A good marketer could give a catchy name to sell the advantages of that system too. Top of my head I can think of "near-fi", but certainly could be done better.
("Sugar, Free Donuts")
Spyware and asbestos, free!
LG must have some internal standard for this feature. If they would just publish it and then that could be the standard.
Edit: to the downvotetards, if you worked in actual engineering like I do, then you would understand that this is how most standards naturally materialize. Someone does one thing particularly well, it becomes the standard.
99% of the functionality with 0 annoyance and ~0 security/privacy risks.
Kinda of like a bluetooth X-terminal, but way way simpler. Think tkinter over bluetooth, probably sans canvas.
A bunch of people will say to just use wifi, make the device a Hotspot, and use your web browser. That's not a bad idea, but tiny devices aren't going to run web servers dishing out multi megabits frameworks.
It could be hard to encode JSON messages dynamically for the actual data to show in the web application, but you _can_ use other protocols from a browser too (CBOR is quite popular for this).
Maybe not. I'm using a micro controller with specific peripherals and ADC requirements for a high speed control system. This has less RAM and flash that you can probably get away with for a web server. We'd have to add a bluetooth radio chip, but I hear those go for well under $1. There are all kinds of embedded devices that have few resources but could be expanded with cheap Bluetooth connectivity. I realize this is changing quickly, but there will always be very small devices.
The product I worked on the bluetooth chip was more expensive than the CPU if memory serves me right and we did something similar. But I am not a board designer or procurement expert.
A long time ago I developed a project called "Handbag[0] for Android"[1] based around a similar concept--it targeted the short-lived "Android Open Accessory Protocol" initially over USB & later also over network/WiFi.
(My project notes from the time mentioned a long-term goal of also supporting Bluetooth but that never eventuated...)
Handbag made use of a "generic" Android app for UI display/interaction and an Arduino library that communicated with the app over a binary protocol.
The app would display various UI widgets such as labels/progress bars to display feedback from the accessory and text inputs/buttons to accept input forwarded to the accessory.
While the project did not take the world by storm, I was reminded when digging up these links that at least one person called the concept genius[2]. :)
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[0] Because it let you "accessorize your Android phone or tablet". :D
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130205135845/http://handbagdev...
[2] https://www.doctormonk.com/2011/11/handbag-android-and-ardui...
Can we stop putting obligatory (hackable) active network devices everywhere ?
I can buy 128M flash for $2/10k
Back in the days infrared connection was a thing. I remember connecting my Compaq iPAQ PDA to Nokia phone.
Wonder if the modern cellphone cameras are fast enough to act as receiver and if this supported one way communication.
Miele uses flashing LED as some sort of serial communication.
I’d like to see them all have a USB port. If you plug in a thumb drive the appliance should create a directory named with the appliance manufacturer and model and serial number. In that directory it should place a copy of its manual and other documents that normally come with it.
If there is a microcontroller and a beeper in there anyway, at only the extra cost of internal memory? Instead of a modem-type modulation and a speaker, make use of the bare minimum piezo beepers and send something that is universally understood? All of that without FCC, no extra hardware cost, no backchannel und thus little security considerations?
Yea - I know. Works much better to upsell "wifi enabled" and I'm happy that the appliances only beep rarely.