The Missing Piece of the Smart Home Revolution: The Operating System 252
An anonymous reader writes with this story about who will lead the IoT revolution, and whether it will follow in mobile's footsteps. "As these technologies sense and and react to changes in your environment, there are obvious parallels to computer operating systems, which receive input and return output. What does the 'operating system' for the smart home of the future look like? Alex Hawkinson is trying to help answer that very question. The founder and CEO of IoT company SmartThings is not only a leader in the market, he’s a consumer. He suggests there won’t be a singular, cohesive operating system for your home, that this stuff isn’t one-size-fits-all. 'I think it’s up to everyone to determine their own bits,' Hawkinson said. 'Some people love cameras in house, my wife wants none. It’s up to your preferences.'”
Not so sure about this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Networks run by professionals can't keep the hackers out, and I want my home to have an operating system? I'm not intereested in my appliences sending me text messages, and my furnace is already on a fairly sophisticated timer. For me, at least, the answer is "no" - for the time being. I really don't see any show-stopping need beyond "wow, my house is wired!"
Re:Not so sure about this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Your mistake is in assuming that wired homes will serve their occupants. They're meant to serve government and civil authorities at the occupant's expense. Note: I avoided using the term 'owner' on purpose.
Re:Not so sure about this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Your mistake is in assuming that wired homes will serve their occupants. They're meant to serve government and civil authorities at the occupant's expense. Note: I avoided using the term 'owner' on purpose.
Makes me think of "smart meters".
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Your mistake is in assuming that wired homes will serve their occupants. They're meant to serve government and civil authorities at the occupant's expense. Note: I avoided using the term 'owner' on purpose.
Makes me think of "smart meters".
What it _should_ be making you think of is the "telescreen" from the book "1984".
/
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Exactly. Some external conflagration of agendas will battle over the setting of your thermostat, what food you store/eat, how much electricity you use, what you can access on the net, etc. I'll pass. I immediately thought of that 'smart' wall outlet by sony. Who wants to be micromanaged like that?
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Makes me think of "smart meters".
I'm sorry you don't care about energy efficiency and renewable power. I suppose it's easier for you when 80% of your electricity comes from coal and the plants run 24/7. Some of us want to maximize the use of renewables, which requires demand shaping, and reduce the total number of kwh. you know, for kids.
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> I'm sorry you don't care about energy efficiency and renewable power.
Get back to us when you have renewable energy that works. Corn ethanol is, for the most part, an expensive, agricultural support program that converts hydrocarbons like petroleum and natural gas into a mediocre fuel. Wind and Solar for the most part require hugely expensive (and probably environmentally destructive) buffering -- think hundreds of billions of dollars -- to interface their intermittent output to a reliable power grid.
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> I wouldn't call ethanol "a mediocre fuel".
Ethanol has low energy density and doesn't burn efficiently in a conventional engine. It's true that it burns slowly and thus can be used in a high compression engine. But then you can't burn gasoline or gases like methane, propane, etc in that tengine. As produced and used in the US it's pretty much a fiasco.
(But it's OK to drink in moderation if you're so inclined).
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People are all panicky about smart meters, and they imagine they're some kind of Big Brother device that reports on their TV watching habits, or know exactly what kinds of subversive web sites they visit based on their power usage, and report their pr0n habits to the gubbamint. But "smart meters" are not "omniscient meters". They just measure your home's overall consumption of electricity, same as your current meter.
Smart meters essentially work like what you're talking about. The difference is they are
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Makes me think of "smart meters".
Wow, that sounds like a hacking opportunity waiting to happen.
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Smart meters are used by the utilities to save money and improve conservation. The government is not involved at all except to provide stimulus funds.
And no, they don't cause cancer either, or headaches, or higher rates, or mind control.
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They either cause higher electricity rates, if the utility is footing the bill, or they cause higher tax rates, if the government is footing 100% of the bill. Either way, I'm paying, and not getting anything for it.
And if you think the utilities are going to install these things and not use them as an excuse to raise rates, you're dreaming.
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Re:Not so sure about this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you explain exactly what is wrong with smart meters?
I work in the water industry where such meters are used. Water companies like them because they reduce costs - no need to send people out to read a little display any more. The regulator has forced the water companies to pass on the savings to the consumer.
There is a privacy aspect, but anyone who understands how the water network works will realise that the concerns are overblown. The smart meters report back very little information, because if they all used up a lot of bandwidth there wouldn't be enough to go round (M-BUS/433/868/915MHz) or would cost too much (GSM/3G). Typically they just report back the current meter reading, or at most a few data points per day. The companies don't need more because they already have monitoring equipment installed on every pipe and facility in their network. If one street starts using more water than expected they will know about it within hours and send someone to find out if there is a leak. Typically 30-40% of the clean water in the network is lost to leaks, so fixing them is a pretty big deal.
Even if they could tell when you are flushing your drugs down the loo, the metering system isn't real-time and there would be no way to know you were not just taking a dump. Their only interest is billing you.
Electricity is similar. They could try to monitor you with the smart meter, but it would be a lot easier to just install something at the sub-station or point a thermal camera at your house.
Can you point to any practical uses for or attacks on smart meters?
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Re:Not so sure about this... (Score:5, Insightful)
The crowning genius of free-market surveillance states is how much of the (otherwise expensive, arduous, and likely to be resented) work of surveillance can be left to private sector self interest to implement and market, with the state needing only to subpoena up the results and do relatively small amounts of supplementary spying(even this often accomplished in no small part just by buying the access).
Data provided by 'smart homes' will end up with the feds, in due time; but it'll be picked clean by every scumbag marketing weasel in the business first. Best of both worlds!
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I didn't mean to understate either. Perhaps I should've rephrased. Private entities have as big an interest in our minutiae as the state does.
Re:Not so sure about this... (Score:5, Interesting)
Data provided by 'smart homes' will end up with the feds, in due time; but it'll be picked clean by every scumbag marketing weasel in the business first. Best of both worlds!
Don't forget the Internet savvy burglar class that is coming. These smart device companies aren't spending their angel funding on security. Casing houses is quickly going to become a service available on the darknet; for a fraction of a bitcoin, crackers with giant databases of IoT surveillance data will tell the burglar which houses in the target area are unoccupied during the hours they specify. Tapping the camera signals will let the burglars pre-plan which stuff to grab. For a premium price, they'll disable the alarms, unlock the doors, and open the garage.
And my freaking homeowners insurance will go up, while Harry Hairstyle the scumbag CEO's stock will continue to soar into the stratosphere, because he won't be found negligent, and the homeowner who trusted him won't be found stupid.
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Wasn't Trendnet sanctioned by the FCC over this kind of thing? It seems like there is punishment for failures, although arguably not enough.
The key will be creating demand for security with consumers. Once they realize it is important they will look for it, and companies that fail to deliver will suffer as a result. Hopefully with events like the recent celebrity iCloud hack getting a lot of publicity we won't have to wait too long.
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* Your schedule could be established with power and water cycles - known empty home would be more interesting to thieves
* From above, if your insurance company determines you keep odd hours they may find that to be higher-risk and adjust your rate
* Law enforcement may be interested if your power and water usage continuously exceeds the requirements for the number of occupants - are you running a grow room? Warrant time!
I'm not necessarily paranoid enough to
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Re:Not so sure about this... (Score:5, Insightful)
it's funny how libertarian nutters believe in the exact opposite of what happens in reality.
in the real world, governments - i.e. providers of socialised health care/health insurance - don't give a fuck about what you do or eat, they provide the health care you are entitled to (i.e. whatever you need without regard for your finances) no matter what you do.
private health insurers, on the other hand, leap at any excuse to get out of their obligations - if there's anything, no matter how tiny or how irrelevant they can use to blame the patient for their misfortune, then they'll use it.
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This one million times.
I'm so amazed at this mantra of "corporations good, government bad" that gets repeated ad nauseam in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary that I'm about one inch short of deciding that the entire USA is some kind of religious nutjob cult to the god of imaginative economy.
I don't want government nor private corporations into my house to watch me 24/7. But when I think about the potential consequences, I'm more afraid of corporations and what they would do with it than of t
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Oh for fucks sake, Slashdot really has become another shitty conspiracy theory site :/ I've seen some shit on here thats worse than what you can find on AboveTopSecret.com!
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you know, I have to say meh? Apple has sold 800 million [imore.com] ios devices sold worldwide. even if we put an ios controller in every US household [wikipedia.org], it only increases the ios attack surface by 15%. Also, considering iphones and ipads already have access to emails, passwords, everything else, there wouldn't be a crazy amount of additional value in people's refrigerator use.
So I would say the summary and article are dusted off from 2012. The smart home OS of the future is the mobile OS. Apple has their Homekit systems
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What I can see is an Apple TV with HomeKit acting as some sort of hub.
Re:Not so sure about this... (Score:5, Interesting)
Networks run by professionals can't keep the hackers out, and I want my home to have an operating system? I'm not intereested in my appliences sending me text messages, and my furnace is already on a fairly sophisticated timer. For me, at least, the answer is "no" - for the time being. I really don't see any show-stopping need beyond "wow, my house is wired!"
I couldn't agree more.
Give me a gadget that can tell me when my washer/dryer is finished. It can be wireless/bluetooth-like, because washers and dryers are usually just far enough, that you can't really hear their buzzer when they're done, but connect that same gadget to the cloud, and you've lost me permanently as a potential customer. Don't give me what I don't need. Do not give me what I don't want. For instance, I already have a smart meter, but this is certainly not because I was given a choice. If I wasn't such a helpless sheep, I would have destroyed that smart meter as soon as I noticed it.
Also, do not build that gadget into the washer/dryer itself and do not embed a tablet or anything too complex like an OS into an appliance. Just like I do not trust Ford to make good and cost-effective built-in gps units with free regular updates, I do not trust a washer/dryer manufacturer to make a good reliable gadget that's easy to fix, or easy/cheap to replace, or can even be easily kept up-to-date, compared to my own dedicated phone, or my own dedicated tablet, which I tend to replace much more frequently.
Also please take into account, that when I move apartments, I usually don't take the washer and dryer with me, nor the fridge. The same goes with some people who actually own homes and move from house to house. Some people do, but not everyone moves in/out with their large appliances. Do not limit the market for your goods to such a small subset of people.
If you want to do something useful, just get out of my way, or make room for my things. It would be nice if my tablet could hang on top of my stove, or on top my fridge. It would be nice if it could be protected from potential splashes, or from heat or smoke, or smudges. It would be nice if my tablet could easily be charged from its stand. And it would be nicer if the form factor of the fridge/stove was flexible enough that it could adapt to a wide range of devices, from my small old recycled re-purposed android phone to the latest and greatest tablet out there, whether it be my device, or the device of a family member/friend visiting me for a day.
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You assume those networks are ran by professionals. They may work for a company, but rarely do you hear about a professional place getting hacked.
It's easy to make statements like that, but from a factual standpoint, you'vr got nothing to support your view.
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Ya no shit. Store all your settings and access all these devices from the cloud. No thank you. Now the "Intranet of Things" interests me somewhat and most of the interesting stuff is happening in the do-it-yourself space. People are doing incredible things with RaspberryPi's and Arduino's and other variants and they are posting their code publicly so anyone can hack around.
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Hah, yes, I was about to say that the missing piece of the 'smart' home is - the need for such a thing. I don't fall for the hype about how great it would be to control my dishwasher or heating with my mobile (I mean, really? Why would I want to do that?). Likewise, I don't fall for the nonsense about 'the government' wanting to intrude on my privacy - I can't see why they would, for one thing; I am worried about the grubby hands of private businesses, whose staff are not even vetted to the standards requir
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> Networks run by professionals can't keep the hackers out, and I want my home to have an operating system?
Exactly. For the most part, the ideal operating system for the home is probably the human brain augmented by some switches and simple (repairable) MECHANICAL timers like those on dishwashers.and washing machines. For the most part, the digital hardware in my house sucks. The interfaces are, for the most part, poorly designed, non-intuitive and not especially reliable. There is entirely too much
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1) Hackers taking over your home and setting your dishwasher to Eco mode!
2) "The man" knowing about when you shit / shower / shave!!
3) But I don't even know why I would want a smart home!!!
Not that these aren't valid points, but they don't have to be raised over and over again; why not stick to the topic? In this discussion I see perhaps 5 on-topic posts, the rest just regurgitate the above 3 points. Sorry, just had to
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Recover my time spent times a reasonable hourly rate? No way. But as I said, it'll probably take a lot less effort in the near future.
Black Mirror (Score:2, Insightful)
Black Mirror recently did an episode that had an interesting take on this. It's interwoven into the second part of the episode.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Christmas_(Black_Mirror)
If you haven't seen the rest of their stuff (two seasons, 6 episodes + the xmas special), it's highly recommended.
I'm at a loss. And I RTFA (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a terrible article. Seriously it is a press release for this company and it says NOTHING. Not only does is say nothing it is full of blatant crap.
Since when does your light bulb and your sensors in ANY WAY contribute to what you OS is?!??!?!?
I'm really at a loss of where to go for what Slashdot used to be. Soilent news isn't there yet. I must be dumb because I can't figure reddit out.
I still come here and every now and again there is something good. But it's getting less and less.
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Thanks for the comment about Soilent News, didn't know they existed. No, I can't figure out Reddit either.
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I also don't "get" Reddit. The pages give me a headache, it's a mess. The moderation system also sucks (just up and down) and looking at what gets modded up there... Slashdot is still way, way better.
Re:I'm at a loss. And I RTFA (Score:5, Insightful)
There has been a lot of this lately.. CEOs of companies with cutesy names like "SmartThings" and "Eyeotee" pitching their bullshit visions to posture as "thought leaders."
We have had internet-enabled devices for some time.
The only revolution here is that big business is trying to monetize your entire life, daily routines and all. They want you to trade all of your security and privacy for a crumb of convenience.
Re:I'm at a loss. And I RTFA (Score:5, Interesting)
Lately? You must be a kid.
Idiots have been pitching smart refrigerators, thin clients everywhere etc for decades now. I'm looking at you Ellison.
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idiots have been pitching alternating current for years now. I'm looking at you Edison.
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You will find very few people arguing against improved devices or superior efficiency. The problem arises when your "smart" devices start collecting and distributing information about you over the worlds largest information interchange network. Do you see how that could be objectionable to some people?
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The mass media as well as tech companies have redefined the term "operating system". It's been fuzzy this way for awhile. The company I'm at added "OS" as a suffix to a suite of services, including one part that actually uses an third party operating system but also the back office servers and the like. It's a marketing term. Similar to some smart phones, the "OS" is no longer the kernel there but instead refers more to the API or suite of applications. I suspect the average person on the street thinks
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There's a few thing
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When I was a kid we had to get up to turn off the lights. We also wiped our butts with paper, using....our hands.
Our grandparents claimed they had to get up to change the TV channel. TV was kind of a primitive net, but they all had to read the same pages at the same time (or something).
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Bigots are far better but good luck trying to find one.
Are you sure you know what the USA is like?
(Unrelated, I totally agree with you about the faucet controls).
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*Why don't we have two faucet controls, one for temperature and one for stream force? Instead we get two dials each mixing both attributes or one control mixing everything.*
because not too many people want electrified active mixing faucets.
you can buy them if you want to. that shits expensive though.
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"What do you use now? Shells? Toilets and faucets haven't advanced in the USA. Why don't we have two faucet controls, one for temperature and one for stream force?"
A pet peeve of mine actually. When I was a kid in the 1940s and 1950s, showers and baths had two controls -- one for hot water and one for cold. Possible, if not especially easy, to get the temperature and flow you desired. Since then, that system has been replaced by four dozen variants of single knob controls. All of which suck and none of w
Re:I'm at a loss. And I RTFA (Score:5, Informative)
What is missing from the 'automated home' is a amazing use case.
my brother and his wife just had their first baby, and when it came time for the wife to go back to work they got three dropcams and put them throughout the house - living room, nursery, and a third place I forget. Now they can check in at any time of day to see what the baby is up to and what the nanny is doing. I agree, it's weird. But it gives them peace of mind and the nanny knows about the camera, so the system works for them.
For many people, "Allows me to check on my infant daughter" is an amazing use case. Consider the all-in was $600 for three cameras, plus $20/month for hosting. Connects to the existing wifi system, no wires to run. Monitored through an ipad or iphone app, which they already have. For me it woudl be super creepy, but it works for them and they love it.
So you may not see a business case here, but for many people (perhaps millions) the combination of utiity plus low cost plus easy setup plus easy use will be very compelling, even considering the tradeoffs.
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Glad that it works for your brother's family, but I'm not sure how a few webcams is an "automated home".
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I'm in for the cat videos. It's fascinating, disturbing and occasionally hilarious to watch what your master^H^H^Hcat gets up while you are away.
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You have to beat the light switch in usability and that is fairly hard to do as you cant make it much simpler.
Usability and simplicity are not the same thing, and upgrading the common light switch is not a new idea *CLAP CLAP*.
The fact is there are many use cases for equipment that can be remotely monitored and controlled, even if that equipment is usually run by something as dead simple as a switch. Here's some things I use mine for:
- When sitting down at the movies I don't need to crawl through a dark living room to get back to my seat, I can switch the lights on and off remotely. I even tried integrating it with
No (Score:5, Insightful)
This is total nonsense and irrelevant to home automation.
Which OS? (Score:5, Insightful)
QNX if BlackBerry does the right steps right now. Next question!
Okay, I will explain. Because QNX has the track records, the reliability, the realtime features, the small footprint, the legal backing required to win there. If a house accidentally burn down to ground, with or without fatalities, the OS provider may be liable for such an accident if someone can demonstrate a glitch, bug, malfunction, etc of the OS is at the origin of the fire. It is not a playground for kids and QNX is well in advance to any other racers.
Real-Time OS vs. Home Automation Needs (Score:2)
QNX and RTLinux and such are great if you need sub-millisecond response for your home automation systems. You don't. If you do, you're doing it wrong.
If your Internet-O-Things devices have spinning motors driving sharp-edged blades, you should be using hardware or at most electrical methods to do automatic stopping. If your electrical things use high voltage that might be exposed to people, you should be using ground fault interrupters on them. If you've got voice-operated instructions, they may need t
You beat me to it. (Score:2)
IMHO the smart home OS will look like QNX.
It might not BE QNX, but it will at least look like it.
QNX is doing just what is needed, and has been for decades. It's about the most rock-solid OS out there. It's tiny and fast.
(What little I've seen of it reminds me of what "super" - my clone of Wiser's clone of the core of Dkikstra & Riddle's T.H.E. - might have evolved into if it were oriented to being invulnerable to failed or hostile tasks rather than being completely dependet on the tasks it supports be
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what exactly in a house requires a real-time OS?
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if someone can demonstrate a glitch, bug, malfunction, etc of the OS is at the origin of the fire
How could the OS cause the fire? What kind of light fitting / smart gear do you install which could potentially burn your house down? If the OS turns on everything in the house and leaves it on the person liable is still the one who decided to install and way overload the house.
If you're installing things that could potentially burn your house down then you're doing something very wrong.
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if a fire starts in your home, you want the system to respond appropriately in milliseconds,
Given the time it takes for people to become alert from a deep sleep, the time it takes a telephone to be automatically "dialed" and connected, and the fired trucks to arrive, ISTM that a 5ms response to a fire alarm signal is no more needed than a 500ms response. OTOH if houses were nuclear powered or flew at 1000 MPH then 5ms response times might actually be considered slow...
Darned hard set of problems (Score:2)
Similar in principle to the confidentiality problems that lead to the orange book, and at least as hard as the byzantine generals problem.
I suspect one needs a trusted system to make sure only the owner issues commands with the right key, and an independent intelligent system to figure out what happens when you add a device and give it a command. Plus lots of hard work figuring out what basic set of rules you need to preserve...
In the short run, expect to "introduce" things to one another, and select wh
UBOS (Score:5, Interesting)
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Great, more items to ransomware! (Score:5, Informative)
"We turned your thermostat up to 85 degrees and you can't change it. We want $5000 worth of Bitcoins in 72 hours--or we find out if your furnace perpetually on full-blast will burn your house down. Think we're kidding? We also know that you have an [some brand name] WebOS-based TV (it was easy--the IP address was the same as your thermostat) and an [some brand name] Android-based refrigerator that we also pwned. In 24 hours fridge will be set to 50 degrees spoiling your food, and in 48 hours your TV will be permanently stuck showing random videos from Xtube. So, your only options are to pay us or cut off power to your house--but when it comes back on, we still own your pwned devices! Good luck replacing the devices we pwned but didn't mention here... TIMER: 71:59:59...71:59:58...71:59:57......."
Seriously, I'm not for government regulation in a competitive landscape, but such devices, especially given their manufacturers will abandon writing security updates for them--6 months after the new model comes out, are ticking time bombs... I'm not about to replace my oven, furnace, dryer, refrigerator, thermostat, dishwasher, home security system, TV, toaster, and toilets every 3-5 years because someone thinks such devices should be IoT and wants to gather even more "big data" about me...
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Most of the useful home automation things have "dumb" interfaces. That thermostat is still only playing with the same 4-6 wires as any other thermostat does. If shit happens, I can pull my Nest (its not screwed in, you just hook it up to its base). If the A/C or heat was on when I pulled it out, all I need to do is have the 2 correct wires touch each other to turn it off. Or i can just flick the breaker.
The critical thing is that the "smart" piece be easily replaceable/serviceable. Now an issue with the Nes
Just replace your thermostat. It's easy. (Score:3)
"We turned your thermostat up to 85 degrees and you can't change it. We want $5000 worth of Bitcoins in 72 hours--or we find out if your furnace perpetually on full-blast will burn your house down.
You do realize that virtually all consumer thermostats use a fairly standard interface, and they can be swapped with one another, right? This includes the Nest/Ecobee, etc. If someone threatened me like that, I'd laugh at them, disconnect the thermostat from the wall, and attach a cheap replacement.
Advertisers (Score:2)
The only people who want a "smart home revolution" are advertisers. They would love to be able to show you advertisements on your refrigerator, stove, thermostat, and everywhere else.
The article (Score:2)
I was thinking of something exotic like a research-project-distributed-OS, but that's not it at all. It's mainly talking about what features will be in the IoT. It got one point right.....towards the end it points out that consumers don't really see a need for the IoT.
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I read the whole article (yes, heresy) and the author doesn't even know what an operating system is. He thinks the OS is what made the iPhone and Android take off, even though both those OSes were around for a decade at least.
lolwut?
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OMG you're right the iPhone was released eight years ago I am so oooooooooold.
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Well, no.... (Score:2)
None (Score:2)
If the "things" in question have an operating system, they're both too expensive and too vulnerable to being hijacked. Most of the "things" in an internet of things (the Smart Home from 2 decades ago, go X10!) need to be as simple and dumb and therefore cheap as possible. Most are the functional equivalent of a single sensor or a single switch. They had better not have an operating system. They need to be as dirt simple as possible, so they're cheap to acquire, cheap to install, cheap to replace if they
Nossir. Whatever you're selling, I don't want. (Score:4)
"Smart Home Revolution" = Hype
How's about I let the industry know when I need some part of my house to be "smart"? I mean, I understand the consumer era is all about creating a "need" out of something that nobody ever realized they wanted, but what do you say we take a little break until we can see some proof that we can stop hackers before we turn our homes into honeypots. Better yet, how about we take a break until we can figure out how to keep consumerist economies from destroying the world?
My coffee maker with a timer control is as smart as I need my house to be, and I went to Edmund Scientific and bought a little mechanical timer to get the job done. The only way to hack it is to come into my house and move the plastic pins around. And even then, I doubt I would miss it if it disappeared tomorrow.
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The thing here is you have a chicken and egg situation. For these things to be useful, they need to integrate with each other. A few pieces are useful as is (ie: the wifi thermostats, or the automated blinds), but a lot of them are useless without integration (if I have a fridge keeping track of my groceries, if it doesn't integrate with something that lets me carry that shopping list around, its useless. The smart smoke detectors are worthless if they don't integrate with the alarm system, etc).
So stuff ha
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Protocols (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's not the OS that's needed, but the protocols. For example the Internet is not an OS - it is a set of protocols built on protocols with more protocols running on top. What is needed for home automation is the protocols allowing a "dumb" device like a sensor or button to be able to connect to something that unifies everything together and lets them communicate. What OS, if any, is running on the devices doesn't matter.
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Re:Protocols (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it's not the OS that's needed, but the protocols.
Literally my first thought on reading the summary: "Someone doesn't know what an OS is."
In a properly engineered environment, the OS of the individual components shouldn't matter.
Smart home revolution explainer (Score:2)
This is some funny shit.
http://edition.cnn.com/videos/... [cnn.com]
More important than the OS - (Score:2)
Don't forget the British Charm Unit, asswipe.
What are manufacturers using now a days? (Score:2)
Western Consusmer: The Lie. (Score:2)
Buying things will not make you happy.
He's not quite found the problem yet (Score:2)
It seems like he's still in the "I'm not satisfied" phase of solving a problem, unfortunately it's unsure if he'll ever reach the "I've understood why I'm not satisfied" phase.
Simply put, in order to derive any meaning full use out of those systems you need to be able to program them. And to be able to program them, they need to have as simple as possible interfaces. If I'll have to read into some complex programming language like Java I'm not going to bother.
It needs to be something simple like sending "sh
Not sure what it looks like (Score:2)
Not sure what the operating system of the smart home *looks* like, but it sounds like Pierce Brosnon.
http://seekcartoon.com/watch/2... [seekcartoon.com]
Up to me? (Score:2)
Fine! I dont need cameras. I dont need a networked Fridge. I dont need a networked lighting setting. I dont need to look up the curve of my heating over the year in the internet.
IMHO the machines should be as dumb as possible. Heating/AC should have a timer. (Oh, wait, it has that already for the last 20 years). The energy savings you can achieve by not starting your heating/AC at the same time but "just before you come home" are not so high.
So yeah. MCUs with 128bytes of ram, no network connection, and a p
The simpler, the better (Score:2)
All an operating system does is file (and secure - more or less) data and schedule/manage tasks: some at given times and optionally concurrently.
An IoT or "smart house" has little need for anything more than a state machine with local in-RAM data and possibly the means to interact with other IoT's within the same house. There are many solutions to this that have been around for years. Whether that involves 432MHz Tx/Rx modules, I.R. or the overkill and high power needs of a WiFi on a chip such as the ESP8
What does the 'operating system' look like? (Score:2)
Re:Linux does fit in everything down to $5 WiFi SO (Score:4, Interesting)
The actual implementation will, as you suggest, be a combination of mostly already common OSes baked into the device firmware, along with a bunch of applications that attempt to present some sort of coherent and usable interface to the whole mess; but using 'operating system' to describe the mechanism that performs hardware abstraction and standardization isn't totally insane, just gratuitously obnoxious.
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he's talking about user interface and machine to machine interfaces in the article, I reckon. that's what he thinks the operating system is... a system for operating the internet of things.
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'OS' definition typically includes device abstraction (drivers or at least driver interfaces), which might be what they are babbling about.
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Yeah, abstraction-layer, that hides the "ugly bits" of each manufacturer's implementation is very much required - I opted to "roll my own", writing a Qt5-based library that detects various (networked) products through manufacturer-specific protocols, and then presents a standard interface for each type of device (e.g. "Smart Light" interface to "LIFX Light", "Hue Light", "Holi Light" etc...)
2 "small" issues is finding time to write support for each protocol, and getting support (products, specs) from each m
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NEST had to recall their fire alarms...
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Skip ad in 3 seconds...
Don't recommend skipping the ad. If you do it automatically cycles compressor back on it shut off 3 seconds ago so you could better enjoy the ad (for new HVAC equipment).