

Another thing that has to be considered is that that if an OEM then uses this SDK to build his own device his software will be open too (in the sense of extractable in code form, not by license). In my experience most device manufacturers won't be happy with that. But I don't know who Silklabs is dealing with and what their expectations are - so things might be different here.

It seems like $100,000 was too low of a goal for their Kickstarter campaign. That's not really enough to justify multiple people working for a year to launch a hardware product. They got $160k, but that's still not enough, which leaves them in this awkward spot.

They should have just set a goal high enough that achieving it would have been a success for them. Kind of true for any sort of goal-setting, but especially committing yourself to selling hardware via Kickstarter.

That's kind of too bad.

Are there any other recommended hubs these days that allow a fair amount of programmability? I just returned a VeraPlus since it wasn't very interoperable with my devices, had some distance issues (with no battery to move it to pair) among other things.

Why do this "smart home hub" thing reminds me of Apple's attempt at making the Mac the hub of our digital lives, only to get nowhere?

I have no idea. Those are very different concepts and approaches (closed vs open source).

Apple wanted to use the desktop computer as the "hub" to sync your various electronic media devices.

This "hub" is for IoT devices.

Seems pretty different to me too.

iTunes was "getting nowhere"?

Largest market cap in the world is nowhere now I guess.

And would it have reached that if it was chained to the Macintosh dongle? How much of that activity comes from it being available on Windows?

Jobs hub was not iTunes, it was the Macintosh sitting in the livingroom corner.

The thing about smart home hubs is that you actually need one. Zigbee or z-wave or some other 900MHz channel is a really good way for these smart home devices to talk to each other, and for that to happen you need some sort of radio operating as a 900MHz hub.

It's not just that all these vendors want to be the hub, something has to do the communication.

I'd say that recent developments in long-range low-power radio networks (like LoRa, but see the list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LPWAN) might change this.

Of course it still makes sense to many here to run their own gateway for reasons of privacy and control, but perhaps the market at large could go for city-wide third-party networks, or something. Of course not everyone lives in cities, but perhaps shared networks might work in more rural settings, too.

Edit: Disregard this comment, my mistake.

Mozilla is such a disappointment. Instead of focusing on their raison d'etre they're busy branching out to one unsuccessful venture after another.

How is employees leaving and starting a startup a failure of Mozilla?

Oh, wow, you're right. My brain completely ignored that "Ex-" at the beginning.

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