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Comment by girvo | Hacker News Reader

> C in IoT stands for “cost-effective” I guess

I know this sounds pithy (and it is!) but you'd be surprised exactly how cheap and cost effective Wi-fi enabled SoCs are. A lot of the time we're getting Wi-Fi for free, and most of those SoC's don't have the Ethernet controller by default, so it's more cost-effective to use Wi-fi if it can fit your use-case.

Other physical protocols/connection types can be supported of course (I wonder what the longest I2C run ever is), but when you're talking about a retro-fitted client like this is, Wifi or wireless protocols in general are best.

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Purely from a materials perspective, 2x cheap WiFi-capable microcontrollers (e.g. esp8266) will cost the manufacturer something like $4-$5 total for both devices - which is comparable to 3m cable+connectors+cheap chips to handle the cable connection (even ignoring the cost of some person to install the cable which is far more expensive than that) so indeed I don't get why the author considers that doing the connection over WiFi is somehow wasteful.

> so indeed I don't get why the author considers that doing the connection over WiFi is somehow wasteful.

Power consumption.

Up front vs ongoing cost; the creators chose to minimise the up-front cost in favour of a marginally higher ongoing cost.

I’d be interested in crunching the numbers if I had time because there can’t be too much in the cost delta.

Is it really a problem? An ESP8266 (which is not the most efficient thing, but is very cheap) uses about 0.5W while transmitting, much less most of the time.

For reference, I have some smart outlets that I measured using a while ago, pulling about 0.05W on average from the wall, or 36Wh a month. That's about as much energy as making 500ml of coffee or charging a phone 2-3x.

not sure if its a problem in reality, radios are the second most power consuming subsystem of my laptop at idle. (first being screen due to the backlight).

At idle? I didn’t think they consumed anything at all really at rest.

ESP32s are basically universal at this point. You can have them for under a dollar if you order in any sort of bulk, and you get Wifi and Bluetooth right out of the box. At this point is more expensive to not use Wifi

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