I've got a Honeywell model [1] I can set from anywhere via an app. It also has scheduling it falls back to if I haven't overridden it via the app or faceplate. My winter weekday schedule: 66 at 6am, 62 at 9am, 65 at 4pm, 62 at 10pm.
1) https://www.amazon.com/Honeywell-Programmable-Thermostat-RTH...
I made a web interface so that I can control it with my phone when I'm not at home.
It is based off an ESP8266 placed in the boiler which controls a relay to tell the boiler whether to heat or not, and an ESP8266 in my office that has a temperature probe and a rudimentary user interface, and runs a web server to allow remote temperature inputs, and controls the ESP8266-relay over WiFi.
The 3d-printed enclosure is rather coarse, but does the job: https://img.jes.xxx/1585
EDIT: Failure of the system could result in you freezing, but that's true of anything that controls your heating, and at least this is a device you understand are in control of, and it doesn't rely on anything outside your house. If it fails and you're freezing, just short the terminals of the relay while you debug it.
An easy way to insure against such failure is to put your homemade thermostat in parallel with an old fashioned thermostat which is set to a constant low temperature.
This is one thing that's constantly on my mind when toying with long-lived electronics projects. Do we know of an actual precedent here?
[1] I work for Honeywell
When I go on vacation for a week there is no way to say "go to max energy savings while saving my pipes mode until just before I get back." I can reprogram the entire week, but then I lose what is the correct programming for normal until I reprogram it. Worse my house is uncomfortable when I get back - usually when I'm tired and want to jump into bed asap (if I know I'll get home about noon I'll look for a tourist thing to kill some time long before I get home).
I don't always have the same schedule. When I'm home sick I don't want to reprogram it. Some weekends I'm at home all day, some I'm out all day - which program is right? IoT thermostats also through privacy and reliability concerns in. The old fashioned mercury thermostats from the 1950s still work as good as new. While your IoT thermostat work next year - some do not.
All the above is made even harder because my house is headed by an air source heat pump: if I'm returning at 9pm it might or might not be better to start heating my house at 11am when the day is warmest. The algorithm depends on the weather which is best predicted the day of.
The problem is that you're renting so you can't do any cool home automation stuff.
https://nest.com/thermostats/nest-learning-thermostat/overvi...
My HP printer can reorder ink when it runs out.
Sadly, that all got balled up almost immediately. The offer came with a mailer for exhausted cartridges. I put them in the mailer, put the mailer in the box (rural route). My spouse mistook it for incoming mail, ripped it open, said "Why is HP sending us empty printer cartridges?"
Fortunately HP had a button to click on the web site to get another mailer mailed to me. I clicked, got the mailer (which was entirely different from the one that came with the offer) and sent the cartridges off.
That was weeks ago. No new ink. My credit card continues to be debited monthly, but the printer is defunct and now what?
These things are so, so prone to getting in a wad and leaving you frustrated. More work than actually buying new cartridges as needed.
I was always running out of black ink, or, because of infrequent usage, my inkjet cartridge/head would be clogged. I was so sick of it. I just wanted to hit "print", and have the printer spit out the page - like I could at my employer.
What did my employer use?
A laser printer. So I started looking into it. The last time I had, such printers were still expensive, but they had come down in price. But even better, because of this, businesses and others were getting rid of their "old and slow" b/w laser printers and upgrading to faster color ones. I eventually found my first laser printer at a computer surplus outlet.
It was an HP Laserjet 6M - I paid $100.00 for it, but it didn't have a cartridge. It was a gamble, but I asked the place if I could return it if it didn't work, they said "sure".
I went to a local ink cartridge and printer ribbon store I knew about (they were an old-time fixture here, they even sold typewriter ribbons! Sadly, they no longer exist), and told them my dilemma - I needed a cartridge to test with, I didn't know if the printer worked. They gave me a mostly used cartridge from their refill pile, and told me to bring it back and they'd refill it for me if it worked! Grateful, I took it home and plugged it in.
It worked perfectly! I ran the self-test, and the printer only had about a 25000 page count - a baby! These old LaserJets are tanks, and that was a very low page count. I took the cartridge back, and got it refilled. Total score!
Some time went by, eventually I upgraded the memory to the max (8 MB using common SIMMs) and got the PostScript board for it (so now it is technically a 6MP). It still chugs away, prints when I want it to, I just have to keep feeding it paper - which is rare, because I don't print much.
I'm also only on my third cartridge; I can get them fairly cheap from multiple places, and still a lot of business use these tanks because they are so damn reliable. It isn't a fast printer, but I don't need this thing to spit out a book a minute, just a page here and there; I can wait.
One of the best computing purchases I ever made.
Years later I found a 5P at a Goodwill with the cartridge. I fired it up in the store, and it too had a very low page count (around 15K). Bought it for $25.00 and stuck it in my shop - I also bought the postscript board for it as well. My original intention was to use it for printing toner transfer PCB art, but costs for PCB fabbing have dropped low enough that it isn't really worth it. So I just keep it if and when my 6MP dies...
I figure I'll pass away long before these workhorses do.
Similarly tagging stuff that you bring yourself to any group event (let's say you are an event organizer and you hand out things and you want to easily account for them).
Sole pressure monitors in shoes would be great to detect problems with stance/gait/load, etc.
Rather than "IoT" tags, I'm of the opinion that we should use dirt-cheap (a few ¢ each, rather than $10+ for a full "IoT tag") RFID tags, and have a reader that can be accessed by a phone over Bluetooth (or have a few permanently installed around the house). Just need to drive the cost of the readers down.
I'm a bit astonished how it still costs 15 EUR for a BLE thingie. :o
Before we had to navigate our way to the other side of a open plan room in the dark to find a light switch, now the motion sensor triggers the Hue bulb.
Plus we have a dimmer without needing an electrician to install one, and can set other colors of light for the mood or to improve the atmosphere of a movie.
You can get started with Philip's Hue for $50 (on Black Friday) and at that price point it is well worth it for a lot of benefits/circumstances.
This would be easier to determine if I lived alone. When someone comes in, someone else could be sleeping, watching something in the dark, etc. There's a decision tree for which lights to turn on and how bright.
What I would expect the lights to do is more complex than I would want to spend the time perfecting. I like tinkering, but not with things that I actually rely on. That's why I haven't tried it. Well, that, and because I'm not willing to give an appliance an internet uplink.
You can get an ESP8266 individually for $5, and its only a few more dollars for a relay or a couple of MOSFETS depending on what you want to control. You can use the Homie for ESP8266 framework to take care of the boilerplate, and build functional device that communicates over MQTT in less than an hour.
Most open source home automation software supports MQTT and you can use habridge to emulate Phillips Hue devices if you want to integrate it with an Echo or other commercial device.
That's not a matter of trying them, it's whether you live in a house with a crappy installation. A switch on every entrance is a basic requirement. I agree that if you're renting, fixing those problems yourself for $50 can be useful, though.
For one example imagine if you're away on holiday but want to give the impression somebody is home, you'll need to invest in a timer, with Hue you've already got that.
You mean, pay $5? Plus it works for other stuff besides lights (we turned on a radio too).
See here: https://www.pcmag.com/article/344336/the-best-smart-locks
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And speaking of smart locks - in the current IoT - that is, cloud-connected - version, they are just idiotic. Such things shouldn't be vendor-locked and their core functionality should be available over LAN. Even that PCMag article doesn't seem to recognize it, as they don't have an "works without Internet" row in their table.
Although you might just have it monitor your housemates smartphone location and lock your doors if all phones have left the house. If you don't want it to lock, it will just push message you the lock state.
If that is what you mean by IoT as just a rebranding of things that have been around for a long time?
That's given rise to the term IIoT (industrial IoT), but it's still troublesome since some discussions of IoT refer to both kinds and some don't, and because the exact same piece of hardware can be IoT or not IoT depending on whether it is installed in a home or a business.
Surely discussions of IoT security should refer to both industrial and consumer products!
> Maybe some people have decided to take IoT literally and redefine it to include existing technologies
I'm pretty sure it's normal to take new descriptive terms and group preexisting things into them where applicable. For example, just because the terms "car" and "motor car" came into use circa 1895 doesn't mean that nothing prior to that date can be considered a car.
Whether the definition actually works for the devices mentioned is still a valid question though.
> that definitely wasn’t the original intention of the word.
That's an odd thing to argue. We aren't talking about people who compute things when we talk about computers, are we? The original meanings of words are fairly inconsequential if over time the accepted meaning is something else.
Could you give some examples? I've yet to hear a single IoT thing I'd be willing to pay money for.