9 ms·

What's HN's thoughts on IoT? To me it looks like yet another buzzword from the "wouldn't it be neat?" crowd (the same people who previously gave us a lot of hyp

by m12k 7y ago

What's HN's thoughts on IoT? To me it looks like yet another buzzword from the "wouldn't it be neat?" crowd (the same people who previously gave us a lot of hype about Semantic Web and P2P social networks) but as before none of the applications are actually worth the hassle, this prevents critical mass from ever being reached, and in reality it's mostly just a way for appliance companies who are already overcharging me for non-repairable planned-obsolescence-ridden products, to overcharge me a bit more. I'm glad someone without a profit motive is taking a stab at it, but I still fail to see the actual uses of it being worth the hassle.

doctorpangloss 7y ago
> who are already overcharging me for non-repairable planned-obsolescence-ridden products, to overcharge me a bit more... NAS devices and networked home speakers are incredibly competitive categories in the IoT space, and as anyone who has actually owned e.g. a Sonos knows, you listen to a lot more music and they've supported the same 12 year old hardware throughout its lifespan.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Why are Sonos speakers instead of simply receivers that your speakers plug in to?
  - detaro 7y ago
    They aren't. Both types of devices exist. (But apparently many people like all-in-one speakers instead of buying multiple separate bits and connecting them)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
hamilyon2 7y ago
Iot is already in consumer electronics space. It is firmly in the present, and it is worth the hassle for a lot of people.
- jpindar 7y ago
  And it's been commonplace in industrial electronics for about 20 years. The reaction to it there was "It has an rs-232 over Ethernet adapter built in? That's convenient."
  - bashinator 7y ago
    My take on what makes the modern IoT different from just attaching networking to devices, is the mandatory cloud backend replacing in-house IT infrastructure. That's what's letting networked devices enter the mainstream consumer market.
temporaryvector 7y ago
I look at it as something that's not really a necessity, but has the potential to improve my quality of life. Unfortunately, most current implementations of the idea are pretty bad. Having to take out my phone or speaking to a voice assistant to turn my lights off or on isn't all that useful. Where IoT really comes into it's own is either doing stuff automatically or doing stuff without requiring my presence (remotely). By far my favorite application of this so far has been the ability to turn my air conditioning on or off remotely, that way I can turn it on about an hour or two before coming home to a comfortably cool room. This increases my quality of life without increasing my electricity bill too much. Other things like opening the blinds in the morning a bit before my alarm and either disabling or lowering the volume of my doorbell are pretty good too. Other useful for me applications (that I'm in the process of implementing) would include monitoring water levels, flow, temperature and pressure to control pumps, heaters (I don't use hot water during the day so turning off the heater would make sense until I'm ready to go to bed, for example), detecting leaks and maybe automatically shutting the water/gas supply. Things like automatically watering the garden if needed, smart reminders (remind me to do something only if I forgot about it, keep silent if I already did it), home security (doors, cameras, alarms), etc. are also things that would benefit from IoT integration. The problem I have right now with most things IoT is that a lot of them are doing their own thing, connecting to their own servers, using their own apps, have different behaviors in the event of power outage and who knows if they'll continue working after the company moves on to newer products, goes bankrupt or gets sold. A lot of modern things you can buy are also pretty trivial in their functionality and don't offer much their regular, manual counterparts. This results in a lot of expensive hardware that's tedious to interact with for little benefit. Someone who actually wants to get a lot out of their smart things (like me), in the current world, can't really go buy off the shelf solutions or even pay someone else to design a solution for them, they have to be technically competent so they can hack existing stuff together, make their own smart things, fix stuff that breaks or stops working, etc. Smart homes are still pretty much the realm of the DIY hobbyist, there's little on the market today that can compete with what a halfway competent hobbyist with some time and money on their hands can cobble together for themselves, particularly with the prevalence of cheap and easy to use hardware platforms (NodeMCU, Arduino, RPi), open source projects in the sphere, cheap and widely available sensors and actuators, good community support, etc. If IoT wants to move away from the current status as expensive, unreliable gimmicks, companies need to stop focusing on the idea of separate smart things and start thinking in terms of smart homes (like the kind we used to see in old sci-fi talking about the futuristic year 2000). There has always been a push in that direction, but it's never been too successful. What needs to happen is that people need to drop the idea of smart things as hardware and start thinking of them as peripherals. Just like your house now has a breaker panel, a hypothetical smart home should have a house computer, running a "House OS" to which all kinds of sensors, actuators and devices can connect through a universal house bus, pretty much the same way you connect a mouse or a camera to your computer today. This would let device makers focus on their devices and the "House OS" maker focus on other issues like remote access, scriptability, security, etc. When I buy a mouse I'm not worried about it working with my computer, I'm not worried that it'll stop working if Logitech goes out of business, I don't need to worry about it catching malware and DDoSing some website or phoning home with all my mousing data. Why should it be any different if I buy a smart light bulb or a smart air conditioner? There are numerous projects working in that direction like this one from Mozilla, HomeKit and whatever else, and DIY solutions almost always have a centralized home server for all that stuff too, so I think we will eventually get there, but for now the modern smart home feels very similar to the way the earliest micro computers were in the late 70s and early 80s.
icebraining 7y ago
IoT is a great success - in industry. At home, from what I can tell, it mostly divides into: - People who apparently live in warzones and need military-level surveillance of their home - People who want to feel like they're living in the Star Trek universe - People with very specific needs, who might take advantage of a commercial IoT device or two in their overall setup
- jon_richards 7y ago
  I'd love to have blackout blinds that close every night and open 30 minutes before my alarm goes off. I haven't been able to find a quality (quiet!) product that does this.
  - jsty 7y ago
    I saw IKEA launched some 'smart blinds' a couple of days ago, and this [0] review mentions timers [0] https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/3865106-3865106 https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/3865106-3865106
    - jon_richards 7y ago
      Not available in the US until October, unfortunately. I'll have to wait and see how loud they are.
  - SomeHacker44 7y ago
    I have Hunter Douglas Pirouette blinds in my room, controlled by Control4. They are very quiet when going from open to close or vice versa, but loud going up to down. Look at a video to understand the difference. Recommended, but not cheap.
    - jon_richards 7y ago
      Yeah, you know it's going to be expensive when you have to call and ask for a quote. It's funny that even the expensive options haven't figured out how to make a quiet electric motor. If you don't mind me asking, how much did yours end up costing per window? Someone else mentioned the ikea shades coming out in October, so I might wait and see how those are. Potentially much cheaper, but no slatted blind effect, so the only option would be to fully raise/lower them (and deal with whatever noise that generates).
Phenomenit 7y ago
Ikea has definitely helped make it more "mainstream" and there selection is just getting bigger and bigger and they are relatively open and easy to access from other software and most importantly cheap.
xienze 7y ago
>it's mostly just a way for appliance companies who are already overcharging me for non-repairable planned-obsolescence-ridden products, to overcharge me a bit more. I agree, but I think the goal is to overcharge you “a lot” more. It seems like no matter what the product is, once it’s “smart”, the price floor is $50.
_pmf_ 7y ago
It gets the sweet government grants, at least in Europe.
SamuelAdams 7y ago
It's a great idea, but companies are building products that no one wants. Here's a few ideas of products / services / suites of items I would actually buy for my home: - Machine to completely do my dishes. End to end. It puts them from the sink to the dishwasher. Runs the dishwasher. Takes them out of the dishwasher and puts them in the cabinet. I do not care if this takes 5 hours - it can run overnight. I just don't want to think about it. - Lets the dog out. If I can do this manually, say when I'm on vacation or something, cool. I saw a post about some dude who used facial recognition software on his cat's door flap to see if the cat was bringing in a dead rodent: it barred the cat from entering unless he dropped the rodent. That's a good start. But I don't want to hire a dog sitter. Just have siri or Alexa or whatever home assistant you have do it. - I want automated recycling. Basically I don't want to think about organizing my garbage. Apparently there's a long list of items that can't be recycled. I honestly can't remember them all, so forcing me to do this manually is always going to result in error.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- 0-_-0 7y ago
  Also: - Cook a meal from scratch. End to end. Takes the ingredients from the fridge and puts a meal on the table at a specified time. Orders new ingredients when it doesn't have them. Also washes the dishes (see above).
  - mrmonkeyman 7y ago
    Dudes, this is not IoT. These are appliances, robots.
    - rusk 7y ago
      No but as IoT you could leverage the power of "The Cloud"
      - blackflame7000 7y ago
AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
> none of the applications are actually worth the hassle That's my take as well. Complexity for the complexity fetishists among us.
moby_click 7y ago
The implementations are disappointing so far. Devices that rely on some vendor internet service are unacceptable. At the very least I'd want a direct connection to the device with a documented API and documented behavior of the firmware. Ideally the firmware itself would (partially) modable. Some safety critical parts may be left inaccessible. For example, I'd want cookware with temperature sensors and a pressure sensor in case of a pressure cooker, a controllable stove and oven with power monitoring, a kitchen hood wit gas sensors, etc. What we can instead are gadgets with mobile apps, that are completely undocumented beyond the UI. Kitchen devices for the commercial sector have been somewhat smart for a while, but are a pain to program and again lack documentation. IoT these days is paying a premium for vendor lock-in.
Chris2048 7y ago
Given the state of IoT seems to be crap-by-default, maybe making homebrew easier would be the solution; They's be insecure-ish maybe, but no less than commercial offerings. With the advent of cheap wifi mcs and 3d printer, maybe this will help: https://www.frolicstudio.com/portfolio/smartians https://www.frolicstudio.com/portfolio/smartians
ololobus 7y ago
I don't think so. My guess is that the industry of consumer electronics is moving toward the right direction. I have two pieces of IoT in my household: 1) Robot vacuum cleaner, and I am absolutely felt in love with it. My floor now is always clean during weekdays, when I am busy working, no more visible dust, crumbs, etc. I just have to clean filter and container once a week, otherwise it is fully autonomous. The only thing I want to add is a self-cleaning and automatic floor mopping, but I've seen such a project on Kickstarter, so it is close. 2) Cheap WiFi RGB light-bulb. I have connected it to Homebridge and it is nice to say 'Hey Siri, turn off the floor lamp' or 'Hey Siri, set the floor lamp to 10%', but it is not one of essentials. There are a lot of questions of course: there should be an option to work completely without proprietary servers and continuous internet connection; 'smart' kettles, hairdriers and so on are useless stuff; security; universal and open protocols; etc.
- RandallBrown 7y ago
  iRobot has made the Braava for a pretty long time to do floor mopping. Or are you talking about a robot that does both?
  - ololobus 7y ago
    Both will be cool, but anyway, to use Braava for mopping you should manually install and fill mopping module. You cannot leave it for a week of fully autonomous work. I have a Roborock S50 and it has a similar mopping cartridge, so actually it can do both, but mopping is semi-manual
- Marsymars 7y ago
  I also have both a robovac and some smart bulbs, but my experiences differ a bit: 1) I push the clean button on my vacuum when I'm leaving the house. Wireless connectivity wouldn't add anything for me. 2) Siri actually works really nicely for bulbs because it functions locally. As a non-iPhone/HomePod user, I'm stuck with Alexa, where every bulb voice command has an obnoxious delay for communication to the Amazon mothership.
justicezyx 7y ago
To me, the IoT is better than AI, in that it enables broad control mediated by humans (with necessary tooling and programming educations). Whereas AI, on the contrary, deprives humans from the ability to control things. My uninformed observations on the issue of IoT tech development: * IoT, in order to be useful, needs to form a common infrastructure first. It's obviously useful for TVs to be able to talk to nearby smartphone directly, to offer rich control. However, if the protocol vary between TV, Micro Oven, Fridge, Washer & Dryer, etc. And each brands of these devices also vary. Apparently no one is going to appreciate the results. Worse yet, if they are interfaced through smartphones, the sparse physical form factor offered through phones are going to confuse users all the time, even if they manage to build a common infrastructure and enabled a uniform experience. At the beginning, the experience would definitely be worse than the dedicated and well optimized interfaces offered by the individual devices nowadays (not saying they are satisfactory either). * On the other hand, the manufacturers, in general, is not tech savvy. Nor they are ready to relinquish their hold on their own market segment. And that worry is justified. Once the common infrastructure is built, they'll be at mercy to the ones who own the tech. As obviously, they are not going to be able to gain that capability themselves. IMHO, this is also why IoT is often with 5G. As the 5G community is historically closer to the manufacturers, than the Internet community. And 5G is itself a fairly mature tech, and has even broader application than IoT, so presumably, they can ride the wave and make sure they are not commoditized in the process.
whazor 7y ago
ESP8266 is essentially an Arduino with WiFi for 2 dollars on AliExpress. With Hass.io and Esphome it becomes trivial to configure these in your home with some sensor or relays. I think once the ecosystem is more ready, you will see more applications. In my view, especially the automations between sensors and actuators are currently bothersome to configure.
detaro 7y ago
If you count Google Home, Amazon Alexa, ... as IoT, you sure a critical mass hasn't been reached yet? There's lots of interesting niches, the overall term "IoT" and what people use it for is incredibly broad (IMHO to the point of uselessness)

by m12k 7y ago

doctorpangloss 7y ago

> who are already overcharging me for non-repairable planned-obsolescence-ridden products, to overcharge me a bit more... NAS devices and networked home speakers are incredibly competitive categories in the IoT space, and as anyone who has actually owned e.g. a Sonos knows, you listen to a lot more music and they've supported the same 12 year old hardware throughout its lifespan.

lonelappde 7y ago
Why are Sonos speakers instead of simply receivers that your speakers plug in to?
- detaro 7y ago
  They aren't. Both types of devices exist. (But apparently many people like all-in-one speakers instead of buying multiple separate bits and connecting them)

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

hamilyon2 7y ago

Iot is already in consumer electronics space. It is firmly in the present, and it is worth the hassle for a lot of people.

jpindar 7y ago
And it's been commonplace in industrial electronics for about 20 years. The reaction to it there was "It has an rs-232 over Ethernet adapter built in? That's convenient."
- bashinator 7y ago
  My take on what makes the modern IoT different from just attaching networking to devices, is the mandatory cloud backend replacing in-house IT infrastructure. That's what's letting networked devices enter the mainstream consumer market.

temporaryvector 7y ago

I look at it as something that's not really a necessity, but has the potential to improve my quality of life. Unfortunately, most current implementations of the idea are pretty bad. Having to take out my phone or speaking to a voice assistant to turn my lights off or on isn't all that useful. Where IoT really comes into it's own is either doing stuff automatically or doing stuff without requiring my presence (remotely). By far my favorite application of this so far has been the ability to turn my air conditioning on or off remotely, that way I can turn it on about an hour or two before coming home to a comfortably cool room. This increases my quality of life without increasing my electricity bill too much. Other things like opening the blinds in the morning a bit before my alarm and either disabling or lowering the volume of my doorbell are pretty good too. Other useful for me applications (that I'm in the process of implementing) would include monitoring water levels, flow, temperature and pressure to control pumps, heaters (I don't use hot water during the day so turning off the heater would make sense until I'm ready to go to bed, for example), detecting leaks and maybe automatically shutting the water/gas supply. Things like automatically watering the garden if needed, smart reminders (remind me to do something only if I forgot about it, keep silent if I already did it), home security (doors, cameras, alarms), etc. are also things that would benefit from IoT integration. The problem I have right now with most things IoT is that a lot of them are doing their own thing, connecting to their own servers, using their own apps, have different behaviors in the event of power outage and who knows if they'll continue working after the company moves on to newer products, goes bankrupt or gets sold. A lot of modern things you can buy are also pretty trivial in their functionality and don't offer much their regular, manual counterparts. This results in a lot of expensive hardware that's tedious to interact with for little benefit. Someone who actually wants to get a lot out of their smart things (like me), in the current world, can't really go buy off the shelf solutions or even pay someone else to design a solution for them, they have to be technically competent so they can hack existing stuff together, make their own smart things, fix stuff that breaks or stops working, etc. Smart homes are still pretty much the realm of the DIY hobbyist, there's little on the market today that can compete with what a halfway competent hobbyist with some time and money on their hands can cobble together for themselves, particularly with the prevalence of cheap and easy to use hardware platforms (NodeMCU, Arduino, RPi), open source projects in the sphere, cheap and widely available sensors and actuators, good community support, etc. If IoT wants to move away from the current status as expensive, unreliable gimmicks, companies need to stop focusing on the idea of separate smart things and start thinking in terms of smart homes (like the kind we used to see in old sci-fi talking about the futuristic year 2000). There has always been a push in that direction, but it's never been too successful. What needs to happen is that people need to drop the idea of smart things as hardware and start thinking of them as peripherals. Just like your house now has a breaker panel, a hypothetical smart home should have a house computer, running a "House OS" to which all kinds of sensors, actuators and devices can connect through a universal house bus, pretty much the same way you connect a mouse or a camera to your computer today. This would let device makers focus on their devices and the "House OS" maker focus on other issues like remote access, scriptability, security, etc. When I buy a mouse I'm not worried about it working with my computer, I'm not worried that it'll stop working if Logitech goes out of business, I don't need to worry about it catching malware and DDoSing some website or phoning home with all my mousing data. Why should it be any different if I buy a smart light bulb or a smart air conditioner? There are numerous projects working in that direction like this one from Mozilla, HomeKit and whatever else, and DIY solutions almost always have a centralized home server for all that stuff too, so I think we will eventually get there, but for now the modern smart home feels very similar to the way the earliest micro computers were in the late 70s and early 80s.

icebraining 7y ago

IoT is a great success - in industry. At home, from what I can tell, it mostly divides into: - People who apparently live in warzones and need military-level surveillance of their home - People who want to feel like they're living in the Star Trek universe - People with very specific needs, who might take advantage of a commercial IoT device or two in their overall setup

jon_richards 7y ago
I'd love to have blackout blinds that close every night and open 30 minutes before my alarm goes off. I haven't been able to find a quality (quiet!) product that does this.
- jsty 7y ago
  I saw IKEA launched some 'smart blinds' a couple of days ago, and this [0] review mentions timers [0] https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/3865106-3865106 https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/3865106-3865106
  - jon_richards 7y ago
    Not available in the US until October, unfortunately. I'll have to wait and see how loud they are.
- SomeHacker44 7y ago
  I have Hunter Douglas Pirouette blinds in my room, controlled by Control4. They are very quiet when going from open to close or vice versa, but loud going up to down. Look at a video to understand the difference. Recommended, but not cheap.
  - jon_richards 7y ago
    Yeah, you know it's going to be expensive when you have to call and ask for a quote. It's funny that even the expensive options haven't figured out how to make a quiet electric motor. If you don't mind me asking, how much did yours end up costing per window? Someone else mentioned the ikea shades coming out in October, so I might wait and see how those are. Potentially much cheaper, but no slatted blind effect, so the only option would be to fully raise/lower them (and deal with whatever noise that generates).

Phenomenit 7y ago

Ikea has definitely helped make it more "mainstream" and there selection is just getting bigger and bigger and they are relatively open and easy to access from other software and most importantly cheap.

xienze 7y ago

>it's mostly just a way for appliance companies who are already overcharging me for non-repairable planned-obsolescence-ridden products, to overcharge me a bit more. I agree, but I think the goal is to overcharge you “a lot” more. It seems like no matter what the product is, once it’s “smart”, the price floor is $50.

_pmf_ 7y ago

It gets the sweet government grants, at least in Europe.

SamuelAdams 7y ago

It's a great idea, but companies are building products that no one wants. Here's a few ideas of products / services / suites of items I would actually buy for my home: - Machine to completely do my dishes. End to end. It puts them from the sink to the dishwasher. Runs the dishwasher. Takes them out of the dishwasher and puts them in the cabinet. I do not care if this takes 5 hours - it can run overnight. I just don't want to think about it. - Lets the dog out. If I can do this manually, say when I'm on vacation or something, cool. I saw a post about some dude who used facial recognition software on his cat's door flap to see if the cat was bringing in a dead rodent: it barred the cat from entering unless he dropped the rodent. That's a good start. But I don't want to hire a dog sitter. Just have siri or Alexa or whatever home assistant you have do it. - I want automated recycling. Basically I don't want to think about organizing my garbage. Apparently there's a long list of items that can't be recycled. I honestly can't remember them all, so forcing me to do this manually is always going to result in error.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
0-_-0 7y ago
Also: - Cook a meal from scratch. End to end. Takes the ingredients from the fridge and puts a meal on the table at a specified time. Orders new ingredients when it doesn't have them. Also washes the dishes (see above).
- mrmonkeyman 7y ago
  Dudes, this is not IoT. These are appliances, robots.
  - rusk 7y ago
    No but as IoT you could leverage the power of "The Cloud"
    - blackflame7000 7y ago

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago

> none of the applications are actually worth the hassle That's my take as well. Complexity for the complexity fetishists among us.

moby_click 7y ago

The implementations are disappointing so far. Devices that rely on some vendor internet service are unacceptable. At the very least I'd want a direct connection to the device with a documented API and documented behavior of the firmware. Ideally the firmware itself would (partially) modable. Some safety critical parts may be left inaccessible. For example, I'd want cookware with temperature sensors and a pressure sensor in case of a pressure cooker, a controllable stove and oven with power monitoring, a kitchen hood wit gas sensors, etc. What we can instead are gadgets with mobile apps, that are completely undocumented beyond the UI. Kitchen devices for the commercial sector have been somewhat smart for a while, but are a pain to program and again lack documentation. IoT these days is paying a premium for vendor lock-in.

Chris2048 7y ago

Given the state of IoT seems to be crap-by-default, maybe making homebrew easier would be the solution; They's be insecure-ish maybe, but no less than commercial offerings. With the advent of cheap wifi mcs and 3d printer, maybe this will help: https://www.frolicstudio.com/portfolio/smartians https://www.frolicstudio.com/portfolio/smartians

ololobus 7y ago

I don't think so. My guess is that the industry of consumer electronics is moving toward the right direction. I have two pieces of IoT in my household: 1) Robot vacuum cleaner, and I am absolutely felt in love with it. My floor now is always clean during weekdays, when I am busy working, no more visible dust, crumbs, etc. I just have to clean filter and container once a week, otherwise it is fully autonomous. The only thing I want to add is a self-cleaning and automatic floor mopping, but I've seen such a project on Kickstarter, so it is close. 2) Cheap WiFi RGB light-bulb. I have connected it to Homebridge and it is nice to say 'Hey Siri, turn off the floor lamp' or 'Hey Siri, set the floor lamp to 10%', but it is not one of essentials. There are a lot of questions of course: there should be an option to work completely without proprietary servers and continuous internet connection; 'smart' kettles, hairdriers and so on are useless stuff; security; universal and open protocols; etc.

RandallBrown 7y ago
iRobot has made the Braava for a pretty long time to do floor mopping. Or are you talking about a robot that does both?
- ololobus 7y ago
  Both will be cool, but anyway, to use Braava for mopping you should manually install and fill mopping module. You cannot leave it for a week of fully autonomous work. I have a Roborock S50 and it has a similar mopping cartridge, so actually it can do both, but mopping is semi-manual
Marsymars 7y ago
I also have both a robovac and some smart bulbs, but my experiences differ a bit: 1) I push the clean button on my vacuum when I'm leaving the house. Wireless connectivity wouldn't add anything for me. 2) Siri actually works really nicely for bulbs because it functions locally. As a non-iPhone/HomePod user, I'm stuck with Alexa, where every bulb voice command has an obnoxious delay for communication to the Amazon mothership.

justicezyx 7y ago

To me, the IoT is better than AI, in that it enables broad control mediated by humans (with necessary tooling and programming educations). Whereas AI, on the contrary, deprives humans from the ability to control things. My uninformed observations on the issue of IoT tech development: * IoT, in order to be useful, needs to form a common infrastructure first. It's obviously useful for TVs to be able to talk to nearby smartphone directly, to offer rich control. However, if the protocol vary between TV, Micro Oven, Fridge, Washer & Dryer, etc. And each brands of these devices also vary. Apparently no one is going to appreciate the results. Worse yet, if they are interfaced through smartphones, the sparse physical form factor offered through phones are going to confuse users all the time, even if they manage to build a common infrastructure and enabled a uniform experience. At the beginning, the experience would definitely be worse than the dedicated and well optimized interfaces offered by the individual devices nowadays (not saying they are satisfactory either). * On the other hand, the manufacturers, in general, is not tech savvy. Nor they are ready to relinquish their hold on their own market segment. And that worry is justified. Once the common infrastructure is built, they'll be at mercy to the ones who own the tech. As obviously, they are not going to be able to gain that capability themselves. IMHO, this is also why IoT is often with 5G. As the 5G community is historically closer to the manufacturers, than the Internet community. And 5G is itself a fairly mature tech, and has even broader application than IoT, so presumably, they can ride the wave and make sure they are not commoditized in the process.

whazor 7y ago

ESP8266 is essentially an Arduino with WiFi for 2 dollars on AliExpress. With Hass.io and Esphome it becomes trivial to configure these in your home with some sensor or relays. I think once the ecosystem is more ready, you will see more applications. In my view, especially the automations between sensors and actuators are currently bothersome to configure.

detaro 7y ago

If you count Google Home, Amazon Alexa, ... as IoT, you sure a critical mass hasn't been reached yet? There's lots of interesting niches, the overall term "IoT" and what people use it for is incredibly broad (IMHO to the point of uselessness)