Why are there no PowerLine Smart Plugs?
shkspr.mobi
shkspr.mobi
It seems quite common for a particular market to have come to "conceptualise" itself, or categorise itself, in a certain way that then becomes a prevailing set of assumptions of every company serving that market. This results in every product in a given market basically being the same and formed under the same set of assumptions, leading to a lack of meaningful choice.
Examples I've encountered:
- You can't get non-wireless (/non-battery-powered) noise cancelling headphones. Go on, try and find some.
- The market for presentation remote controls (that is, wireless clickers for advancing to the next slide) seems to be entirely conceptualised around proprietary 2.4GHz communication with one of those tiny USB dongles. The market for Bluetooth presentation remote controls seems to be tiny, and the ones that do support Bluetooth are hybrids which support both Bluetooth and a dongle. Also weirdly expensive.
- You can get Zigbee temperature/humidity sensors but getting Zigbee temperature/humidity/pressure sensors is seemingly much more niche, despite the existence of MEMS chips which can sense all of those. Zigbee temperature, humidity, pressure and CO2? Good luck.
Given how neat and useful Zigbee is as a technology I'm a bit surprised more isn't done with it and a more varied set of devices aren't available for it.
[I am not an electrical engineer]
I think that noise canceling headphones require at least one microphone, some op-amps, and some digital circuitry to sample analog signals, process those samples, and then perform digital to analog conversion to put the canceling signal back in the audio stream.
Line level audio, can't power all that. Not enough current. Not enough voltage. So you need a battery or USB or a wall wart.
Or you put some big ear pads on ordinary headphones...I have some for my ATH-MX50's I bought on eBay. They are about an inch think and filter out a lot of ambient sound. But perhaps I digress.
Or maybe not. Thick earpads provide passive noise reduction without batteries and a set of ATH-MX50's plus earpads will set you back about $200, but you might get by with less expensive MX-30's or even MX-20's...indeed, some MX-20's plus some thick earpads from eBay is the simplest thing that might work.
https://www.bose.com/p/headphones-aviation-headsets/bose-a30...
The six-pin LEMO connector carries both power and audio.
Well, you'll need battery or USB power at the headphone anyway. And bringing in a connection from a computer is a great way to bring in noise over the power or jack without proper filtering.
Also I'm 99% sure my Sony and Bose noise cancelling phones had an input jack (mini?) that could be plugged in to devices.
I had to give up and buy one of those true wireless, but of course the controls are touch which is terrible for many sports: I do shadow boxing and whenever I simulate dodges and cover my ear, the song gets paused. Lovely.
The overear hooks are a necessity or with some movements the headset gets shot out of the ear
[1] e.g. https://www.bestbuy.com/site/sony-noise-canceling-wired-on-e...
I spent a LONG time looking for wired noise-cancelling headphones a year or two ago without success. By this I mean headphones where the noise-cancelling electronics can be powered over USB. It seemed obvious to me to design a pair of headphones with a USB audio interface which powered noise cancelling. But nope, doesn't exist.
Even worse all the wireless noise cancelling headphones I find, including high end ones, automatically turn off when you charge them. So you can't actually use them when they're charging. I'm certain companies do this due to some kind of liability paranoia about a battery igniting when someone's wearing them, but the result is that the entire product class seems to be literally designed to put an upper bound on how much you can use the product. I find this insane.
Sennheiser's noise cancelling headphones do this. Bose's noise canceling headphones cannot be turned on when charging.
What I don't get is why Google slides (or powerpoint online) doesn't have the ability to use your phone as a remote. It would seem like it should be something already built in but maybe i'm missing it or something.
Look into remote controls for, say, Kodi. You're sure to find the wiki listing a bunch of ways to control Kodi from your couch, which includes bluetooth remotes of various flavors that should meet your needs.
...they're expensive. I don't know if it's licensing or what, but zigbee SoCs are 5-10x the cost of, say, an ESP32 wifi SoC. $10ish each vs $1.25 ea at a quick glance.It would work better in, I don't know, warehouses? Where the distance to the next device becomes too large.
EDIT: it seems the KNX standard is a more modern system that supports Powerline as well as other communication methods, although it seems to mostly be for business use.
Building power wiring is never impedance controlled. It is just two parallel wires as a transmission line. Any time this unshielded line gets next to a piece of metal, or it bends too sharp, or whatever, the impedance changes in the RF frequencies significantly enough that it will radiate (and accept incoming interference by reciprocity). These devices literally fill the airwaves with interference.
So why does the FCC allow them? Because for FCC testing they're allowed to use contrived setups/jigs of power wiring that are nothing like those that happen in actual buildings. FCC approval of these thing should require actual testing in actual house/building like wiring. If they did none would ever be approved and all existing ones would be taken off the market.
So... yes, you can technically legally use PowerLine networking. But if you do so knowingly you're being extremely rude and a bad person. Like, throwing trash on the ground in a national park type rude. The radio spectrum is a limited shared resource. Please don't ruin it.
It bears considering that "compromise" technologies like powerline ethernet aren't because we should, it's because we can.
There's nothing technically appealing about powerline ethernet, it's always going to be inferior to simple ethernet cabling and at best a sidegrade to wireless ethernet or repurposing coax cabling or telephone wiring.
Its practical appeal is the convenience of not having to run new ethernet cabling in an environment where wireless ethernet or reusing other kinds of existing wiring also aren't an option. Running new ethernet cabling can be an arduous task, especially if you want to do it nicely, and sometimes practical convenience trumps objective superiority.
This "can" in this case is assuming a premise that the aesthetic appearance of your living space is more important than not littering and degrading a shared public resource. It's not. That's rude.
Wikipedia[1] lists some pros and cons but it's not clear how impactful those cons are in real world scenarios. How does the speed compare to Wifi? Do multiple devices cause issues?
Family radio and the public channels I heard are full of useless chatter and insults, I can't imagine radio being any better than the internet besides the idea of broadcasting data on it which the government doesn't like.
Because it runs on tattletales that tell the government, if they removed the licensing we'd just get the ability to not illegally (maybe dirty) encrypted long distance messages anonymously. A far superior system than today's.
> The average age is like 60-70 usually
I can't find any statistics on the average age among all amateur radio license holders. Wikipedia says the average age is 68, but that is marked with a [citation needed] because it doesn't point to a source. Whoever wrote that likely got it from the ARRL which declared that the average age of their membership is 68. Not all hams, and perhaps not even the majority of hams, are members of ARRL. In the same way that not all licensed gun owners are members of the NRA.
In rural areas, you may find the local ham radio club is a clique of 5 or 6 older guys who have known each other for several decades and aren't too welcoming to newcomers. But more urban areas are a completely different story. Where I live, the local university has a ham club operated by college students. There is a community club that certainly _trends_ toward older engineer retirees, but actually has members of all ages, ethnicities, and technical background. And they are all a pretty friendly bunch.
There are online clubs and communities for various demographics as well. (And an uncountable number of discords for some reason.)
> the government kept lowering the requirements to get a license and it's even less popular.
The only ones saying that are YouTubers and clickbait SEO-encumbered blogspam. There are more amateur radio license holders now than there have ever been. http://ah0a.org/FCC/Graphs.html
> I heard they're usually mostly benchmarking distance and truckers listening.
You must have heard wrong? I don't know what "benchmarking distance" means, and while there _are_ truckers that are hams and sometimes talk while they drive, IME there are not many. Certainly not enough to be a notable chunk of local ham radio activity.
> Besides apocalypse or maybe wanting to tunnel data through it (illegal) it doesn't seem to serve a real function or benefit.
You could ask the FCC, the ones who license and regulate the service? https://www.fcc.gov/wireless/bureau-divisions/mobility-divis... "The amateur radio ... services are for qualified persons of any age who are interested in radio technique solely with a personal aim and without pecuniary interest. These services present an opportunity for self-training, intercommunication, and technical investigations."
In short, amateur radio is set of spectrum set aside for hobbyists to practice and experiment with radio. Amateur radio can be and has been used to coordinate communication in areas stricken by disaster when other services were down, but it is NOT an "emergency radio" service, no matter what the preppers say.
Encryption on the ham bands is forbidden for a very good reason: ham radio activities are public, open, and are not a substitute for commercial or ISM bands. You don't need encryption in order to experiment with radio. It's a different layer, completely orthogonal. The only narrow acceptable use related to cryptography is authorization of control messages to repeaters, RC aircraft, and such. In that case, you are not obscuring the meaning of the message, you are simply proving that you are the rightful controller of the device.
> Family radio and the public channels I heard are full of useless chatter and insults,
FRS and CB radio are not ham radio, full stop.
I have never seen a single community anywhere in real life or on the Internet that didn't have the occasional asshat or two. Although a few hams can be idiots, as in any community, the majority are quite respectful and friendly.
> I can't imagine radio being any better than the internet besides the idea of broadcasting data on it which the government doesn't like.
As mentioned before, you're missing the purpose and spirit of amateur radio. It's not "free and libre wireless communication for the masses." The spectrum was originally set aside by the FCC at a time when amateurs were making more progress on the state of the art of radio technology on their kitchen tables than radio manufacturers with whole labs. Not as relevant today perhaps, but it's a miracle that we still have that spectrum available to us when these frequencies are so highly coveted by HFTs, ISPs, and mobile phone operators.
Broadcasting on amateur radio is not allowed, because there are already FCC-licensed services for broadcasting over radio. Some people think that broadcasting over amateur radio should be allowed because they don't like the FCC's policies on the broadcast bands but that's some pretty backwards thinking, if you ask me. Nobody stumps for broadcast rights on FRS, GRMS, CB, or marine bands for some reason. It's only the amateur radio service where this is ever even suggested as a possibility, generally by people who don't understand what the service is for.
Thank you for clarifying the point of its usage. Compared to something like SDRs, and meshtastic it's way more mature and has a lot less interesting specs to me besides it's frequency. I skimmed your blog and didn't see anything related to either radio. Is there a lot of overlap between sdr and ham? I only knew one who was a trucker that mostly just listened to local people.
* It generates tons of electrical noise, which can wreak havoc on electronics particularly radios.
* The actual connection speed varies greatly by the condition of the copper wiring and generally isn't that great.
* Depending on how the copper wiring is laid out, you might not get a connection between two points.
* Security can be an issue if you don't configure your powerline adapters properly.
They do come in different speed ratings though, and those still depend on the condition of your house wiring.
Buy them from somewhere with a good return policy and give em a shot.
Moca is another option if you have coax wiring for cable TV in your house. That's nice cuz it doesn't share bandwidth with power lines.
We then switched to MoCA (ActionTec) and it has been about as good as a direct ethernet cable. Consistent performance and stays up for years at a time. No issues ever.
The performance of each likely comes down to how much noice is on the respective wires. Our electrical network is likely crowded and influenced somewhat by neighbors. However our coax was completely unused and I disconnected it from the outside world (for privacy and noise reduction)
If you have coax outlets in locations useful for networking, I would definitely consider using MoCA instead of PowerLine.
I get about 35Mbps and it’s a little flaky, but I haven’t tried to troubleshoot it. It serves my minimal use case (streaming to a very rarely used guest bedroom TV).
I’d use anything else in most cases (including pulling fiber to my detached garage rather than using power line to galvanically isolate the networks).
I’ve not tested it, but my understanding is that powerline networking will not pass (or pass well) a surge suppressor (which might be a problem if you have an updated electrical panel with whole house suppression).
Anecdote: I participated in college radio, and learned that the station originated with a couple of students in a fraternity broadcasting AM radio on the power lines, in the 1950s. Two of those students became my professors. They said that in those days, the power system was so simple, that they could reach the entire town. But more modern power distribution equipment had built-in filtering that eventually forced the station to go on-air.
I’ve had powerline adapters work quite happily sometimes (and unhappily other times) on separate circuits in my home so it clearly can tolerate some level of copper juncture (circuit breakers, consumer units, and the like) beyond a simple ring main.
A recent unit I bought had an optional pairing process between adapters. I don’t know how it works but it is billed as a way of ensuring privacy between endpoints. It wasn’t clear from the documentation if this was to protect me from other people in my house, or from neighbouring properties.
I myself had the same problem to a house 3 doors down, despite the tech promising a fuse box should be a barrier.
There is no reason not to enable it if it isn’t by default.
That pairing process is the use of a key, yes. I think modern Powerline adapters generate a key anyway.
the signal will probably leave your premise in some way and an interested party will be able to break the encryption.
security = low
impact = low
That is one reason they are becoming less and less common.
This caught my eye. If something like that worked well without too much fuss setting it up, it would be really cool.
Immediately thereafter, I realized most of the places I went didn't have PoE PSE, but the concept was neat, anyway.
And now you don't have to worry about the flakiness of WiFi, but instead have to worry about the speed of your powerline (which can vary greatly throughout a building depending on how the wires are run). You are probably better off strategically placing wifi range extenders connected via powerline.
if its reliability in a dense (apartment complex) wifi area you are after, zigbee mesh has more resilience and is cheaper than powerline
powerline networks only generally work on the same ring main.