Wow, I'm a little surprised by the negative reactions here.

This seems like an odd argument: we shouldn't make something a little easier because I have a make-shift solution that works in my situation because my device works a certain way that others don't.

What about other users with dryers that don't have a timer on them? Should that timer remain the pinnacle of dryer notification technology?


Question for EI "experts." Does the inclusion of EI in a device do more than just give information? Does it enable control? Could I fully control a clothes dryer remotely with EI, for example?

I'm currently in the process of automating my home. The biggest obstacle will be cost (ZWave is super expensive), but there are other obstacles. For example: there are no ZWave-enabled garage door openers (anymore - apparently there used to be). I would love to be able to remotely control these doors, or include them as triggers in my system (garage door goes up, turn on a light in the entrance).

I'd mostly like to be able to check if I put the door down after I left my house


Ugh, because X10 is crap. Seriously, that is the worst automation technology. It's super cheap, but that's the one positive I can say about it. It's really susceptible to interference on power lines, has a lot of trouble jumping over phases (if your house has them), and any product that adds scene capability not only feels like it was designed in 1995, scenes just won't work well at all.

ZWave switches to a wireless mesh network for communication of devices, which makes it far more reliable than powerline. These devices, however, are very expensive, almost all costing at least $50. Assuming a base cost of $26, I wonder how much over that cost a similar device would be.

The idea seems to be that Imp will reduce the development / maintenance costs for manufacturers who would want to put these kinds of features into their products, making it more likely that this "internet of things" ecosystem evolves than it would be if the manufacturers themselves were trying to do it with their own costly, buggy, non-interoperable technology stacks.

This "sell to the manufacturers, who will in turn sell to the customers" bank-shot approach will have to overcome the limitations / drawbacks sn00p mentions above, which all seem like legitimate and reasonable complaints to me. They really have to get it right out of the gate, with some big-name manufacturers and some seriously useful features. I don't think they can sell this as a home tinkerer type thing like the Arduino, because tinkerers aren't going to want to deal with a somewhat-expensive-for-what-it-can-do-on-day-one cloud service.

I don't know of a single garage door opener that can't be operated with a dry contact closure (i.e. shorting two terminals on the device, normally connected via wire to a simple door-bell style momentary push button).

I would think it should be trivial to add any garage door opener to a ZWave (or any) automation system.

Now if you wanted some fancy two-way communication that's something else entirely, but you didn't mention that aspect.

I did. I want to know the state of that door (up or down). There have been projects that enable garage door control over ZWave using existing products and a tiny amount of wiring that I could easily do myself and might end up trying. But it still only activates the door. There's no way to know if it's open or not. There are ZWave door/window sensors that some have tried to use on garage doors, but that doesn't apparently work so well.

It's dead in the water from day one for home automation, the reliance on the cloud has done that.

"Garage door opens, turn on lights"

If this all happens locally then fine, but it doesn't in the imp world.

if your Internet is down or the imp cloud is down its not going to work.

It's like the inverse of that old saying "the lights are on but nobody is home".

A local mesh system for home automation seems a much better bet to me.

Make-shift? Touching a couple of buttons on my watch to set the count-down timer is more of a make-shift than buying and programming and paying a monthly fee for a device to send data to the internet so that it can call my cell phone and send me a message when my clothes are dry?

Rube Goldberg would be proud!

tanstaafl.

I just want to point out that you only do all of that stuff once. So yes, I still say it's easier.

Agreed, more than the technology actually working and being very cool without a "killer app" it will be hard to take any hold.

I'd like to automate a few things in my home, and like the idea of just slipping in an EI when I am ready, but what worries me about the idea is that the manufacturer needs to put in a log of redundant electronics in say a light switch on the assumption that at some point someone might want to internet enable it in the future. That to me sounds like an excuse to charge a lot more for a light switch. And it would need to be in everything, already, which is of course impossible.

From a consumer point of view I need to see what this thing can do, and if I were EI marketing team that is what I would be doing right now, reworking existing devices to show the world what it's all about.

Cheers

Cris

I'm surprised at the number of people here using the timer feature on their drier, and are not using the moisture sensor, which would have an unknown length of time.

The real place for the EI is in things like "web enabled thermostats". Such gizmos already exist, and often have poor interfaces. Selling it with an EI socket should reduce the initial purchase cost, and if someone wants to web-enable their purchase then they buy an EI and insert it. If not, they don't. Easier for the manufacturer, easy for the end-user.

Perfect application for it.
I wonder what other situations have as good a fit, though?

I mean, who the heck would want internet access in, say, a TV, Radio, Phone, or home alarm system? Just hard to imagine until somebody does it and others pile cool stuff on top.

Cheers

This is the exact solution I was thinking of here at home, that and my electricity meter.

But I don't see anyone even coming up with a working model of these solutions. I think someone needs to do that in order to kick start the whole thing. I guess someone is working on that right now maybe ???

Cheers

Cris

I can't speak for others, but when I discuss this there's a difference between "timed dry" and what I'm referring to as the timer. I use the automatic dry modes and I agree, the time can vary (making it difficult to know whether that initial time the dryer gives you is correct). My washing machine also has a timer that starts when you start a load, but that time changes depending on the load size.

Ah, so it displays an estimated time to completion, I had a GE washer that did that, it was based off of the time it took todo previous loads of the size & temp, nice feature, except that washer kept blowing main boards

That's what ours does. The estimated time (when you start the load) does vary. Sometimes it's over, sometimes under. But unless we're doing something that retains a lot of water (such as bedding, towels, or a lot of jeans), it's accurate enough that when it says 40 minutes, you can come back in 40 minutes, and your dress-shirts are ready to pull out and hang up.

I was going to say that Tony apparently never owned GE appliances when he wrote this


I had a friend with a GE refrigerator that must've had the mainboard replaced half a dozen times, it took two after the warranty period expired before he just got a new fridge.

Except for the monthly fee part.

No -- I'm saying that it's such a trivial problem to overcome with current, existing features that, as a manufacturer, I don't think there's any business value in spending R&D time or money for it. Do I think there's a segment of the market that would want this feature? Certainly. Is there a segment of that segment, for whom this would be a make-or-break feature in a purchase decision? I suppose. Is that segment big enough for me to want to chase? Not likely.

But here's the other thing -- I generally know how long my dryer cycle takes, anyway (well, I used to, before I got married, and my wife took over the laundry duties), so even without the timer, I knew when to go hang up my clothes.

Yes, but even if you only count all those steps once, it's still a LOT more effort. And even not considering the effort, it's also a LOT more costly.

This makes it not worth it IMO. (not in this particular example anyway)

edit: didn't notice canuckInOR also mentioned this point.

Sorry, but I disagree. I strongly believe in spending a decent amount of time and energy up front in order to make little things easier for me in the long run. You may disagree, but that's your preference and there's products out there for you.

Besides, we're fixating on one feature of one product here. I have to imagine that there's more stuff we could think up for this.

And then there's the bigger issue: you all hate Hugo.




Now, I'll agree with an earlier statement that putting home automation in the cloud might have its problems. It's difficult enough to get signals to devices quickly enough when everything is based inside the home. I wonder if there's a way to do a combination of the two...

Here's the other thing. People who have huge bucks to spend on automation don't do their own laundry. Poof. All problems solved with the addition of a house keeper.

Funny you should mention that. I am arguing with my wife about whether to buy and install a washer/dryer. It will cost about $25,000 pesos (~$2,000 USD) (and yes, I have it tallied in an Excel spreadsheet ) because of where it has to be installed, which will involve running gas pipes, replacing an old, inefficient hot water heater, chopping a hole in a masonry wall, digging up a sidewalk and the street and getting the municipality to connect directly to the sewer line.

Presently, we are paying $40 pesos (about $3.20 USD) every two weeks to have someone else wash, dry, and fold our clothes. I could barely pay to heat the water, pay for the gas to dry the clothes, pay for the electricity to run everything, and buy the soap if we had our own washer/dryer. It would take about 25 years to amortize just the cost of the installation. Factor in the cost of the estimated service life of the machines and it's a no brainer.

"But it's so much more convenient having our own washing machine" she says. Considering that the entire scope of her laundry duties for the past three years has been to ask me "Would you drop the clothes off at the lavendería when you walk the dog this morning?" I question that "convenience" argument.

However, since I am the man of the house, the head of the household, the boss of the place and the one who makes all the important decisions... I guess we'll probably be putting in a washing machine and dryer sometime in the not too distant future.

tanstaafl.

I'm betting that what she's really saying is that one time, she was down to wearing her reserve underwear (that stuff you keep, and wear out of necessity in the event everything else is dirty).

If she wants convenience, switch to a lavenderia that has pickup and delivery service.

Doesn't this do about the same as what ElectricImp does?

Not really. These French guys, obviously high on glue, seem to be setting up a parallel network along side the internet, operating at data rates slower than a 1981 modem. This network would then be connected to the internet at some point. To serve... no point.

One word for the project as described: useless.

The radio tech being created may have other purposes, but the entire project just seems like overly complicated nonsense. It's like someone using a rube-goldberg type contraption to solve a very simple problem.

I think it's a different application space. I can easily imagine the desire for low-power, low-data remote sensors, for which WiFi or current mobile communication technology isn't practical.

Sure, but setting up a country-wide infrastructure for these devices to communicate through? Instead of say, an even lower power and lower range alternative that uses a base-station/repeater that connected to the internet via WiFi or ethernet or even cellular modem?

I can't even put into words how absolutely ridiculous I think the idea is. Ugh.

You're assuming that Internet access is ubiquitous. It's not. Cellular access is. It becomes more interesting when you consider developing countries instead, such as India. Which is what these guys are into.

But this system doesn't work over cellular. It works over their own network which currently exists nowhere but their lab.

You can replace wifi/ethernet repeater/adapter in my previous post with 3G/2G modem if you'd like. Then you're on global cellular systems. Edited the post to reflect that.

Power consumption is a big issue, as is cost, which appears to be what they are going after. Given that it would take only 1000 antennas to cover France (674,843 km2, 260,558 sq mi), which presumably would be able to leverage many existing towers - and logically once they hit a tower they'd jump on an internet backbone, much like cell phone towers, but different.
It is not a huge leap, but they do have a chicken & egg situation, so they'll need some very useful use cases - maybe better version of the road sensors that are used today for monitoring speed and surface temp. (How is this done today?)

I'm glad someone brought up cost. How will they pay for the continued maintenance and development of this network? Subscription/usage pricing for equipped devices probably. How much do they think it's going to cost to implement this proprietary wireless hardware into a product?

Sorry, it still sounds like a bad idea on all fronts, including power usage and cost. If they had consumers in mind and they wanted a more viable product, they'd do a retail bridge.