Re:How to break a smart home, again
by nitrogen on Wednesday February 28, 2018 @11:49AM
(#16484303)
Unless the people developing commercial HVAC are simply better software/hardware developers than consumer companies' solutions.
Sometimes this is true, relative to the purpose at hand. Take a mediocre web developer and ask them to build a smarthome system, and you end up with a wire protocol of raw, unverified, unfiltered Python code in plain trxt, running under eval() on a grossly underpowered microcontroller (true story, was fixed eventually AFAIK, not naming names).
There's something to be said for the discipline that comes from working in a resource-constrained hardware/software project. We could benefit from more cross-pollination between industries, as long as experienced engineers are sanity checking the resulting ideas (Python is not a protocol!).
Sometimes this is true, relative to the purpose at hand. Take a mediocre web developer and ask them to build a smarthome system, and you end up with a wire protocol of raw, unverified, unfiltered Python code in plain trxt, running under eval() on a grossly underpowered microcontroller (true story, was fixed eventually AFAIK, not naming names).
There's something to be said for the discipline that comes from working in a resource-constrained hardware/software project. We could benefit from more cross-pollination between industries, as long as experienced engineers are sanity checking the resulting ideas (Python is not a protocol!).