"This project was fun. It was very exciting to bring it to life step by step, and such a pleasure to see it working after we put so much effort in it. But this is nothing compared to how much we learned thanks to it. What seemed to be pretty easy from the beginning, turned out to be very tricky in details. I could not imagine I would have to learn statistical methods and clustering algorithms, dust off my school notes on electronics (though we only need the basics here), and discover a number of useful tools and services on the way."
These are exactly my feelings after reading through this marvelous blog post.
I didn't know about Julian Schwinger's life before this. Two of the many awe-inspiring paragraphs from the text:
Bethe describes his meeting with Schwinger:
"I entirely forgot that he [Schwinger] was a sophomore 17 years of age. . . His
knowledge of quantum electrodynamics is certainly equal to my own, and
I can hardly understand how he could acquire that knowledge in less than
two years and almost all by himself.” Bethe concludes that “Schwinger will
develop into one of the world’s foremost theoretical physicists if properly
guided, i.e., if his curriculum is largely left to his own free choice."
"he published his reformulation of quantum electrodynamics
in three long papers in Physical Review, Quantum
Electrodynamics I (1948), II (1949), and III (1949). They
include several of the results for which he, Richard Feynman,
and Sin-Itiro Tomanaga were eventually awarded the 1965
Nobel Prize in Physics."
One of the companies that is solving this very problem is Xiaomi. Their method is quite crude - that is, they make everything themselves. But the end result is that everything they make - from an air purifier to a TV - is connected and operated via a similar / familiar OS called MIUI.
They give away their phones for very cheap, because the phone is the Trojan horse - it is the remote control for all the other devices it makes.
Xiaomi is the largest and fastest growing IoT company on the planet, and worth keeping an eye out for.
Yup, Xiamoi makes everything interoperable by making it themselves. And Apple makes HomeKit. And Google makes their own. And Microsoft makes their own. And HP makes their own. And...
Part of the issue with IoT is what do you define as IoT, the devices themselves, data ingest, management infrastructure, etc. The whole topic is pretty broad.
I'm cynica that will be the case. On the Internet TV front we have roku, apple tv, chrome cast, kindle fire TV-- all of them empty plastic boxes doing nearly the same exact thing, and yet there is no interop to speak of. It's just more walled gardens
I've been considering replacing my media PC with a Roku, so I'm curious why you would call them "empty plastic boxes" considering the Roku can stream from my local server and I block all outbound requests at my router (firewall). The advantage I see is the 5W power draw vs. my current 20W. I'm also unclear on what interoperability would mean for one of these devices. I don't think 2 Roku on the same network have any capacity to communicate either (maybe I'm wrong?).
I'm not krisdol, but I presume the "empty plastic boxes" is a reference to the fact that the amount of hardware necessary to stream video is now miniscule. My Roku is the size it is not because it needs to be that big to hold components, but so that it looks substantial to consumers and doesn't get lost in a ball of cables.
And interop for me would mean that instead of N proprietary platforms that must be targeted separately by software/content makers, there would be one universal platform with different manufacturers. The Amazon app on Roku, for example, is pretty weak; I presume it's much better with an actual Amazon device. And YouTube wasn't available on Roku for a number of years, even though you could get it on other devices, I presume because Google was trying to make their own device play with Google TV.
I agree with your take, but I don't see that happening; I prefer to take care of media acquisition on my own because I don't trust these companies to do any differently than the media companies they seek to, ultimately, replace.
Roku has the private channel feature that I think makes it more interesting than the other players, and I wish more effort was exerted to explore the possibilities with private channels. Have you used this feature?
It seems to me that if the streaming providers had better APIs, the device makers could make use of them; I imagine Amazon's devices have access to private APIs that Roku does not.
I picked up a new Sky Now TV box for 8 GBP (with cashback). It's basically a re-branded Roku but you can't get all the channels. Still, quite the bargain considering it even comes with an HDMI cable. It has all the standard catchup apps such as BBC iPlayer but no Netflix (Sky are competitors).
It also has a developer mode which may be what you are referring to. I managed to side-load Plex onto it. If the Netflix app code was available then I guess that could be side-loaded too. Only one development app can be loaded at a time though.
I also looked at doing some development but the VBScript brings back too many bad memories. :)
I haven't. I use the Roku to put things like Netflix and Amazon on the big screen. I remember trying a few different things to put content from my server on the Roku, but I could never get it to work smoothly; there were hitches both with the on-Roku software and with encoding issues. Instead I just bought an Intel NUC for that.
In a few years I hope I can replace them both with some sort of Android device, but for now I don't mind two devices.
>My Roku is the size it is not because it needs to be that big to hold components, but so that it looks substantial to consumers and doesn't get lost in a ball of cables.
Are you sure its not because multiple-generations-removed miniaturization technology is cheaper, and the latest Roku devices are under $100? Or that perhaps it's a different economic driver, rather than so the consumer sees its physical size?
Regarding the second app, I think the issue is again non-technical -- content is not available across devices because it's a differentiator. It may seem an artificial barrier -- your Roku can decode any video stream -- but the structure of a system that created the content suggests otherwise.
Sounds like things are ready for interoperation except for the human/economic/structural element.
16 hours daily usage?! Whoa nelly, that's a lot of TV watching! I suspect a lot of people on here (like me) watch less than one hour a day. The US national average is five hours, which is still startlingly high, but doesn't get you close to 16 hours per day even with multiple people in a household (as their viewing times will tend to overlap).
I suspect that stand-by power usage may be more important than active power usage for such a device. And I don't know how Roku fares for that, nor its alternatives.
The point of the disillusionment exercise was to carefully select parameters that favored narrowrail's perceived "advantage" in an improbable but still realistic way.
In other words, assuming a proverbial couch potato got a sweet deal on a new Roku 3 and pays up the wazoo for electricity, it would take a solid 4 years of usage in the prescribed manner before breaking even on a relatively small investment, rendering any perceived power savings "advantage" over an existing 20W system null...let alone other considerations like product MTBF, lifecycle, the next trending 6-second attention getter, interoperability, etc.
if all of these have youtube, hulu and netflix ...to the consumer that might be the level of interop currently required -- interop with their fav delivery platforms, not necessarily the devices themselves
Why not a good open-source standard? iOS did it "right" for mobile, but Android provided tough competition. And Apple benefited from the competition... it pushed iOS designers to keep their game up - and likewise.
If Xiamoi makes enough of the stack, the devices with a desirable user experience...it might not be a problem at all for both Xiamoi and the customers at this phase of IoT - the vertical integration level is likely required to get it off the ground and make it a good experience.
Eventually, a shift to a more horizontal and open approach will win out, but it seems hard to do that at the starting point of an emerging market.
There is a whole different dynamic to these devices in China. Air quality, water quality, etc. are part of middle class lifestyle in China, and many people do not trust the authorities to keep these parameters within spec. Multiple air filters in an apartment are common, and monitoring the performance of these devices is an obvious interest to their owners. This is a much more compelling home automation story than thermostats or smoke alarms that should be mostly invisible in the home environment.
I've never understood the desire to add smart technology to the smoke alarm. Once properly installed a smoke alarm should be interacted with when (1) there is a fire, (2) the battery is running flat. False alarms pretty much mean you've installed it wrong.
A friend of mine, a great cook, regularly performs what she refers to as The Dance of Smoke Alarm Supplication, wherein she and a broom jointly try to persuade the alarm gods that everything is fine. When she heard that there was a smoke alarm that would pop up a notification on her phone first so she could mute it with zero shrieking, she was very excited.
It may be that her landlord installed it wrong, but landlords (and homeowners) install an impressive number of things wrong, so a business that didn't depend on "amateur does X perfectly" doesn't sound like a bad idea to me.
Ah, the Smoke Alarm Supplication Dance. Great term. My wife and daughter had the same issue. They like to cook and can tomato sauce. Our smoke alarm would go off very easily - lots of false positives. One day my wife is vacuuming the hall and the motor in the vacuum cleaner overheats and starts putting out thick, black smoke right under the smoke alarm. Nothing from the smoke alarm... Needless to say we quickly replaced both the vacuum cleaner and the smoke alarm and made certain to get one with dual sensors...
> A friend of mine, a great cook, regularly performs what she refers to as The Dance of Smoke Alarm Supplication, wherein she and a broom jointly try to persuade the alarm gods that everything is fine. When she heard that there was a smoke alarm that would pop up a notification on her phone first so she could mute it with zero shrieking, she was very excited.
However in what scenario does a landlord install a £100 smoke alarm when s/he can install a £10 one though? No landlord I've ever had would have done this -- given that over here bills are paid by the tenant a thermostat is usually not provided.
Homeowners can at least move them when they realise they have installed them wrong.
Some landlords will install a £100 smoke alarm when they realize that they can get real-time notifications that one of their buildings is on fire. Others will do it as a fancy feature to attract higher-paying tenants.
And when the price falls to £30, as happens with these things, a lot more will do it.
>Some landlords will install a £100 smoke alarm when they realize that they can get real-time notifications that one of their buildings is on fire.
Not even on fire, maybe people are smoking inside when they aren't suppose to be. Maybe someone burns their food commonly and that needs investigated before they burn the whole damn place down one time. I can see lots of reasons for that.
> I've never understood the desire to add smart technology to the smoke alarm.
Because very few things suck more than coming home from work and your house is burnt down because the smoke alarm wasn't heard by anyone and by the time the fire crews arrive it's too late. Happened to a friend of mine, house was beyond repair even though fire crews arrived 10min after a passing driver noticed the blaze.
A smoke detector is there to alert the occupants of the building so that they get out. If it was an actual alarm system that is connected to a dispatcher, the firefighters would've been notified.
Yeah, as originally designed perhaps, but what if you could add a bit of tech to make sure your pets are safe? Or you're not coming home only to inhale carbon monoxide? I don't think $99 is a ridiculous expense for such peace of mind, even if it's not proven to be full proof just yet.
Because CO kills surprisingly quickly -- unless your commute is in the order of a couple of minutes you'd be too late. Also you don't send a person into a house with a CO leak so asking you neighbour to retrieve your cat would be placing them in danger.
My point is that the smoke alarm and the CO alarm should be exactly what they are simple alarms that allow occupants to escape in an emergency. Adding IOT capabilities doesn't add to the alarm functionality in sensible ways. However, it does risk introducing vulnerabilities. I don't want my smoke alarm to start sending spam emails (this really happened with a smart fridge a couple of years ago).
You're being awfully pedantic. Have the neighbor shut your gas off. Have your landlord alert the neighbors. What if you just left for work? I can find a bunch of scenarios where the information can be useful, whereas you seem determined to argue that only the occupants (who might just be kids burning toast) should have this information.
The information is intended to allow the occupants to escape safely if required. In the case of a CO alarm no one should enter the premises until qualified engineers have made it safe. The the case of a smoke alarm the occupants are the only ones that can safely decide if it is a false alarm -- if there is a fire no one should enter the premises until the fire has been dealt with by qualified personal. What you are suggesting would mean adding a general purpose computer to essential safety equipment. Anything that adds complications and could affect the main function of the safety equipment would need to be considered very carefully.
I never suggested that unqualified personnel should enter an unsafe environment or people add anything to essential safety equipment. The Leeo just listens for alarms and lets you decide what to do with the information. It does not affect the operation of the safety equipment whatsoever.
In the case of CO2, is it better to have qualified personnel attempt to arrive at 6pm after you get home from work and hear the alarm, or sometime closer to when the leak occurred and you were alerted on your smart phone? (I don't think emergency responders are twiddling their thumbs in the evening or there's light traffic)
In the case of fire, is it better to call the personnel before the retired lady down the street notices the flames and smoke while your at work??
That's not true - you're meant to test your smoke alarm weekly.
Also false alarms can be the smoke detector acting correctly to the presence of smoke, eg. Burnt toast.
In this case the ability to remotely check the alarm status from a self check, or to remotely snooze a false alarm while clearing the smoke can be very handy
OK so you find it easier to find your phone open the app and then press that button. I find it easier to press the button on the unit. I also find it easier to touch a £10 device with food covered/wet fingers whilst cooking than to get out a £300 smart phone and touch that with food covered or wet fingers.
I agree. They are so cheap. The ones I install are less than ten dollars. Won't name the brand. They are usually on the bottom of the shelf. Hidden away from worrisome consumers that equate price with function. Many contractors buy them by the case.
I usually install two, and run a electrical line to one.
Yes, an app is fine if you burn food, and have the disposable income? I would rather see home owners spend the money on running a line to their smoke, and CO detectors though.
As my username probably reveals, this is my favorite game, and one of the most enjoyable / funny gaming experiences that I have had. The part that I still remember, after all these years is sword fighting insults. Till today, my friends and I sign off our emails with some of these dialogue writing gems [1]
"Nobody's ever drawn blood from me and nobody ever will."
"You run THAT fast?"
"People fall at my feet when they see me coming!"
Even BEFORE they smell your breath?
"I'm not going to take your insolence sitting down!"
"Your hemorrhoids are flaring up again eh?"
What a great game, and what a great era for gaming.
There are 2 amazing things about this article:
1. It was written a while ago, and the general description of the country and its problems are just as true.
2. This quote: "In the eastern section of India, there is a company called Bengal Fertilizer, which was built in the early nineties. The government spent $1.2 billion on it and it took seven years to complete. It now employs 1550 people with complete work schedules, vacations, canteens, unions, etc. And yet they have never produced an ounce of fertilizer."
A good piece of writing - quite critical about the country, but also comes from a place of affection for the country.
> A good piece of writing - quite critical about the country, but also comes from a place of affection for the country.
I'm not sure where you're reading "affection" from. Rogers has been predicting and even actively cheerleading India's financial decline consistently for literally two decades. He even closes the article with a claim that is laughably ignorant[0] of historical facts, and just reeks of colonial apologism.
> India really is not a rational country. The English mushed India together in the panic of independence in 1947, but little heed was given to ethnic, religious, linguistic, historic, national, or geographic considerations which is one reason India has had problems with every one of its neighbors since. India as we know it will not survive another 30 or 40 years. This of course does not have to end in disaster, but it probably will given the chauvinism of its government and the way history has always worked.
The reason that India has been at war is because the world's then-largest superpower[1] (the British) openly declared that they wanted to start a civil war in India, and then actively funded terrorist[2] groups to ensure that it happened.
There are people in the US who have affection for India. Rogers is not one of them.
[0] No, I don't think that Rogers is actually ignorant of history; I'm saying he chooses to ignore history.
[1] India's fight for independence was just around the time that the US took over that epithet from the British
[2] That word didn't exist then, but that's absolutely what we would call them today
Re: "terrorists" and India at the time of independence
> That word didn't exist then, but that's absolutely what we would call them today
It had actually existed for about a century and half before that, and had been used in the modern sense (including referring to non-state and subnational actors, often directing violence against a state, rather than the original use referring to terrorism strictly in the sense of a top-down means of state control originating with the French Revolution's Reign of Terror and its architects, the original "terrorists") for about 70-80 years prior to Indian independence.
Agreed, in fact just last week I was just watching a Dutch program I recalled watching back in 2005 when I was a teenager, it was basically a conversation that Rogers and Marc Faber and another guy had on their ideas of the future. Then India came along and he was incredibly negative and dismissive and that stood out to me as being over the top. Here I am a week later, surprised to see a topic on just that (Rogers about India) and not surprised to find comments like yours.
As a father, and as someone interested in this discussion (about "child learning to talk"), I think you will love Prof Deb Roy's insights into how his infant son learned language.
As one of the other commenters pointed out - it is like a tree (words/concepts) branching out from one another. I would be fascinated by seeing if this research can be continued into adulthood, where the individual "concepts" aren't as important as the interplay between them.
I love this part:
"It would have taken an entire lifetime for any engineer with a soldering iron to try all those variations. So I said to him, Now that games are software, it's going to be a different world for games."
This is software eating the world in 1977 and it hasn't stopped till date :)
I am super keen to make a hardware product (I know only software), and started watching this with great anticipation. It would have been great to hear the story about their journey from 1995-2001. Thats would have been hugely valuable in itself. I am stuck at : How do I take my hardware idea, and make it real? How do I make a prototype (it requires an e-ink display) to know if someone will actually like it/use it? Since there are a number of HW startups on this page, thought I will ask my question. Specifically, I want to make a photo frame with an color e-ink display.
Edit: in a sense the journey from 1995-2001 was covered in the startup school video (linked in another comment), but that was mostly about the "company". He didn't cover the "How-to" of specifically how they did prototyping, manufacturing and development in the early days. 'how to start' this stuff is what I am interesting in.
I suspect the answer to "will people pay ~$100 for a washed out colour photo frame that is slightly less inconvenient than normal LCD digital photo frames" is "no", but you're welcome to try.
I used to work for a consultancy that did hardware product prototyping as a design service. We were good and very wide ranging but not at all cheap. The cheap DIY end is probably covered by the maker/hackerspace/arduino/rasberrypi movement which has evolved from the older ham/model railway ecosystem.
Another wrinkle is that if you want to sell electronic goods you need to consider FCC/CE/UL certifications, and there is no minimum quantity for the rules to apply. That increases the cost of the MVP greatly.
You make a prototype by cobbling stuff together and show off the user interaction points, not by making a finished product or by dealing with FCC/UL/CE/etc. This will likely cost a few thousand USD worth of parts/assembly/tools/etc if you are counting your time as free (but could be done for less if you already have a decent amount of electronics around).
Once your idea has been validated with potential customers, then you start designing. If you will have low sales numbers (ie: 10k or less/year) then look for having high value and high margins (few hundred dollar price and 50% gross margins). If you will have high sales numbers (100k+ or 1M+ per year) then you can get down below the $100 price point and lower your margins somewhat (but I suggest staying above 25% gross margin).
Expect that your BOM (bill of materials) for the electronics parts, when priced at your yearly volume pricing, will be 1/3 of the cost of your product. Then add your margin to get the sale price. If you're selling retail, account for 25-50% margin for the retailers in addition to your margin (so customer may pay 3x what it costs you to build the product for).
Regarding eInk screens, going to large sizes (ie: Kindle DX range) is going to cost you a lot for the screen. Assume Amazon make very little profit on Kindle devices and you're in the ball park for how much their BOM costs them. Your competition for electronic picture frames are under $100 sale price retail, so I suggest you focus on differentiation so that customers aren't comparing your product to the <$100 picture frames if you want to be successful.
"This project was fun. It was very exciting to bring it to life step by step, and such a pleasure to see it working after we put so much effort in it. But this is nothing compared to how much we learned thanks to it. What seemed to be pretty easy from the beginning, turned out to be very tricky in details. I could not imagine I would have to learn statistical methods and clustering algorithms, dust off my school notes on electronics (though we only need the basics here), and discover a number of useful tools and services on the way."
These are exactly my feelings after reading through this marvelous blog post.