I really hope more people will play around with iroh and build stuff especially because in the last year some things have been renamed in the API to be more clear and other stuff has been simplified e.g. see this blog post https://www.iroh.computer/blog/iroh-0-94-0-the-endpoint-take...
It's a demo of how easy it is to make even an ESP32 device available globally with iroh.
But that 10% is magic. A fan that switches on when air quality falls below a threshold? Not that useful in a living room, but in a workshop setting - especially a shared workshop setting? Awesome. Just awesome.
A well defined use case, in the right setting, and smart stuff can be genuinely very useful. Usually that’s not how they’re used - i know, because of the 15-20 smart things i have only one or two are genuinely useful.
Why wouldn't that be useful? People be surprised how poor their air quality generally are inside, unless they already measure it, making it better sounds useful in oh so many ways.
> i know, because of the 15-20 smart things i have only one or two are genuinely useful.
What are those things? I have about 70-80 "smart things" by now, but every single one is genuinely useful, otherwise I wouldn't install them in the first place. Lots of open/closed sensors, soil moisture, temperature+pm2.5 sensors, water taps and so on.
First because it’s the wrong solution to the problem. As I understand it bad air quality in a home is created by specific activities like cooking, vacuuming, or lighting candles/incense/smoking. So you solve the problem by turning on the fan when you cook, opening the windows when you vacuum, and by not using incense or smoking.
Second because you can have a dumb sensor and switch the fan on with your hand when it goes turns orange or red.
> I have about 70-80 "smart things" by now, but every single one is genuinely useful
We have different definitions of genuinely useful. I’m glad you find you setups useful tho - you do you!
There's only a limited number of features that you can pack into a few buttons and a 7-segment display. If you want to sell outside the US and need to support the long-tail of non-English languages, preferably without per-country product variants, you can't even label the buttons any more, you have to rely on simple pictograms and icons.
If there's a $1 microcontroller in your device (and there often is), you're very tempted to implement lots of features which cost you almost nothing, but that kind of UI just doesn't really let you do so. Sure, you could add a proper touch screen with a localizable UI stack, with reflowable text and support for displaying Kanji and RTL languages, but that's often more expensive (and less practical) than slapping on a BLE or WiFi chip.
Anyway, why are you commenting here if you're not into this sort of thing? Feels like you're just trying to stir up an argument.
Sure you can do everything manually, but I like networked things, especially those using open standards (matter over openthread) so I can connect them all together easily.
For example, every time I watch a movie the roller blinds automatically come down, the lights turn off and the fan turns down, I think thats just cool.
Pff, assuming that everyone have arms and hands much?
Also I don't see the point of a fan, I live right next to the ocean, if you want moving air, why don't you just open a window?! Talk about useless invention