Ask HN: What is the thing you've build you regret the most?

Re:Ask HN: What is the thing you've build you regret the most? by mlyle on Saturday November 19, 2022 @10:39PM (#33677954)

Yes. The commenter is upset because a mesh network that he helped build for another purpose also provides a convenient dense network of radios that can be used to track staff, and that this is now the primary use case.

"All of that made it really easy to just stick a beacon tag inside employee badges and measure the RSSI from the mesh lightbulbs (since they already tracked that to discover who their physical neighbors were)."

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Re:Ask HN: What is the thing you've build you regret the most? by mhh__ on Saturday November 19, 2022 @11:07PM (#33678128)

I assumed the rssi thing was there from the start, apparently mistakenly.

If it's any consolation to the original engineer it feels like a non-trivial thing to add

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Re:Ask HN: What is the thing you've build you regret the most? by haneefmubarak on Saturday November 19, 2022 @11:16PM (#33678176)

Most nodes in a radio based system will do rssi measurements to any other nodes that they need to communicate with directly, as part of deciding appropriate tx/rx amplification levels / when nodes are unavailable / etc. These functionalities are often easy to access to enable easier debugging, so it's a relatively straightforward change to start using them to scan other things on the same protocol etc.

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Re:Ask HN: What is the thing you've build you regret the most? by mlyle on Saturday November 19, 2022 @11:17PM (#33678183)

The original engineer states the RSSI thing from the start because it was an input to the meshing algorithm.

Using it for location of employees was the new part.

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