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0 pointsdclara12y ago0 comments

So funny. You bet.

It reminds me why we even make these things available online. Why do machines need to talk to each other? If they need to collaborate in order to complete some tasks, they should be controlled by human or program.

You can make these things online talking HTTP as toys you are playing with your childhood friends, but not for serious business products. It becomes a trend now. Kidding.

From two aspects:

1. Cost: in order to make them talk HTTP or API, you need all of them carry a web server which is installed on top of OS. It's not necessary. Machine needs very simple commands to drive them to perform certain tasks because they already know how to do it, you only need to give them instruction on what to do.

2. Security: machines at home should be controlled inside the home or by computer controlled by home users, which could be sitting in the cloud with other OS level of security instead of HTTP or HTTPS. If you are going to expose all of your device status to the internet, do you feel secure? If you do want to control remotely from home, you need to find some way to make schedule or via the cloud.

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toomuchtodo12y ago

> 1. Cost: in order to make them talk HTTP or API, you need all of them carry a web server which is installed on top of OS. It's not necessary. Machine needs very simple commands to drive them to perform certain tasks because they already know how to do it, you only need to give them instruction on what to do.

An Arduino can run a web server. It's amazingly cheap to run HTTP.

> 2. Security: machines at home should be controlled inside the home or by computer controlled by home users, which could be sitting in the cloud with other OS level of security instead of HTTP or HTTPS. If you are going to expose all of your device status to the internet, do you feel secure? If you do want to control, you need to find some way to make schedule or via the cloud to control them.

My door lock, thermostat, and smoke/CO detectors are already controlled "via the cloud". In for a penny, in for a pound. You're always free to not buy the devices.

dclaraOP12y ago

I need to clarify my points a little bit. I don't mean we don't need controllable devices. I need door locker, window slider for years. But I will not buy a thermostat for > $100, because the way to produce the "things" is not economic.

We can have centralized program to control all the things at home. Two usages:

1. Need to control from remote: we should control them via OS level security to reduce the unnecessary cost to speak HTTP no matter how cheap the OS is. If they can be controlled directly, why do we need them to understand HTTP?

2. Need to talk to each other: they can talk via the controlling program. They don't need to be that intelligent to talk to each other via HTTP.

By the time when we have every "thing" at home, you can see the difference. The cost must be reduced to almost nothing in order to make home automation popular with very low additional overall cost compared with the existing devices. Again, think about it, we'll have 100 things at home, are you going to buy every thing for $100? Not necessary, not scale.

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