h264 videos are generally significantly smaller than comparable resolution animated GIFs, not to mention being much better quality: It is a very good thing that the era of animated GIFs is drawing to a close, and the pace with which MP4 is supplanting animated GIFs is quickly accelerating.
Having said that, an h264 source can have magnitudes more complexity for playback, and generally the greater the compression the higher the playback complexity. Having five or so high profile multi-MB decorative videos autoplaying on a page is excessive.
They shouldn't use autoplay. They shouldn't even initialize until scrolled into view. They shouldn't all play at once. Their bandwidth usage is going to be enormous from this HNing, a single page impression pushing 15MB+ (EDIT: I hadn't really delved into it at the time given the display issues, however I grossly underestimated when I said 15MB).
Thanks for the heads-up. Not that I want to learn anything about HN's ban system, but it's interesting to see that the hellbanhammer can be wielded on a per-thread basis.
Apparently [1] MP4s (at least their file sizes) can be optimized much more than animated GIFs, although it doesn't seem like that's been fully done here.
FWIW it runs fine on Chrome Canary (currently 34). CPU/GPU is still excessive for videos that people might not even want to see, but the videos all run smoothly and the browser remains responsive. Not sure what the Chrome difference is for that.
It works just fine for me on Chromium 31 and Chrome 32 on Linux, using the open-source Radeon drivers. It would be interesting to see what the common factors for others who are reporting poor performance is.
Worked well technically on i7/win7/laptop(32GB)/firefox. I didn't like the effect though: jittery, repetitive, distracting. A tripod would have gone a LONG way here as well as only using in focus images. as only using It was like channel surfing. I said, "ooh ahh" to myself, but didn't hold the channel there for long even though I love the concept.
Different person, but the videos do not load in either the iPad (iOS7) or Nexus 7 (Android 4.4) for me. As mentioned in another post, the content-type being returned is wrong for video/mp4, at least from the S3 servers I am hitting. Perhaps this varies and is correct for some, but it seems to be the reason for so many varied experiences -- some clients just ignore it, others seem to choose render paths based upon it, and others refuse the content because of it.
I'd rather I it didn't auto-play and let me choose whether I want a page to swamp my bandwidth and CPU. Even over an 8Mb/s ADSL connection on a quad core Xeon workstation with 12GB or RAM and fairly decent video card this page is one of the worst behaved I've encountered in a while.
Sadly I won't be reading any of the content because even after five minutes it's killing my browser. To the spark.io blogging team, please don't assume unlimited wads of broadband. Let the reader decide whether they want to play your videos, and you know, I can only watch one video at a time on that page, so why start them all playing at once? This is no better etiquette than CNN or MSNBC or an adware farm where they start playing videos at you upon arrival. It's very rude.
You can easily embed MediaCrush videos on your site. I'm one of the devs on MediaCrush, I can answer questions if need be. It brings in webm, mp4, and ogv, but we've fine tuned the encoding more than most people would think to, and we have the video player UI in place if don't want to autoplay.
It's funny how BeOS could handle playback of multiple videos extremely smoothly on a Celeron 400Mhz from year 1998, but modern browsers struggle with it. Of course, the complexity of the codecs has increased, but it's still kind of strange given the huge advances in hardware.
Bluekitten is just the 100th or so reincarnation of recoiledsnake, which is as far as we can tell a Microsoft astroturfing campaign. Lately their sockpuppets are often female, to give people the impression we're banning women when we ban them.
What browser are you using? I didn't have any issues at all with that page.
I'm using version 7.2.0 (this is a very old driver) of the open-source Radeon X.Org driver on a four-way Phenom II system with 16GB of RAM and a Radeon HD 6950 with Chromium 31 and Chrome 32.
I also have an i5, and my Firefox was only using about half of one CPU, but stuttering like crazy. The UI froze up constantly and would barely scroll. FF 29.0a1 (2014-01-16) on Win7.
Edit: This is with crummy AMD FirePro 2270 graphics. Chrome 34.0.1789.0 canary was very smooth on the same box!
I'm running Windows 8.1 on an i5 with Chrome and didn't notice any slowdown (nor fan speedup, or any of the usual issues sudden resource drains tend to cause) at all either. Looking at task manager shows Chrome is only using 13% of the CPU while I'm actively viewing that page.
I'm sure YMMV depending upon OS, browser, underlying installed codecs handling the video (and their associated gpu acceleration or lack thereof), etc.
It wouldn't have the same effect without auto-play. This is essentially a smarter GIF. Looks like the CPU suffers from all the videos playing simultaneously, maybe pausing videos as soon as they go off-screen could solve that (while browsers don't get to optimize this).
I'd have to agree. It's not the bandwidth that was the issue though. All those videos loading and playing at once crushed my poor browser (Waterfox 24) until I was able to slowly pause them one by one. This does, however, work mostly smooth on my version of Chrome (32).
Same with Safari 7 on my MacBook Pro. Worked a treat, was a super cool concept. I'm surprised to see all the complaints with Chrome, I always took that browser to have the best support for this kind of stuff.
A different video card, codec chain, and on and on, can yield a very experience. Being an early adopter of many Harry Potter-esque moving pictures can yield nice content, but it will invariably cause client issues.
As I mentioned in another post, it works fine in Chrome 34 on the same hardware that it struggles dramatically with in Chrome 32. Both of them have hardware decoding enabled, and so on. The Chrome 32 instance has no problems at all playing video anywhere else.
Indeed, on that same line, the videos don't load at all on Chrome on the Nexus 5. The N5 of course supports h264, and has no problem on any other site that I've ever discovered. Maybe their server is now overloaded (EDIT: Okay they're using S3....going to be an ugly bandwidth bill from that...and it's fully responsive), but it also doesn't load on the iPad 3rd generation running iOS 7. Again just black boxes.
EDIT: I wonder if it's because they're (s3) setting the content type to octet-stream, rather than video/mp4. Some clients seem to be going on alternate decode paths or are refusing to display it because of that.
In my experience Safari is generally much smoother and uses less power than Chrome on OSX. Chrome frequently makes my MBP uncomfortably hot on websites that Safari doesn't break a sweat on (like Flash videos on Youtube, although Chrome's built-in Flash could be causing problems). It's unfortunate.
Autoplay has been the devil for 15 years in UI. You don't repeat animation and you don't auto-start it unless that is the expected primary feature of the landing page.
Thank you for your comment: it allowed me to understand that the empy blocks I was seeing were meant to be videos (Firefox user here).
It's sad to find out that they ignored that mp4 isn't supported by all browsers. I know: HTML5 video is just a PITA, and that's indeed a reason why so many still rely on gifs.
I hope this project grows, and that they will care a bit more than they did here.
As someone who often browses over remote desktop, it gets quite frustrating, since all of the sudden my connection, which is fast enough for static text, freezes.
I actually really disliked this. Too distracting for me. Maybe my tastes will change over time - but I stopped reading because I couldn't concentrate on the text.
The nest cannot be always on because it is not provided with enough power. It has to use the power it has to charge an internal battery so they it can work at all. Always on would not have sufficient power.
I was talking about a switch for the HVAC fan, not the nest itself. With the nest you have to fiddle through a bunch of screens to turn the fan on and off. It is a personal pain point of mine.
Totally agree. I've been tinkering with my own project to do this. I wanted the recirc fan under programmable control as well to try and mix the house air once in a while and distribute the temperature a little better.
Nobody has ever offered this in a thermostat with the possible exception of the RadioThermostat CT30/3M50, which has a JSON API and lets you manually control the relays.
??? My 30 dollar third-world built brazilian crappy on-off thermostat has manual fan on and off. It can be programmed to turn on automatically when over/under a given temperature and also to not run for more than a predefined ammount of minutes.
As I understand it any temperature control designed for big refrigerators or freezers has this features. Some even allow you to pre-configure fan cycles (i.e. on for x minutes, off for y, repeat) and turn the cycle on or off depending on temperature or compressor state.
To me this is like the hardware mute switch on the side of the iPhone. Maybe let me decide with software what the switch does, but let me throw the switch when I want something NOW.
Documenting a company hardware hackathon this way is super interesting. I think we'll have to give something like this a shot next time we do some rapid prototyping over here. Way to go Spark!
There is a project called GNU remotecontrol that I just discovered that could be used for this purpose. It's important that you can be in control of your thermostat data instead of handing it over to Google/Nest/some other malicious vendor.
Going from a few examples that obviously cause harm, beyond dispute, I can immediately think of several that do not lend themselves to quantification.
(I hesitate to list them, lest I incur low-brow "Do you really think what google is doing is that bad?!?" comments (hint: harm, while not necessary quantifiable, is not all made equal), but if you really can't think of any examples I can list a few.)
It still seems like a really bad idea to rely on a third-party to control your heating. They might not have any malicious intents, but they could just shut down the service one day and your thermostat won't be worth much anymore. Not to mention the security implications of running your thermostat on some remote server that you don't control.
Which was not in anything I posted. I simply said that stating these companies are malicious is a bit far fetched.
That said, there's microcontrollers and firmware in all programable thermostats (not to mention the heat pump). Most people today already rely on third parties to heat and cool their homes.
Wood is basically more expensive than plastic for mass-manufactured items. The basic raw material is more expensive. You can't source a large volume of aesthetically-identical pieces, so its harder to produce identical items. You can't injection mold wood, so higher manufacturing costs.
There are "manufactured" woods which address many of these issues, but they also tend not to be deemed as beautiful / strong as the real thing.
I believe its the reason that injection molding plastics is so popular versus doing metal and wood. Wood and metal most of the time require a subtractive(sp?) manufacturing process that requires a lot of raw material, assembly steps, and waste. Injection molding and 3D printing is additive that is automated and simplifies the process with minimal waste.
You can't beat polymers for consistency, finishing, handling, tooling, durability, etc. For each friction point with wood, you could create dynamic systems to alleviate the pain or you could just start with materials designed for scale.
One of the good things about wood is you don't have to worry about it sticking around for 1000+ years. The problem with plastics is most of it can't be recycled. Not the way we think of recycling.
Aluminum cans are melted down and turned back into aluminum cans. Polymers are ground up and injection molded into lower grade polymers. Once too many polymer chains get broken the grade is too low to be usable.
Careful polymer selection can work around that. PLA can be digested back into starch by an enzyme or composted at high temperature. There are plastics that can be cleanly incinerated or ground up and embedded in concrete mixes as insulation. You can chemically depolymerize a number of plastics and end up with much more manageable products. The real problem is getting all that stuff out of the world at large and into a processing plant.
> The real problem is getting all that stuff out of the world at large and into a processing plant.
The problem with plastics is its cheap acquisition costs and expensive disposal costs. One of the good things about living in a developed country is we sorta manage the disposal costs well. In developing countries they don't manage plastic disposal at all. In all my travels one of the overriding themes I've seen is plastic on the sides of road, in rivers, on the beach.
When I removed the wooden door from a house we didn't need to call the city to send a special truck to dispose of it. We chopped it into pieces and used it for bbq. Then we mixed the ashes into the compost. Disposal was $0.
While plastic is cheap in the short term I think there are a lot of long term costs that get ignored.
You can burn most plastics too, it's not like polyethylene doesn't burn like frozen gasoline. Sure, some of them will offgas toxic byproducts but so, too, does wood smoke.
(Those processes mostly just mean that it all comes down to whether you want to put energy into something. Whether they are economical today doesn't factor into the usefulness in eliminating mountains of plastic.)
Nice. It's a quote from "The Graduate" in case there's anyone puzzled by this. Career advice from a wise grey head to the young Dustin Hoffman character.
I'm only involved in manufacturing as a hobby for my custom keyboard projects. But my bet would be that it's about injection molding [0].
Once you got the molds machined you can mass produce plastic parts extremely cheaply. Need more plastic parts? Get a few more molds made. It scales pretty well because one mold can produce multiple parts at once and the injection molding presses itself are relatively inexpensive and pretty much fully automated.
Wood while being great for prototyping doesn't scale that well in mass production. You would machine it using CNC routers and if you need more produced you need new expensive CNC routers which can only produce one part at a time. Also the CNC routers I know you have to baby sit.
Again: That's only from my limited experience with limited runs (a few thousand pieces at most). Maybe someone who knows more about real mass production can elaborate a little more on this.
Sorry, I should have elaborated. Flammability popped into my mind because of the need to list the flammability ratings of the materials in a design when going through regulatory testing and certification (UL, CE, etc).
How does the thermostat control temperature? Am I crazy, I feel like I'm missing a section on how this device connects to the central air, Ac, heater, fan or something that can affect temperature. Under hardware: "relays to control the furnace and the fan." But I don't see details on the relay.
You just wire the relays to the control wires coming out of the wall. You can turn your furnace on and off by just touching these wires together. It will depend on how your system is wired there can be a lot of variations. Of course making sure your product works with all those variations is one of the hard parts that they didn't address.
If you're interested in building IoT, wearables, and externals, I'm getting an expo + hackathon together called Hackendo (http://hackendo.techendo.co) for April. I would really love the community's support in helping make this awesome, so anyone with experience in this area or feedback on how I should run the event, please reach out.
This makes me happy. I have a house with electric heat and eight thermostats pushing Nest costs into unreasonable territory. I'd love to be able to remotely set all my thermostats to 55 degrees or get certain zones to react based on events fired from my phone, (e.g. coming, leaving, charging with screen off aka sleeping, pending alarm)
Unfortunately, with my electric heat the thermostats sit inline with the heater's power source so I need devices that can safely handle 120v.
Not large at all. One thermostat per room. With electric heat you have to put a thermostat in line between the circuit breakers and the heating element (radiant panels in my case). Centralizing the house on a single thermostat, like you would with forced air, would actually be incredibly difficult. It would also lose the benefit of fine control; one of the few positives of electric heat.
Worth pointing out (and you touch on this above) that this is not a function of electric heat but a function specifically of the type of electric heat (radiant in this case). I have electric heat by way of a ducted electric heat pump which is not zoned and thus centralized. Zoned ducted and non-ducted electric heat pumps both offer localized control over heating.
Electric heat means they have electric baseboards in each room, making individual control logical and obvious, so eight rooms really isn't outside of the ordinary. Compare that to central HVAC where there's one furnace and at most you have electric dampers restricting flow to an area of the house (though few houses have even that).
I think it's pretty funny how much gnashing of teeth there is over a $250 item that's installed in a house, given how expensive so many other things in a house are.
I mean, I just don't get why people are so angry that someone would possibly want to spend some extra money to have a cool thermostat. If it was a cool video card for $249 that just lets them play games, no one would blink an eye. But because it's for a house, but for a part of the house that is supposed to be utilitarian, it's a sin.
Replacing an existing item in your house with something for 10x the cost is not something you want to be doing too often as a homeowner. The benefits have to be quite significant. I've got a simple programmable digital thermostat that works fine. If I come home earlier than normal, I just bump up the heat manually. Calling ahead with my phone wouldn't add all that much value for me. If it was $50, I'd think about it. $250? No chance.
Nest thermostats seem to be around $250. If you want thermostats that you can control with Applescript, Perl, mobile apps, etc., check out these Insteon-based ones for $150:
http://www.smarthome.com/2441TH/INSTEON-Thermostat/p.aspx
One problem with the Nest is that if your thermostat is in a poor location (more of a problem with central heating), the motion sensor won't see you. With the ones I suggested above, you can programmatically link those to ~$40 motion sensors installed in the correct locations that will actually work.
I have one of those; it works pretty well. Before the Insteon was released I had a X10 thermostat which was somewhat cheaper. I worked around the "X10 is only 95% reliable" problem by having misterhouse set the temp every 5 minutes or whatever it was.
The financial payback time is unfortunately infinite but it was interesting.
One advantage of programming an insteon thermostat is its just plain old off the shelf technology to all end users including repair guys, although how its temp is set is magic and done by computer.
Most of the software work is already done by the misterhouse system, its not like you have to write your own insteon drivers or write your own sensor drivers or whatever. Misterhouse's support for Insteon has varied a bit over the decades. Last time I had to mess with anything it was a little fuzzy. I would imagine things have advanced considerably in the last half decade or so. I do not currently have misterhouse controlling the insteon thermostat mostly out of lazyness, I'll eventually re-enable it.
I have the exact same situation but I have spoken to Nest Customer Service and other "smart" thermostat CS and all have told me that they will not work with the wiring for electric heaters commonly controlled by a single dedicated mechanical thermostat. I was out of luck so if you find an working "smart" thermostat I would love to get one.
Not only that, but basic, programmable load bearing thermostats are relatively expensive compared to the typical control line alternatives. However, even with basic programmable thermostats (>=$75 a piece), I saw my electrical bill drop considerably vs. a 30 year old mechanical thermostat in an apartment I lived in the past 4 years.
We've moved since then and took the thermostats with us. I still have two if you want to buy some slightly used aube programmables (nothing with wifi, but better than nothing).
Nice, but I'd rather not be tied to a 3rd party service like Spark Cloud. Indeed thats my problem with Nest. It would be great if it would just connect to my private VPS or something.
Yep, the Common Questions section of their website[1] says that they'll be releasing an open source version of their Cloud. Awesome.
[1] https://www.spark.io/
I'm trying to understand if you can self-host the server-side piece of this. I've wanted to have a networked thermostat for a while, but all the ones I found connect to the vendor's server, which is silly. I'd like to be able to point the device at my own server so I have full control.
EDIT: Yep, the Common Questions section of their website[1] says that they'll be releasing an open source version of their Cloud. Awesome.
Even better than not sending your usage information offsite: not having the system stop working when spark.io goes out of business (or is purchased, or goes to version 3, or...) and stops their servers.
I think this is great but there are lessons here from desktop Linux, Facebook clones, etc, which is that retail is hard.
In order to ship a widely used operating system, you need a support infrastructure, consumer research, drivers for lots of hardware, warranties, marketing, payroll, operations, accountants, regulatory compliance. The product is almost the easiest part.
I imagine that Nest understands all this. Putting a piece of hardware in someone’s house – one that’s connected to a furnace or which claims to protect against fire – means a lot of liabilities, broadly defined.
I’d love to see an open source version get to that level of maturity and support. It does happen but it takes a lot of people.
–
(Tangent, but when I started at Stack, a lot of people said they could (and did) build a clone in a weekend. Sure, as an approximation of the technical product. But that ain’t the ‘retail’ product, which is actually comprised of community, goodwill, SEO, quality control, and a lot of other things.)
I have built a similar system, and expanding it to more devices (think: devices other than thermostats). However, I use my own custom messaging/web server for communicating with the device from anywhere in the world. Think controlling your (ex: toaster) in NYC from LA without configuring any networks, vpn, ports,...aka Nest-like. Combined with some machine learning and machine "thinking", its pretty powerful.
The Spark Thermostat is great minus the fact that you need their web api for communicating with it. But for a 1-day build, how can anyone disappointed! Great job Spark team.
In regards to my own devices, I am definitely going to have to take a look at Spark now. Cool hardware.
Any ideas for stuff to build with this besides a thermostat? I'm talking about for a fun side project to learn the ropes, not necessarily the next $3.2B IoT company.
Once you add networking, Arduinos don't really have much cost benefit over a full-fledged Linux SOC board. An Uno plus an Ethernet shield ends up being nearly the cost of a Raspberry Pi, which is several times more powerful.
I built out my XMPP-controlled office thermostat on a BeagleBone Black, which costs a bit more than the Pi but has way more pins, including analog inputs, which are pretty important for temperature sensors. Plus using a Linux machine meant being able to choose your language instead of being stuck with C, so I took the chance to learn some Erlang: http://technomancy.us/171
A web connected[1] ultrasonic sensor unit, that you put[3] on the side of your car , and while driving, it recognizes[2] empty parking spaces and sends the location[4] to a cosm.com map.
[1] through your phone hotspot.
[2] since an ultrasonic sensor senses distance, it can sense if you have a car near you or an empty space.
That's a great idea. Another way of doing this is to use Google map. Google map already knows your location for their collection of traffic data [1], they could cross reference this to when they car leaves a parking location. The emptying of the car park is notified to Google map. Trouble is the data is only available to Google.
I think that this is a really cool project. But I think that the problem here is still fundamentally the same as the one faced by the nest.
The thesis of spark.io is "you can trust us with your data" not you have control of your data.
The spark is built on a cloud connected platform. even if you can see and control outputs from your board you still exist as part of their ecosystem. Which is basically the functional equivalent of using the dropbox api to build something instead of google drive.
I won't be excited about home automation until someone goes the way of an open protocol for these types of devices that doesn't require a centralized pass through.
Because if history has been any kind of teacher, it shows us that spark.io will probably get sucked up by google or somebody in the near future.
First I would say that nest certainly has a good user base. Keep in mind 3.2 Billion is just what google was willing to pay for the company this is in no way a metric for the success of the product. Liberal estimates give the company a potential revenue of 111 million a year based the amount of units they claim to produce, but this is a maximum sales number. Also the argument that most users don't care about this issue has been clearly shown to be incorrect. http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-sync-hits-1-million-users...
Spark is still like nest a company, and THEIR argument is that their product is great because of the control it gives you over making your own solution. I am not saying that nest isn't a valid product for the market I am simply saying that sparks thesis isn't really valid because they claim to put the user fully in control when really they are still the gatekeepers.
If you want the simplicity of the Cloud but you want it on your own server, we'll be releasing an open source version of the Cloud designed for quick and easy deployment.
(They also don't seem to restrict the device very much)
yeah once the open source cloud release happens I think that my view would change. But as it stands you do currently need to use their cloud to connect to the device.
Perhaps not when it was Nest as opposed to Google. I'd have quite liked the Nest Protect but I don't want to have even more of my life depending on Google. Diversification is a good thing.
Of course, I might be wrong and had Nest actually been a Google product from day 1, then it might have been even bigger. Who knows.
Who knows Google will also acquire Spark some day. They have bought a bunch of robotics companies, Nest and so on. A cloud connected controller, why not?
This is pretty cool. For some time I've been interested in building a Nest clone. I like the concept of Nest however it doesn't work for me because my wife's work schedule can't be predicted with machine learning and therefore I think Nest would actually end up being less efficient for us. She keeps her work schedule in a calendar though so my plan was to have the thermostat use her work calendar to optimize our heating/cooling plan. This project looks like it could be a good starting point.
I gotta say -- the use of video in this blog post is outstanding. Best use case of HTML5 Video I've yet come across, frankly. Sorry, I'm supposed to comment on the actual comment...haha. Just saying I love the format. :)
Cannot view the page in Firefox because it's freezing the browser and the memory usage jumps from 155 MB to 880 MB (even with clean profile without add-ons) :(
258 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 245 ms ] threadI never thought I'd see a good use case for auto playing videos. (It kind of reminds me of Harry Potter too)
Having said that, an h264 source can have magnitudes more complexity for playback, and generally the greater the compression the higher the playback complexity. Having five or so high profile multi-MB decorative videos autoplaying on a page is excessive.
They shouldn't use autoplay. They shouldn't even initialize until scrolled into view. They shouldn't all play at once. Their bandwidth usage is going to be enormous from this HNing, a single page impression pushing 15MB+ (EDIT: I hadn't really delved into it at the time given the display issues, however I grossly underestimated when I said 15MB).
[1] http://gfycat.com/about
Sadly I won't be reading any of the content because even after five minutes it's killing my browser. To the spark.io blogging team, please don't assume unlimited wads of broadband. Let the reader decide whether they want to play your videos, and you know, I can only watch one video at a time on that page, so why start them all playing at once? This is no better etiquette than CNN or MSNBC or an adware farm where they start playing videos at you upon arrival. It's very rude.
Maybe using whatever https://mediacru.sh/ returns instead will help.
https://blog.mediacru.sh/2013/10/31/Add-media-hosting-to-you...
For no real reason either time. I'm not sure what's going there.
I'm using version 7.2.0 (this is a very old driver) of the open-source Radeon X.Org driver on a four-way Phenom II system with 16GB of RAM and a Radeon HD 6950 with Chromium 31 and Chrome 32.
Edit: This is with crummy AMD FirePro 2270 graphics. Chrome 34.0.1789.0 canary was very smooth on the same box!
I'm sure YMMV depending upon OS, browser, underlying installed codecs handling the video (and their associated gpu acceleration or lack thereof), etc.
Now i'm thinking about upgrading and all that... :P
$('video').each(function() { this.pause(); })
Not sure what the others guy are talking about. Works fine on my MacBook Pro...not issues at all?
As I mentioned in another post, it works fine in Chrome 34 on the same hardware that it struggles dramatically with in Chrome 32. Both of them have hardware decoding enabled, and so on. The Chrome 32 instance has no problems at all playing video anywhere else.
Indeed, on that same line, the videos don't load at all on Chrome on the Nexus 5. The N5 of course supports h264, and has no problem on any other site that I've ever discovered. Maybe their server is now overloaded (EDIT: Okay they're using S3....going to be an ugly bandwidth bill from that...and it's fully responsive), but it also doesn't load on the iPad 3rd generation running iOS 7. Again just black boxes.
EDIT: I wonder if it's because they're (s3) setting the content type to octet-stream, rather than video/mp4. Some clients seem to be going on alternate decode paths or are refusing to display it because of that.
e.g.
Content-Length:6915107 Content-Range:bytes 0-6915106/6915107 Content-Type:application/octet-stream
There's a lesson in here somewhere.
It's sad to find out that they ignored that mp4 isn't supported by all browsers. I know: HTML5 video is just a PITA, and that's indeed a reason why so many still rely on gifs.
I hope this project grows, and that they will care a bit more than they did here.
I utterly disliked it. It made my browser slow and so I didn't read their page.
Poor degradation to those of us running NoScript, there.
Opening the page via eww in EMACS made it readable since it doesn't load videos if I don't ask it to.
Nobody has ever offered this in a thermostat with the possible exception of the RadioThermostat CT30/3M50, which has a JSON API and lets you manually control the relays.
As I understand it any temperature control designed for big refrigerators or freezers has this features. Some even allow you to pre-configure fan cycles (i.e. on for x minutes, off for y, repeat) and turn the cycle on or off depending on temperature or compressor state.
Going from a few examples that obviously cause harm, beyond dispute, I can immediately think of several that do not lend themselves to quantification.
(I hesitate to list them, lest I incur low-brow "Do you really think what google is doing is that bad?!?" comments (hint: harm, while not necessary quantifiable, is not all made equal), but if you really can't think of any examples I can list a few.)
That said, there's microcontrollers and firmware in all programable thermostats (not to mention the heat pump). Most people today already rely on third parties to heat and cool their homes.
I always hoped they would switch back to wood, but it's incredibly hard to do right in mass manufacturing.
Any particular reason? From the outside, wood seem easier to use than plastic.
There are "manufactured" woods which address many of these issues, but they also tend not to be deemed as beautiful / strong as the real thing.
The future is not made of wood.
One of the good things about wood is you don't have to worry about it sticking around for 1000+ years. The problem with plastics is most of it can't be recycled. Not the way we think of recycling.
Aluminum cans are melted down and turned back into aluminum cans. Polymers are ground up and injection molded into lower grade polymers. Once too many polymer chains get broken the grade is too low to be usable.
The problem with plastics is its cheap acquisition costs and expensive disposal costs. One of the good things about living in a developed country is we sorta manage the disposal costs well. In developing countries they don't manage plastic disposal at all. In all my travels one of the overriding themes I've seen is plastic on the sides of road, in rivers, on the beach.
When I removed the wooden door from a house we didn't need to call the city to send a special truck to dispose of it. We chopped it into pieces and used it for bbq. Then we mixed the ashes into the compost. Disposal was $0.
While plastic is cheap in the short term I think there are a lot of long term costs that get ignored.
Great point. Simple and head-smack obvious when you read it. Hits right at the core.
Immediately after reading, I generalized to "cheap up-front, expensive back-end costs."
and here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_garbage_patch
and here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Ocean_garbage_patch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrolysis#Plastic_waste_disposa...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization
(Those processes mostly just mean that it all comes down to whether you want to put energy into something. Whether they are economical today doesn't factor into the usefulness in eliminating mountains of plastic.)
It's quite profitable, just the required amount of upfront investment is high.
I'm only involved in manufacturing as a hobby for my custom keyboard projects. But my bet would be that it's about injection molding [0].
Once you got the molds machined you can mass produce plastic parts extremely cheaply. Need more plastic parts? Get a few more molds made. It scales pretty well because one mold can produce multiple parts at once and the injection molding presses itself are relatively inexpensive and pretty much fully automated.
Wood while being great for prototyping doesn't scale that well in mass production. You would machine it using CNC routers and if you need more produced you need new expensive CNC routers which can only produce one part at a time. Also the CNC routers I know you have to baby sit.
Again: That's only from my limited experience with limited runs (a few thousand pieces at most). Maybe someone who knows more about real mass production can elaborate a little more on this.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Injection_molding
Also the firmware definition bugs me.
neat product/concept tho.
Also if you're in the bay area, you should check out this meetup group run by my friend Nick Pinkston: http://www.meetup.com/HardwareStartupSF/
Unfortunately, with my electric heat the thermostats sit inline with the heater's power source so I need devices that can safely handle 120v.
electric heat refers specifically to heat generated by heating an element with current.
The issue is that standard programmable thermostats don't come close to the price of a Nest... about $20.
These wifi light bulbs are 3 for $199: http://store.apple.com/us/product/HA779VC/A/philips-hue-conn...
I mean, I just don't get why people are so angry that someone would possibly want to spend some extra money to have a cool thermostat. If it was a cool video card for $249 that just lets them play games, no one would blink an eye. But because it's for a house, but for a part of the house that is supposed to be utilitarian, it's a sin.
http://www.homedepot.com/p/Honeywell-Wi-Fi-Programmable-Touc...
I could buy a new fridge, a new stove, and a new water heater for that kind of money. Nice ones, too.
One problem with the Nest is that if your thermostat is in a poor location (more of a problem with central heating), the motion sensor won't see you. With the ones I suggested above, you can programmatically link those to ~$40 motion sensors installed in the correct locations that will actually work.
The financial payback time is unfortunately infinite but it was interesting.
One advantage of programming an insteon thermostat is its just plain old off the shelf technology to all end users including repair guys, although how its temp is set is magic and done by computer.
Most of the software work is already done by the misterhouse system, its not like you have to write your own insteon drivers or write your own sensor drivers or whatever. Misterhouse's support for Insteon has varied a bit over the decades. Last time I had to mess with anything it was a little fuzzy. I would imagine things have advanced considerably in the last half decade or so. I do not currently have misterhouse controlling the insteon thermostat mostly out of lazyness, I'll eventually re-enable it.
This doesn't solve your problem of the $250/room cost, but if you'd like to use some other thermostats in your rooms this would work great.
The only complaint I'd have about mine is that the relay is very loud. You might want to search for a quieter one.
http://www.aubetech.com/products/list.php?noLangue=2&noFamil...
They apparently pay attention to how loud it is.
We've moved since then and took the thermostats with us. I still have two if you want to buy some slightly used aube programmables (nothing with wifi, but better than nothing).
Looking back to 5-10 years ago you would have had a really hard time building this in a week let alone 1 day.
Yep, the Common Questions section of their website[1] says that they'll be releasing an open source version of their Cloud. Awesome. [1] https://www.spark.io/
- Eggs should not be washed.
EDIT: Yep, the Common Questions section of their website[1] says that they'll be releasing an open source version of their Cloud. Awesome.
[1] https://www.spark.io/
http://docs.spark.io/#/examples/local-communication
Seriously, the case was possibly the least important part of this and they had no troubles manufacturing it.
In order to ship a widely used operating system, you need a support infrastructure, consumer research, drivers for lots of hardware, warranties, marketing, payroll, operations, accountants, regulatory compliance. The product is almost the easiest part.
I imagine that Nest understands all this. Putting a piece of hardware in someone’s house – one that’s connected to a furnace or which claims to protect against fire – means a lot of liabilities, broadly defined.
I’d love to see an open source version get to that level of maturity and support. It does happen but it takes a lot of people.
–
(Tangent, but when I started at Stack, a lot of people said they could (and did) build a clone in a weekend. Sure, as an approximation of the technical product. But that ain’t the ‘retail’ product, which is actually comprised of community, goodwill, SEO, quality control, and a lot of other things.)
The Spark Thermostat is great minus the fact that you need their web api for communicating with it. But for a 1-day build, how can anyone disappointed! Great job Spark team.
In regards to my own devices, I am definitely going to have to take a look at Spark now. Cool hardware.
There are lots of microcontroller-that-you-program-via-usb communities. Arduino is a good search word.
Also, this discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7071080
included this tumblr:
http://bltuc.tumblr.com/
I built out my XMPP-controlled office thermostat on a BeagleBone Black, which costs a bit more than the Pi but has way more pins, including analog inputs, which are pretty important for temperature sensors. Plus using a Linux machine meant being able to choose your language instead of being stuck with C, so I took the chance to learn some Erlang: http://technomancy.us/171
The $40 wifi-included board featured in this story sort of has a nice installation story though (maybe fussy setup, but one less cable).
A web connected[1] ultrasonic sensor unit, that you put[3] on the side of your car , and while driving, it recognizes[2] empty parking spaces and sends the location[4] to a cosm.com map.
[1] through your phone hotspot.
[2] since an ultrasonic sensor senses distance, it can sense if you have a car near you or an empty space.
[3] Maybe with vacuum stick units.
[4] You'll need a gsm shield for that.
[1] http://www.theconnectivist.com/2013/07/how-google-tracks-tra...
Servo big enough to close central heating valve (the big knob next to your heater).
Automatic light switches when you leave house or going to sleep.
Smart monitors, esp. water leak alert when you are not home.
I think a really great improvement would be GSM module, delivering connection over Whispernet (aka hassle free).
The thesis of spark.io is "you can trust us with your data" not you have control of your data.
The spark is built on a cloud connected platform. even if you can see and control outputs from your board you still exist as part of their ecosystem. Which is basically the functional equivalent of using the dropbox api to build something instead of google drive.
I won't be excited about home automation until someone goes the way of an open protocol for these types of devices that doesn't require a centralized pass through.
Because if history has been any kind of teacher, it shows us that spark.io will probably get sucked up by google or somebody in the near future.
From the "Common questions" section at the bottom of https://www.spark.io/:
If you want the simplicity of the Cloud but you want it on your own server, we'll be releasing an open source version of the Cloud designed for quick and easy deployment.
(They also don't seem to restrict the device very much)
Of course, I might be wrong and had Nest actually been a Google product from day 1, then it might have been even bigger. Who knows.
http://docs.spark.io/#/examples/local-communication
Eventually they promised to open source their entire cloud stack. Eagerly awaiting when they do.
After all, one wouldn't want to have to charge their smoke detector every day like a smartphone, right? (Not once a month either).
Edit: It's doing the same in Chrome too