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Comment by klooj | Hacker News Reader

iroh is a peer to peer networking technology so the project example of controlling a fan isn't so much about the fan but rather that it's controllable from anywhere through an esp32 microcontroller that can maintain a resilient connection endpoint even through power cycles and so on. I think iroh was posted about on HN a few weeks ago and I had a similar reaction of like...what in the world is this blog post even saying haha. But I found their docs page and found it pretty fascinating learning! https://docs.iroh.computer/what-is-iroh

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Works on Android too when developing Dart applications and making use of flutter_rust_bridge though it's a bit of an involved setup to be honest.

I really hope more people will play around with iroh and build stuff especially because in the last year some things have been renamed in the API to be more clear and other stuff has been simplified e.g. see this blog post https://www.iroh.computer/blog/iroh-0-94-0-the-endpoint-take...

I use a fan with an on/off button.

I think it's great someone is working on a fun little project such as a smart fan but let's not kid ourselves, it's not supposed to be practical! I don't think anyone would claim that.

It's a demo of how easy it is to make even an ESP32 device available globally with iroh.

That's very much not a smart fan. Not really relevant.

Pretty relevant because I've never seen the reason for "smart" gadgets at all. Physical switches are simply better.

90% of smart devices are for novelty, or for you to spend more time setting up and maintaining their automations than they save you in being automated.

But that 10% is magic. A fan that switches on when air quality falls below a threshold? Not that useful in a living room, but in a workshop setting - especially a shared workshop setting? Awesome. Just awesome.

A well defined use case, in the right setting, and smart stuff can be genuinely very useful. Usually that’s not how they’re used - i know, because of the 15-20 smart things i have only one or two are genuinely useful.

> A fan that switches on when air quality falls below a threshold? Not that useful in a living room,

Why wouldn't that be useful? People be surprised how poor their air quality generally are inside, unless they already measure it, making it better sounds useful in oh so many ways.

> i know, because of the 15-20 smart things i have only one or two are genuinely useful.

What are those things? I have about 70-80 "smart things" by now, but every single one is genuinely useful, otherwise I wouldn't install them in the first place. Lots of open/closed sensors, soil moisture, temperature+pm2.5 sensors, water taps and so on.

> Why wouldn't that be useful? People be surprised how poor their air quality generally are inside

First because it’s the wrong solution to the problem. As I understand it bad air quality in a home is created by specific activities like cooking, vacuuming, or lighting candles/incense/smoking. So you solve the problem by turning on the fan when you cook, opening the windows when you vacuum, and by not using incense or smoking.

Second because you can have a dumb sensor and switch the fan on with your hand when it goes turns orange or red.

> I have about 70-80 "smart things" by now, but every single one is genuinely useful

We have different definitions of genuinely useful. I’m glad you find you setups useful tho - you do you!

The reason is UI.

There's only a limited number of features that you can pack into a few buttons and a 7-segment display. If you want to sell outside the US and need to support the long-tail of non-English languages, preferably without per-country product variants, you can't even label the buttons any more, you have to rely on simple pictograms and icons.

If there's a $1 microcontroller in your device (and there often is), you're very tempted to implement lots of features which cost you almost nothing, but that kind of UI just doesn't really let you do so. Sure, you could add a proper touch screen with a localizable UI stack, with reflowable text and support for displaying Kanji and RTL languages, but that's often more expensive (and less practical) than slapping on a BLE or WiFi chip.

I have lots of smart gadgets that also have physical switches. It's convenient to be able to control them in more than one way, from more than one location.

Anyway, why are you commenting here if you're not into this sort of thing? Feels like you're just trying to stir up an argument.

Having the option to say “hey siri turn on the fan” while you’re in bed is pretty nice. This kind of thing works pretty reliably these days with the right setup. The fan still has a physical switch.

I have an automation that automatically regulates the level down when I do something where I want to minimize noise (like watching a movie or when I go to sleep)

Sure you can do everything manually, but I like networked things, especially those using open standards (matter over openthread) so I can connect them all together easily.

For example, every time I watch a movie the roller blinds automatically come down, the lights turn off and the fan turns down, I think thats just cool.

If your fan isn't Byzantine fault tolerant, you're irrelevant

And some people don’t see any reason for the internet and just wanna use phones and physical mail. To each their own.

You can have the best of both worlds with a hand-off-auto switch.

> Physical switches are simply better

Pff, assuming that everyone have arms and hands much?

Also I don't see the point of a fan, I live right next to the ocean, if you want moving air, why don't you just open a window?! Talk about useless invention

I do have working arms and hands, so for the lights and fans in my house I don't need to assume otherwise.

Can't help but read this in the voice of Homer Simpson.

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