There's enough dystopian science fiction out there that the only thing I think when I hear "smart" is "No thanks."
A "smart", unnecessarily Internet-connected kettle or lightbulb or juicer isn't going to usher the second coming of fascism to the Western world. Even data breaches connected to those devices aren't going to have any meaningful impact on an average person's life. But it's sad, because it's wasteful. It's ugly. It's bad engineering. And all of this is motivated by greed and sociopathy of people putting it on the market. With each everyday item that gets attached to my butt, I lose faith in people a little more.
Each individual one isn't, but in aggregate they start transferring more and more control over your daily activities to faceless corporations thousands of miles away.
That is dystopian.
Remember that time a city in CA sent Cointelpro-esqe letters to the registered owner for vehicles their plate readers recorded going down a particular street?
There's nothing that prevents similar bad behavior from HOAs or cities/towns that have access to other data sets.
I don't want a HOA sending me brochures about recycling because my smart house reports that my ratio of trash to recyclables doesn't meet some arbitrary value. What goes on within the privacy my home is my business and mine alone to the fullest extent possible.
You can't abuse a data set you don't have. The value to society vs the potential harm of many datasets is so low they shouldn't exist at all.
No, I don’t. I’m guessing others might not, as well. Can you please supply a link?
It was the first result so it might not be the best article.
Maybe there's an autocoffee model, which makes your coffee to your preferences, and you get it to pre-boil while you're heading for home. Using the GPS on your phone with your average walking speed, it calculates when you'll be home so your coffee (or tea or hot chocolate) are just cooling to the perfect temperature when you walk in the door.
You may think it won't happen, but how many would use an autokettle? I wouldn't, as I don't often drink hot drinks, but my mother might because she won't have to hobble around. A blind person might, too, for a similar reason. People who prefer consistent drinks would - I have one particular friend who hates Starbucks but drinks there anyway, because it's always exactly the same.
Which means a very very long timeframe.
If your kettle is deemed an interesting part of the national power infrastructure, it might even become legally mandated. I've read stories that suggest the UK power authorities watch carefully when... Dancing with the stars? finishes, because 15 seconds later, 20% of the nation puts the kettle on. It has already been suggested that "smart" thermostats might be a nice requirement, so the power company mothership can (Voluntarily, of course! initially...) reset your temperature to shape load.
If your kettle and your fridge and your thermostat and your toilet and your alarm clock and your television and your front door and your car and your vacuum and your..... are all chirping little pixels of your life picture to the mothership, you are surveiled to a degree beyond the erotic dreams of the Stasi.
Further: this bleak picture presumes that all of these little fomites are well implemented. In point of fact, many of them are wide open gateways to black hats.
The classic example is Eastenders (a soap set in London where everyone is miserable) and was more recently an issue with the Great British Bake Off, but the effect has apparently declined in recent years due to BBC iPlayer/catchup services/Netflix. [0]
[0] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/03/no-more-electrici...
For example, the kettle boiled this amount of water this many times a day. The kettle isn't boiled between 6am and 6pm so we can deduce that nobody is home during those hours, but the autoboil function initiates at 5.30am on weekdays so we know the owner gets up early. On some Fridays it's later, so they either work more hours or they're off socializing. The quantities boiled suggest that only one person is drinking a hot drink most days. More water is boiled on Saturday mornings, suggesting that someone else spends the night on Friday. External access from the smartphone app comes from $provider but two different phones, suggesting that the drinker has access to two phones.
Now add in a name, phone number, and credit card usage data obtained from a third party, and suddenly you have something that someone will want. If it proves valuable enough, other manufacturers make a similar product, and suddenly a "dumb" kettle becomes much harder to get.
Yet I cannot fine one. Every single 'smart' thermostat has some corporate service I have to negotiate through for access, and of course if that is down, well, I'm outta luck. and, they're surely accumulating all of my data.
Anybody know of one?
There are a number of options there.
Scroll to the bottom of this page for the listing:
From there I'd recommend using something like Home Assistant[1] - it's an open source project that provides a UI for a ton of different smart home gear. I use it at home to control some smart lights and automate things based on whether I'm home or not. (There's also OpenHAB, but in my experience configuring that is much more involved.)
[0] https://www.amazon.com/GoControl-Thermostat-Z-Wave-Battery-P... [1] https://home-assistant.io/
I used 2 ESP8266's - one in the temperature sensing and control box in my office, and one controlling a relay inside the boiler. When it's too hot the relay is opened to switch the boiler off, when it's too cold the relay is closed to switch the boiler on.
As for bugs in the control code freezing your pipes? Well, just give the code as much care as you give to driving and you should be fine. ;)
(The serious solution to that is to have a dead simple failsafe controller that switches between on, off and auto, where auto is controlled by your crazy inventions.)
- At least in US, thermostats control is low-voltage (24 V AC), and come from low-power transformer which will just stop working on overload (ask me how I know :) ), so there is no electrical fire danger
- You never plug anything into the AC outlet directly -- you always use AC/DC adapters (and not the ones bought on ebay for minimum price, too)
- To prevent freeze hazard, you also leave original thermostat hooked up, but set it to really low temperature (10C/50F).
- Overheating house is possible, and you definitely need to consider this in your software (for example, require periodic control messages to keep your boiler on). However, I do not think it is an actual fire hazard -- likely, there are hardware safeties in your heater to prevent that. Still, if you are worried about this, you can install a second thermostat in series with your relay and set it to max temperature you ever want.
In order for there to be a reasonable audience for a product, you have to target the least knowledgeable person - or at least someone pretty far south of the median. Those people aren't going to understand what's happening, and they're going to get upset each time their ip resets and they can't connect to their thermostat anymore. They're going to take the frustration to the thermostat company, they're not going to understand what the service rep tells them, and they're going to return the product, leave a bad review, and buy a nest.
No one wants to be in the position of making and selling such a product. That's why you pretty much need to make your own with an esp8266. And that's why so many of these IoT devices end up being far too bloated.
I understand why this is not available as a standalone product. The window is probably too small to warrant it. I don’t understand why no company appears to offer it as an option to a product that otherwise “just works.”
Sure, it would require additional investment on the part of the manufacturer to include an “expert-mode” toggle that lets the user make their own decisions, but a market exists for people who want that. Money is being left on the table.
It sure is -- I'd buy that immediately.
The nice part about it is, if their "cloud" services actually added value, I'd be happy to sign up for that too.
I just want a direct access and a fall-back if their cloud goes offline (and I read about that happening in the reviews of every single one).
And sure, we're a subset of the market, but I'd expect a sufficiently large subset to make it worthwhile.
If it was a really good unit with high-quality sensors, WiFi connectors and other components, I'd pay more than for a Nest.
These days, the internet gives you access to several billion people. Even a very niche market can translate into a large customer base and a nice, profitable business.
The market for people who want to control their thermostat directly is exactly the same. And the best part? The manufacturer can support that AND have their 3rd-party cloud shebang going on, these are not mutually exclusive.
Remote access is so I can turn it down remotely because I forgot to when I left :-)
Remote control does make sense for some, not all cases.
For home, I agree that the programmable ones are ok, although they fall down when we travel for more than a week -- we have to either run it an unnecessary day, or arrive to an extra-cold house, so if there was a good one, it'd still be handy there.
Wait a minute, I don't have that extension installed at work...
I'm not saying it's universally bad. Getting a notification that your front door has been open for more than a minute sounds super useful. But I personally find huge value in simplicity.
I guess I'll be onboard when those things are entirely invisible to me.