Ask HN: How to think about the safety of Home IoT devices?

2 points by harshitaneja 6y ago ↗ HN

I am currently working on a hobby/amateur IOT product ecosystem for my personal use but would wish to extend it to an actual product. How to think about safety of these devices? For example, while building a smart switchboard what kind of redundancies and contingencies to add-kill switch for the device malfunctioning, manual physical buttons, etc? Are there any books or other resources on safety of IOT devices? This kind of things would have been discussed in industrial automation.

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greenyoda 6y ago ↗

It's hard to answer this question without knowing what kinds of devices you're going to control. For example, I'd want a failsafe way of turning on a light or air conditioner if there was a problem with the IOT network. Not being able to manually turn on a heating system could be very costly in the winter (frozen water pipes, etc.). However, I wouldn't care nearly as much if I was unable to dim a lightbulb or change its color.