7 ms·

All I want is a thermostat with a better screen and a UI that doesn't require cycling through abbreviated options. Beyond that, I don't want a "smart home", and

All I want is a thermostat with a better screen and a UI that doesn't require cycling through abbreviated options. Beyond that, I don't want a "smart home", and especially not one connected directly to FAANG. We don't need these devices, and even non engineers aren't exactly clamoring for them. It's more like everyone just likes the novelty of it all, but is generally disappointed when the devices under deliver. People should reject devices from Amazon. As I have mentioned in other HN threads, I am speaking as someone who quit their job to build a business based on Alexa. You have no real control over such devices, they are prone to flipping on randomly, and most of the advantages are in Amazon's favor. One day, these tech companies might become our literal governments. I'm not going to help them do this because controlling my house with my voice is a neat parlor trick.

stronglikedan 7y ago
> a thermostat with a better screen and a UI that doesn't require cycling through abbreviated options. Love my Ecobee.
- ravenstine 7y ago
  How would you rate it on a scale of "big tech obtrusiveness"? I ask because I've just moved in to a new condo which has ye olde thermostat that I find impossible to program properly, so I'd like to replace it with a modern one, but unfortunately Nest is owned by Google. :( I'd like something that doesn't connect to the cloud.
  - rnicholus 7y ago
    As an owner of an ecobee, I’d say it falls into the category of “ok” overall. The remote sensors feature is neat, but the home IQ calculator is clearly meaningless. They even managed to mess up weather forecasting. It’s functionally reliable, but definitely some disappointments. In short, it does not really benefit from internet access at all. In fact, I may just disconnect it and see if it still serves me well enough.
    - scrumper 7y ago
      Same here, though I like the connectivity because it lets me do things like turn the heating or AC on remotely if I’m heading home at an unusual time. Otherwise, I get no real benefit from it being connected.
    - Johnny555 7y ago
      I've been pretty happy with my ecobee - the HomeIQ stuff seems like a gimmick (and is geared toward making the Ecobee seem like it's saving you money), so I don't really care about it, but the thermostat does a good job of it's core function of warming my house to the setpoint at the right time. I used to set my old programmable thermostat to turn on the heat an hour before I wake up and sometimes the house was too cold, the Ecobee turns on the heat somewhere between 30 and 90 minutes before I wake up to get the temperature up at the right time. Not sure if it uses weather data or just looks at how cold the house is to make that decision, but it does a good job. The internet connectivity is useful for me since I'm away from home a lot, so I like the ability to get low temperature alerts as well as the ability to turn on vacation mode remotely or adjust the temperature (so if the forecast is going to be below 0F, I can turn up the heat from the normal 50 vacation temp to 60 to make frozen pipes in exterior walls less likely). If you don't care about that, then yeah, the internet access is not really necessary.
    - enraged_camel 7y ago
      I'm super happy with my Ecobee. On multiple occasions I've gone on long trips and forgotten to put the A/C on vacation mode. It's real nice to be able to control it from my phone. Similarly, the City of Austin has an energy savings program in summer where on hot days they will (with your consent) remotely turn up all connected smart A/Cs by a few degrees, which drastically reduces strain on the electric grid. I think I got $75 when I joined. And it can be overridden, so overall it has been a great boon.
      - isaacdl 7y ago
        I'd never heard about that Austin program. That's pretty cool! Link: https://savings.austinenergy.com/rebates/residential/offerings/cooling-and-heating/pp-thermostat/ https://savings.austinenergy.com/rebates/residential/offerin...
  - stronglikedan 7y ago
    Unfortunately, it does connect to the cloud, but as far as I know, it's not under the control of any big-tech yet (although, I could, admittedly, be naive in that regard). I have the 3, which isn't alexa-enabled, but the 4 is. It's a nice UI that's easy to program, and has a lot of options like room sensors that detect temp and whether the room is occupied (some may not like that, but the sensors are an add-on). I suppose I'd rate it a 3 or 4 on an intrusiveness scale of 10.
    - diogofranco 7y ago
      I can understand the worry about big tech due to the scale, but on a personal decision like that, I'm much more worried about giving my data away to an ecobee type company.
saltminer 7y ago
>We don't need these devices, and even non engineers aren't exactly clamoring for them. Even "smart" thermostats can be really crap. My mother got one and it couldn't connect to her wifi network because it doesn't support some characters in the password. She just leaves it offline since she doesn't want to change the password and deal with updating all her devices.
- scrumbledober 7y ago
  anything that connects to wifi should support at least any character on a standard keyboard. I have a printer that I had to start a side network for because I couldn't type an apostrophe on it...
  - ravenstine 7y ago
    One of my previous bosses didn't believe in non-ASCII characters because he felt they were "invalid". For some reason, he thought that latin1 database encoding was "standard" and that utf8mb4 is some kind of hack. I explained to him why we should support UTF-8, but he wouldn't hear it. Instead of migrating the database to use utf8mb4, he had me strip out the "invalid" characters from user input, which I wrote as Rack middleware if I remember correctly. Either the characters would be replaced by their closest ASCII cousins or get removed entirely. This was totally unnecessary and made it impossible for the product to support other languages. I imagine there are other bosses just like him out there who think it's "invalid" when someone uses characters other than A-z in their passwords, and told the engineers to do what I did for things like your printer.
  - devteambravo 7y ago
    Today, I learned why printers get taken over so much. The brute force dictionary is much smaller
    - gowld 7y ago
      No, it's because they don't blocker attackers after finite attempts, and often have default or blank passwords
Pxtl 7y ago
I have a thermostat from the 90s with a pretty clean UI using old fashioned LCD . It allows me to set times and temperatures for "sleep", "wake", "leave", and "return" for weekdays and weekends. No silly abbreviations other than the three-letter names for the days of the week. If I tweak the temperature it keeps it until the end of the window unless I press the "hold temp" toggle button, which locks it indefinitely. It doesn't need a full OS and a full pixel display. Just clear, thoughtful design.
- LolWolf 7y ago
  Making one of these things nice (even with a good LCD!) should really not cost much. Honestly wondering if it's worth just going into the market for making "dumb" home stuff that has a slick UI that people want. The only problem I've seen with it is that the people who would actually think about buying them are similar to my family members: tech-savvy enough to want something like this, yet still wanting it to be internet connected. ("Why should I not be able to WiFi control my thermostat? WiFi chips are so cheap nowadays!") The problem I see is that (a) most people don't really care and will stick with whatever they have, while (b) the people that could care usually want IoT devices and (c) the people that do care are a very small, remaining portion of the rest (e.g., some proportion of the usual HN audience).
  - dreamcompiler 7y ago
    You can't get VC for any consumer hardware product that doesn't generate a continuing revenue stream. That means either charging a monthly fee for cloud connectivity or selling customers' data. Both require Internet connectivity, even though that doesn't really add much objective value (and creates huge security problems) for so-called "smart" home devices.
    - ravenstine 7y ago
      As far as I can tell, you wouldn't need VC funding for that anyway. A thermostat, as far as I can tell, is really a set of relays that are toggled by a circuit board connected to a thermometer. A quick search on the topic brings up a lot of successful attempts at making thermostats with Raspberry Pis. It doesn't seem like advanced hardware by any stretch of the imagination. Prototyping should be very easy. I'm sure that a Pi Zero would suffice, along with a board with relays connected to GPIO as well as a thermometer circuit, and an LCD screen. The production product could use a custom built stripped-down ARM board with integrated components, and probably be made for cheap. I'd pay $150 for a dumb thermostat that has a nice LCD screen. Even better if it's hackable(i.e. I can install my own software on it).
Johnny555 7y ago
The Ecobee thermostat seems to provide that, it's a fully functional smart thermostat even without a Wifi connection. You don't get weather adjustments, remote access with the app, and online reports, but otherwise it's fully functional.
sizzle 7y ago
Playing chess with my microwave everyday to input simple instructions is frustrating to say the least. I think we need to focus on usability over IoT for a lot of home appliances.
tzs 7y ago
Depending on your heat source, it may be fairly easy to make your own thermostat. Although I have a heat pump, which is much more efficient than electrical resistance heaters, I have found that I can actually save money in winter by closing a couple interior doors and putting up a couple of interior curtains to somewhat separate the room I spend 99% of my time in and one bathroom from the rest of the house thermally, and then heat just that room with an electric space heater. The heat pump thermostat is in that room, so the heat pump stays off. I check the rest of the house now and then, and when it gets too cold I open the doors and curtains, turn off the space heater, and let the heat pump get the whole house back in range. That's a net win because although the heat pump is more efficient, the gains from that are more than made up for by heating parts of the house I'm not in. I dialed the space heater temperature setting way up so that it would be on whenever it had power, and plugged it into a DLI IoT Relay [1], and hooked a Raspberry Pi up to the IoT relay's control interface. I added a DS18B20 temperature sensor [2] to the Pi. The only other parts needed are a 4.7 K resistor, and whatever you want to use to connect things (I used a small solderless breadboard [3] and premade jumper wire [4]). Wiring is easy. GPIO06 to Relay Control+, Ground to Relay Control -, 3.3 V to DS18B20 Vcc, GPIO04 to DS18B20 DATA, Ground to DS18B20 Ground. 4.7 K resistor between DATA and Vcc on the DS18B20. Then it's just a matter of some Python code to watch the temperature [5][6], and turn the space heater on and off via the relay to keep it in range. I went for simplicity, and just have a print statement that periodically prints the time and temperature, the min and max setting, and whether the heater is on or not, and I can check that via ssh. The min and max settings come from a text file, which I can ssh in and change. It would not be hard to add to this generating a graph and making it available on the web, and making a web interface to change the range, but I don't need that. Interface is whatever you want to build on top of that. [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00WV7GMA2 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00WV7GMA2 [2] https://www.amazon.com/TOOGOO-DS18B20-Digital-Temperature-Arduino/dp/B077NYFYZS https://www.amazon.com/TOOGOO-DS18B20-Digital-Temperature-Ar... [3] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01EV640I6 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01EV640I6 [4] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00M5WLZDW https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00M5WLZDW [5] https://pastebin.com/JaakzGsZ https://pastebin.com/JaakzGsZ [6] As with many projects of this type, that code started out as quick experimenting, reached a point where although it was still ugly throw away code it actually did what I needed, and so I never got around to then writing a writing a proper production version with comments, good error handling, and so on.
dreamcompiler 7y ago
I have wanted the Star Trek world where we talk to computers for a long time. But at no point did I envision everything Kirk said to the computer being transmitted, monitored, and recorded by Big Brother. Especially when there's no technical reason it has to be this way. Fuck FAANG, I'll keep my keyboard.
- around_here 7y ago
  It was always that way, except it was never used by corporate entities to abuse you.
- gowld 7y ago
  In Star Trek TNG, everyone can track everyone else. That was a common plot point in almost every episode..
userbinator 7y ago
The UI of my thermostat is a simple dial showing the heat/cool setpoints and the current temperature. It is completely dumb and that's the way I like it, because its only job is to keep my house at a constant temperature. Others are often surprised that I work in tech, yet everything else about me has been described as "luddist" --- but that's because I know about the "dark side" of all these new "smart" things.
- gowld 7y ago
  A constant temp house wastes money and pollutes the environment.
  - userbinator 7y ago
    ...and all these new e-waste-generating technologies don't? Also, thermal fatigue is a well-known failure mode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_cycling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_cycling
- antisemiotic 7y ago
  If having a thermostat at all is considered "luddite" in USA, then I'm glad I live in a "commie block" and the only temperature control is a valve on a central heating radiator. Can't get wiretapped through that. Though now I wonder if it was possible to attach a microphone to the radiator, and listen to sound picked up from other flats...

stronglikedan 7y ago

> a thermostat with a better screen and a UI that doesn't require cycling through abbreviated options. Love my Ecobee.

ravenstine 7y ago
How would you rate it on a scale of "big tech obtrusiveness"? I ask because I've just moved in to a new condo which has ye olde thermostat that I find impossible to program properly, so I'd like to replace it with a modern one, but unfortunately Nest is owned by Google. :( I'd like something that doesn't connect to the cloud.
- rnicholus 7y ago
  As an owner of an ecobee, I’d say it falls into the category of “ok” overall. The remote sensors feature is neat, but the home IQ calculator is clearly meaningless. They even managed to mess up weather forecasting. It’s functionally reliable, but definitely some disappointments. In short, it does not really benefit from internet access at all. In fact, I may just disconnect it and see if it still serves me well enough.
  - scrumper 7y ago
    Same here, though I like the connectivity because it lets me do things like turn the heating or AC on remotely if I’m heading home at an unusual time. Otherwise, I get no real benefit from it being connected.
  - Johnny555 7y ago
    I've been pretty happy with my ecobee - the HomeIQ stuff seems like a gimmick (and is geared toward making the Ecobee seem like it's saving you money), so I don't really care about it, but the thermostat does a good job of it's core function of warming my house to the setpoint at the right time. I used to set my old programmable thermostat to turn on the heat an hour before I wake up and sometimes the house was too cold, the Ecobee turns on the heat somewhere between 30 and 90 minutes before I wake up to get the temperature up at the right time. Not sure if it uses weather data or just looks at how cold the house is to make that decision, but it does a good job. The internet connectivity is useful for me since I'm away from home a lot, so I like the ability to get low temperature alerts as well as the ability to turn on vacation mode remotely or adjust the temperature (so if the forecast is going to be below 0F, I can turn up the heat from the normal 50 vacation temp to 60 to make frozen pipes in exterior walls less likely). If you don't care about that, then yeah, the internet access is not really necessary.
  - enraged_camel 7y ago
    I'm super happy with my Ecobee. On multiple occasions I've gone on long trips and forgotten to put the A/C on vacation mode. It's real nice to be able to control it from my phone. Similarly, the City of Austin has an energy savings program in summer where on hot days they will (with your consent) remotely turn up all connected smart A/Cs by a few degrees, which drastically reduces strain on the electric grid. I think I got $75 when I joined. And it can be overridden, so overall it has been a great boon.
    - isaacdl 7y ago
      I'd never heard about that Austin program. That's pretty cool! Link: https://savings.austinenergy.com/rebates/residential/offerings/cooling-and-heating/pp-thermostat/ https://savings.austinenergy.com/rebates/residential/offerin...
- stronglikedan 7y ago
  Unfortunately, it does connect to the cloud, but as far as I know, it's not under the control of any big-tech yet (although, I could, admittedly, be naive in that regard). I have the 3, which isn't alexa-enabled, but the 4 is. It's a nice UI that's easy to program, and has a lot of options like room sensors that detect temp and whether the room is occupied (some may not like that, but the sensors are an add-on). I suppose I'd rate it a 3 or 4 on an intrusiveness scale of 10.
  - diogofranco 7y ago
    I can understand the worry about big tech due to the scale, but on a personal decision like that, I'm much more worried about giving my data away to an ecobee type company.

saltminer 7y ago

>We don't need these devices, and even non engineers aren't exactly clamoring for them. Even "smart" thermostats can be really crap. My mother got one and it couldn't connect to her wifi network because it doesn't support some characters in the password. She just leaves it offline since she doesn't want to change the password and deal with updating all her devices.

scrumbledober 7y ago
anything that connects to wifi should support at least any character on a standard keyboard. I have a printer that I had to start a side network for because I couldn't type an apostrophe on it...
- ravenstine 7y ago
  One of my previous bosses didn't believe in non-ASCII characters because he felt they were "invalid". For some reason, he thought that latin1 database encoding was "standard" and that utf8mb4 is some kind of hack. I explained to him why we should support UTF-8, but he wouldn't hear it. Instead of migrating the database to use utf8mb4, he had me strip out the "invalid" characters from user input, which I wrote as Rack middleware if I remember correctly. Either the characters would be replaced by their closest ASCII cousins or get removed entirely. This was totally unnecessary and made it impossible for the product to support other languages. I imagine there are other bosses just like him out there who think it's "invalid" when someone uses characters other than A-z in their passwords, and told the engineers to do what I did for things like your printer.
- devteambravo 7y ago
  Today, I learned why printers get taken over so much. The brute force dictionary is much smaller
  - gowld 7y ago
    No, it's because they don't blocker attackers after finite attempts, and often have default or blank passwords

Pxtl 7y ago

I have a thermostat from the 90s with a pretty clean UI using old fashioned LCD . It allows me to set times and temperatures for "sleep", "wake", "leave", and "return" for weekdays and weekends. No silly abbreviations other than the three-letter names for the days of the week. If I tweak the temperature it keeps it until the end of the window unless I press the "hold temp" toggle button, which locks it indefinitely. It doesn't need a full OS and a full pixel display. Just clear, thoughtful design.

LolWolf 7y ago
Making one of these things nice (even with a good LCD!) should really not cost much. Honestly wondering if it's worth just going into the market for making "dumb" home stuff that has a slick UI that people want. The only problem I've seen with it is that the people who would actually think about buying them are similar to my family members: tech-savvy enough to want something like this, yet still wanting it to be internet connected. ("Why should I not be able to WiFi control my thermostat? WiFi chips are so cheap nowadays!") The problem I see is that (a) most people don't really care and will stick with whatever they have, while (b) the people that could care usually want IoT devices and (c) the people that do care are a very small, remaining portion of the rest (e.g., some proportion of the usual HN audience).
- dreamcompiler 7y ago
  You can't get VC for any consumer hardware product that doesn't generate a continuing revenue stream. That means either charging a monthly fee for cloud connectivity or selling customers' data. Both require Internet connectivity, even though that doesn't really add much objective value (and creates huge security problems) for so-called "smart" home devices.
  - ravenstine 7y ago
    As far as I can tell, you wouldn't need VC funding for that anyway. A thermostat, as far as I can tell, is really a set of relays that are toggled by a circuit board connected to a thermometer. A quick search on the topic brings up a lot of successful attempts at making thermostats with Raspberry Pis. It doesn't seem like advanced hardware by any stretch of the imagination. Prototyping should be very easy. I'm sure that a Pi Zero would suffice, along with a board with relays connected to GPIO as well as a thermometer circuit, and an LCD screen. The production product could use a custom built stripped-down ARM board with integrated components, and probably be made for cheap. I'd pay $150 for a dumb thermostat that has a nice LCD screen. Even better if it's hackable(i.e. I can install my own software on it).

Johnny555 7y ago

The Ecobee thermostat seems to provide that, it's a fully functional smart thermostat even without a Wifi connection. You don't get weather adjustments, remote access with the app, and online reports, but otherwise it's fully functional.

sizzle 7y ago

Playing chess with my microwave everyday to input simple instructions is frustrating to say the least. I think we need to focus on usability over IoT for a lot of home appliances.

tzs 7y ago

Depending on your heat source, it may be fairly easy to make your own thermostat. Although I have a heat pump, which is much more efficient than electrical resistance heaters, I have found that I can actually save money in winter by closing a couple interior doors and putting up a couple of interior curtains to somewhat separate the room I spend 99% of my time in and one bathroom from the rest of the house thermally, and then heat just that room with an electric space heater. The heat pump thermostat is in that room, so the heat pump stays off. I check the rest of the house now and then, and when it gets too cold I open the doors and curtains, turn off the space heater, and let the heat pump get the whole house back in range. That's a net win because although the heat pump is more efficient, the gains from that are more than made up for by heating parts of the house I'm not in. I dialed the space heater temperature setting way up so that it would be on whenever it had power, and plugged it into a DLI IoT Relay [1], and hooked a Raspberry Pi up to the IoT relay's control interface. I added a DS18B20 temperature sensor [2] to the Pi. The only other parts needed are a 4.7 K resistor, and whatever you want to use to connect things (I used a small solderless breadboard [3] and premade jumper wire [4]). Wiring is easy. GPIO06 to Relay Control+, Ground to Relay Control -, 3.3 V to DS18B20 Vcc, GPIO04 to DS18B20 DATA, Ground to DS18B20 Ground. 4.7 K resistor between DATA and Vcc on the DS18B20. Then it's just a matter of some Python code to watch the temperature [5][6], and turn the space heater on and off via the relay to keep it in range. I went for simplicity, and just have a print statement that periodically prints the time and temperature, the min and max setting, and whether the heater is on or not, and I can check that via ssh. The min and max settings come from a text file, which I can ssh in and change. It would not be hard to add to this generating a graph and making it available on the web, and making a web interface to change the range, but I don't need that. Interface is whatever you want to build on top of that. [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00WV7GMA2 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00WV7GMA2 [2] https://www.amazon.com/TOOGOO-DS18B20-Digital-Temperature-Arduino/dp/B077NYFYZS https://www.amazon.com/TOOGOO-DS18B20-Digital-Temperature-Ar... [3] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01EV640I6 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01EV640I6 [4] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00M5WLZDW https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00M5WLZDW [5] https://pastebin.com/JaakzGsZ https://pastebin.com/JaakzGsZ [6] As with many projects of this type, that code started out as quick experimenting, reached a point where although it was still ugly throw away code it actually did what I needed, and so I never got around to then writing a writing a proper production version with comments, good error handling, and so on.

dreamcompiler 7y ago

I have wanted the Star Trek world where we talk to computers for a long time. But at no point did I envision everything Kirk said to the computer being transmitted, monitored, and recorded by Big Brother. Especially when there's no technical reason it has to be this way. Fuck FAANG, I'll keep my keyboard.

around_here 7y ago
It was always that way, except it was never used by corporate entities to abuse you.
gowld 7y ago
In Star Trek TNG, everyone can track everyone else. That was a common plot point in almost every episode..

userbinator 7y ago

The UI of my thermostat is a simple dial showing the heat/cool setpoints and the current temperature. It is completely dumb and that's the way I like it, because its only job is to keep my house at a constant temperature. Others are often surprised that I work in tech, yet everything else about me has been described as "luddist" --- but that's because I know about the "dark side" of all these new "smart" things.

gowld 7y ago
A constant temp house wastes money and pollutes the environment.
- userbinator 7y ago
  ...and all these new e-waste-generating technologies don't? Also, thermal fatigue is a well-known failure mode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_cycling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_cycling
antisemiotic 7y ago
If having a thermostat at all is considered "luddite" in USA, then I'm glad I live in a "commie block" and the only temperature control is a valve on a central heating radiator. Can't get wiretapped through that. Though now I wonder if it was possible to attach a microphone to the radiator, and listen to sound picked up from other flats...