Hacker News Reader

Comment by capitangolo | Hacker News Reader

I honestly don't get it. They have more to win by doing things right than with this crap they pull out . Never getting a Bambulab.

View on HN

Some managers are fine screwing power users when they feel they are big enough. I will never buy a Chamberlain garage door opener for their similar stance against the Home Assistant community

Same! I was burned by Chamberlain, twice. In my case I had bought a $40 retrofit device (it connected to the MyQ cloud and simply used RF to emulate a remote to open any brand of opener).

First, there was their debacle where they broke HA connectivity just for fun, meaning I couldn't use HA or Apple HomeKit anymore. Then, after a pretty routine reset of the opener (I needed to clear out some old remotes and re-learn them) I found that in some recent update of the 'app' or whatever, they'd deleted my brand of opener from their supported list, due to some IP dispute of some kind, leaving it unable to learn the same remote it had learned the year before. So, as peeved as I had been to have to use their ad-laden app, the myQ device itself was completely useless to me.

Never again.

Irony is I just moved to a house with a brand new MyQ cloud-connected door. I bought a RatGDO anyway and will never buy any of the devices in the myQ ecosystem, even though some look attractive. Closed system on purpose = never buy.

Which garage door opener brands / models would you recommend?

Though I'm not OP, I will say that it seems like there are two brands that mostly have the market cornered.

Chamberlain/Liftmaster/MyQ is all the same company; they are a gross company that hates the idea of giving you control over your device. Zero LAN control story, Zero Homekit story, zero Home Assistant and no possibility of any of these.

Genie - whose "app" thing is called Aladdin Connect is the other one. There is a HA integration[1] for it, though it's cloud-dependent, no LAN story so again your ability to control it is subject the company's cloud servers being available, and to any future whim they may have. The Github for the plugin has issues reported, but no idea how widespread they are.

Looking at places like Home Depot it seems there's a brand called SkyLink[2] but it seems cheap in the bad way, and while it has its own "app" there seems to be no HA story whatsoever, so I assume kinda the worst of all.

Deeply uncomfortably, I would have to grudgingly acknowledge the practicality of buying from the gross Chamberlain, never using its MyQ BS, and connecting a RatGDO to it instead, which would give the best experience, even though giving them any business deeply offends me.

[1] https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/aladdin_connect/

[2] https://www.homedepot.com/p/SkyLink-Side-Wall-Mount-Quiet-Ga...

> no possibility of any of these.

Except, you know, a UART?

https://ratcloud.llc/

Please read my comment again - I mentioned RatGDO and literally own one. My point was that there's no possibility Chamberlain would ever give you any of these things in the built-in Wi-Fi-connected hardware you've already paid them for.

It is unfortunate to reward those weasels for their bad behavior by buying their device, even if one substitutes their own "brain" and never uses MyQ. But yeah, that may be the only practical option.

This feels like pressure from the state. I do not see why they would do this otherwise. If people use these printers at work, they may be willingly sending prototypes and designs to China. That would create a huge advantage, because the company could know who bought the printer, where they are located, and what they are working on. Since Chinese companies are required to comply with the government, corporate espionage seems like the most logical explanation to me.

It also enables a similar model to Facebook's insight into third party mobile app growth. The state could look for early growth trends in a given category or model type.

Then their org has the option to burnish or bury models that align with their goals.

Pretty much. It's so blatant obvious severe security risk for anyone who is not perceiving computers as black box magic device.

I am sufficiently paranoid that I think this is drone part detection from the Chinese government.

This is the second comment that has mentioned this. I tried googling, and I found YouTube videos of Ukrainians using Bambu to make drone parts.

Is there any more to read about this angle? China blocking Ukraine's access to the tech?

Ya at this point I mainly know Bambu from their adversarial behavior. Some friends and I put three new printers online this past month and proudly none are Bambulabs.

Do they? They came to the realisation that they control a sufficient fraction of the market that your preference as a consumer no longer matters to them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com