3 ms·

The entire market of smart-home shit's gonna keep being terrible until/unless some decent, reliable, inter-operable, long-lived standard takes over or is impose

The entire market of smart-home shit's gonna keep being terrible until/unless some decent, reliable, inter-operable, long-lived standard takes over or is imposed. It's all too expensive to be worth it unless you can be pretty sure it'll keep working for at least a couple decades. Imagine if lightbulb sockets were proprietary! It'd be madness. The current state of things with smart home stuff is worse than that, because at least there's a decent chance proprietary-lightbulb-socket world would have plentiful adapters and 3rd-party manufacturers for most or all types. The odds of a company stepping in to provide a software-side fix for Insteon dying, are slim.

Swizec 4y ago
> Imagine if lightbulb sockets were proprietary Pretty sure lightbulb sockets used to be proprietary. And in the UK it used to be common to buy appliances with just a cable that you wired up to a plug because there was no common standard for outlets. There was even a brief period when appliances plugged into lightbulb sockets! Remember the 90’s and what phone chargers looked like until the EU put its foot down and said “This is dumb, everyone should use USB for charging”. Now phone chargers are interchangeable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_AC_power_plugs_and_sockets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_AC_power_plugs_and_... Great episode of Absolute History about this: https://youtu.be/sxndE740wlo https://youtu.be/sxndE740wlo
- tialaramex 4y ago
  AIUI the reason appliances in the UK used to be supplied with a bare cable is that it avoids the need for extra SKUs. If you sell a Washing Machine which can do anywhere from 100 to 250V AC input, you can make 5000 of them, and you don't care if 50 or 500 of those sell in England, it's all the same to you since it's the same SKU. If the English ones need BS1363 plugs (as they do today) then that's a separate SKU. The reason it changed is that it turns out a ludicrous number of people can't safely and correctly wire a plug. On older circuits if you wire Earth where Neutral should go, the appliance will probably work, but now you've significantly increased the risk of faults becoming fatal. Also UK plugs are fused and left to their own devices almost everybody will put a 13A fuse in the plug (the maximum size commonly available and equivalent to the maximum ~3kW energy draw for 240V home mains) even though very few appliances need that. So now when there's a fault and your 5W bedside clock radio is drawing 2kW (plenty of energy to start a fire), the fuse doesn't blow and instead your house burns down. It's very easy to tell manufacturers "Put the right size fuse in" because they're ordering crates of fuses they can just order the correct one, but home owners know the 13A fuse will "work" so they're not going to buy a 5A fuse instead and risk finding they've got the wrong kind. As a nerd kid I cared a lot about this, and I would maybe find about half of appliances I was allowed to examine were wrong in some way, most often over-size fuse but sometimes loose wiring or even just straight up wrongly wired. Today those appliances have a pre-installed plug which is almost certain to have the right size fuse and be correctly wired just because it was done as a production line task so somebody was actually trained and given the appropriate equipment.
api 4y ago
Yeah this plus the cloud privacy nightmare are what's kept me away. I don't fancy having my entire house go braindead because a company goes bankrupt and shuts down its cloud, gets hacked, or experiences a gigantic devops mistake like Atlassian just endured. "We're sorry, your house is now bricked." The entire thing is madness on lots of levels. Cloud use is an anti-feature for me in anything that does not objectively benefit from cloud compute offload, rich collaboration, or access to large amounts of data. It doesn't totally rule it out but if I see that it has to call out to the cloud that's a ding against it.
Andrex 4y ago
There's some hope in Matter... if it doesn't keep getting delayed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard)

Swizec 4y ago

> Imagine if lightbulb sockets were proprietary Pretty sure lightbulb sockets used to be proprietary. And in the UK it used to be common to buy appliances with just a cable that you wired up to a plug because there was no common standard for outlets. There was even a brief period when appliances plugged into lightbulb sockets! Remember the 90’s and what phone chargers looked like until the EU put its foot down and said “This is dumb, everyone should use USB for charging”. Now phone chargers are interchangeable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_AC_power_plugs_and_sockets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_AC_power_plugs_and_... Great episode of Absolute History about this: https://youtu.be/sxndE740wlo https://youtu.be/sxndE740wlo

tialaramex 4y ago
AIUI the reason appliances in the UK used to be supplied with a bare cable is that it avoids the need for extra SKUs. If you sell a Washing Machine which can do anywhere from 100 to 250V AC input, you can make 5000 of them, and you don't care if 50 or 500 of those sell in England, it's all the same to you since it's the same SKU. If the English ones need BS1363 plugs (as they do today) then that's a separate SKU. The reason it changed is that it turns out a ludicrous number of people can't safely and correctly wire a plug. On older circuits if you wire Earth where Neutral should go, the appliance will probably work, but now you've significantly increased the risk of faults becoming fatal. Also UK plugs are fused and left to their own devices almost everybody will put a 13A fuse in the plug (the maximum size commonly available and equivalent to the maximum ~3kW energy draw for 240V home mains) even though very few appliances need that. So now when there's a fault and your 5W bedside clock radio is drawing 2kW (plenty of energy to start a fire), the fuse doesn't blow and instead your house burns down. It's very easy to tell manufacturers "Put the right size fuse in" because they're ordering crates of fuses they can just order the correct one, but home owners know the 13A fuse will "work" so they're not going to buy a 5A fuse instead and risk finding they've got the wrong kind. As a nerd kid I cared a lot about this, and I would maybe find about half of appliances I was allowed to examine were wrong in some way, most often over-size fuse but sometimes loose wiring or even just straight up wrongly wired. Today those appliances have a pre-installed plug which is almost certain to have the right size fuse and be correctly wired just because it was done as a production line task so somebody was actually trained and given the appropriate equipment.

api 4y ago

Yeah this plus the cloud privacy nightmare are what's kept me away. I don't fancy having my entire house go braindead because a company goes bankrupt and shuts down its cloud, gets hacked, or experiences a gigantic devops mistake like Atlassian just endured. "We're sorry, your house is now bricked." The entire thing is madness on lots of levels. Cloud use is an anti-feature for me in anything that does not objectively benefit from cloud compute offload, rich collaboration, or access to large amounts of data. It doesn't totally rule it out but if I see that it has to call out to the cloud that's a ding against it.

Andrex 4y ago

There's some hope in Matter... if it doesn't keep getting delayed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard)