Nest Protect is a terrible buggy product

> I'm curious how many people think this is valuable as a stand-alone device? Does it need to have it's own screen and interface? I see a device whose dominant use case would be direct, at-a-glance interaction. It doesn't strike me as sensible that a typical user would generally care about data whose practicality matters only when he/she is physically present in the datalogged space...almost as insensible as texting someone sitting right beside you. Furthermore, omission of direct UI immediately eliminates the unconnected market segment. I would imagine that "mobile app" isn't exactly a driving parameter when people are looking for an air quality monitor, but in today's connected age, it does seem to add modern appeal and a sense of (perhaps misguided?) relevance. > Would it make more sense built into something like a thermostat? This isn't a thermostat, which makes the proposition sound like feature creep. -Placement consideration: Think where thermostats are typically mounted in a home: places that are clear from passing obstruction but not where people generally spend much time in. Places I'd expect to find this device: kitchen counter, living room table, bedside night stand, computer desktop, garage workbench...in other words, where people linger, within arm's reach, and generally not anywhere near a thermostat. -Safety consideration: Designing a 4-20mA temperature control circuit is a straight forward affair. Designing a fault-tolerant, high-reliability, regulation-compl

in “Speck” · View on HN

You definitely don't have to write your own an OS. You use existing tools, for example FreeRTOS. It's surprisingly simple. With a microcontroller, you can have a pretty much complete understanding of the whole machine. All you need is a basic knowledge of C, and most of the people who would solder stuff to a Raspberry Pi already have that or are willing to learn. Say you're making a thermostat. By convention, you leave address 0x0 empty, since dereferencing the NULL pointer is bad form :) At address 0x4 you have a int containing the target temperature. At address 0x8 you have a int containing the current measured temperature. Your whole app uses 8 bytes of memory, plus a few more for the stack. You write a loop. It reads a few GPIOs, updates those two values, does a bit of logic to decide whether to turn on the heat, then writes one more GPIO to turn the heater on or off. GPIOs are "general purpose IO", metal pins that can be individually set to, say, +5V or 0V. The beauty of this is that if you write it cleanly and debug it and test it once, it will work perfectly forever. It will never throw up a popup that says "a new version of Ubuntu is available". It will never ask you to download 80MB of Java. It will never auto update. The server will never go down, because there is no server. It feels totally different from typical software development. You're writing a bit of C, but you're not making an "app" with all the complexity and flakiness that entails. You're creating an emb

in “Raspberry Pi Zero vs. Elliott 405” · View on HN

bradfitz has this pretty famous video "review" (of sorts) of Nest fire alarms: ▶ this video The review is extremely negative, explicitly telling people not to buy Nest products. Those are (and were at the time of that video) a Google product, as Google acquired Nest in 2014. Brad still works at Google. I'm sure Benson will be fine.

in “Google engineer writing Amazon reviews on USB-C cables that don't work” · View on HN

Here's a good video demonstrating a similar experience: ▶ this video It is amazing how many of his attempts to silence them fail, until he finally gives up and packs them away in multiple coolers in his garage to insulate away the noise.

in “I No Longer Have Any Trust in the Nest Protect” · View on HN

The reference to Nest isn't a big plus in my book. I've only heard bad things about it - ▶ this video This phone isn't going to kill the iPhone - in fact it would take a big screwup on the part of Apple for people to start migrating away from its products. Not that Apple is incapable of screwing up, but so far they've sailed their ship pretty well. Apart from the hardware, there's the whole ecosystem of app developers, programming environments, cloud services.. Ultimately it's about who can attract the more talented developers - and that is a lot more difficult than snapping a faster CPU or better camera in your phone.

in “Behind the Pixel: Google’s First Real Threat to Apple’s iPhone” · View on HN

I don't know, after seeing the video [1] from Brad Fitzpatrick about his experience with Nest products, I'm not sure I'd ever consider them. Side note: if you watched the season premiere of Mr. Robot last night, there was a scene that reminded me of Brad's video (I'll say no more for fear of spoilers) [1] ▶ this video

in “The Nest Cam Outdoor is a $199 camera with an easy-to-install magnetic base” · View on HN

This is neither the first time Google's done something like this to customers, nor the first time Tony Fadell has been directly involved. When they pulled Google Glass from the market, it was concurrent with moving the Glass team to Fadell's leadership. They didn't go quite so far as to push an update to brick devices, but they left the software in a broken state, and refused to open source their fork of Android so users could fix it themselves. Nest has also burned a lot of Google's goodwill with badly designed smoke detectors ( ▶ this video ) and thermostats ( [link] ). And then there's this, on a recent HN thread: [link] > "I still wake up with something like PTSD occasionally from getting yelled at and bullied by Tony Fadell almost literally every day while I was there." > "Tony literally stood up at an all-hands after the Alphabet thing and said "Fuck being Googley" (direct quote)." I think Google/Alphabet need to take a serious look at what Nest has been doing to their brand. A few thousand very-pissed-off people here and a few thousand very-pissed-off people there add up to a serious liability for a company like Google.

in “Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices” · View on HN

The Nest thermostat is a dream compared to the smoke detector. The smoke detector goes off all the time -- without rhyme or reason. With a normal detector, you can just pull the battery if it refuses to shut off. With Nest, you actually need a screw driver to open the battery compartment to turn it off. So, when it decides to wake up the entire house at 3am (yes, the entire house, since they all go off in unison) you'll need to go find a screw driver to get it to shut up. The one flippin' reason I bought a Nest Protect was so I could "wave to silence" an alarm. Well, every time it goes off, it tells me that "this alarm cannot be silenced" - even by pushing the power button. Not once have I been able to turn off an alarm without removing the batteries. The worst feeling is when you get an alert on your iPhone while nobody (but your pet) is home. "Alert: your house is on fire." Then you rush home and realize it's a false alarm. After our fourth or fifth false alarm we returned them all and replaced them with the old-fashioned alarms. Watch this hilarious video if you're considering buying a Nest Protect: ▶ this video (warning: loud alarms in video)

in “We're hearing about troubles at Nest” · View on HN

> 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. The Dance of Smoke Alarm Supplication can still apply to smart smoke alarms: ▶ this video

in “The Internet of Way Too Many Things” · View on HN

While I kind of agree with the author's position in general, I found the singling-out of the Leeo (which I had previously never heard of and thus have no horse in the race of its success) a bad example. The way it is described in the article actually sounds pretty ideal to me in that it is not trying to insert all sorts of "intelligence" into the simple, well-understood solution that already exists in the form of a simple smoke alarm. Rather, it is merely augmenting that solution in a way that is helpful but less mission critical, without integrating extra "intelligence" in a way that is likely to cause software-related problems. See bradfitz's video for an example of how "intelligence" can hamper something like smoke alarms if the entire system is integrated and "smart". ▶ this video

in “The Internet of Way Too Many Things” · View on HN

I'm very surprised parent-of-parent got so downvoted; I agree the point isn't very rigorous (as parent argues), but parent-of-parent isn't particularly less rigorous or more incendiary than average HN comments. There are plenty of solid reasons to doubt Google given the points that parent-of-parent draws: * Android was purchased and has plenty of product sharp edges. E.g. there are several ways to send texts. There's the issue of fragmentation. The new Google Photos has embarrassing auto-tags for African-Americans. Google has a solid whole product right now, but so did RIM. They will need to push really hard on projects like Tango and Project Fi to compete in future markets. * Nest is garnering a reputation for being untrustworthy due to absurd bugs like: ▶ this video * Google is the most published self-driving car manufacturer, but w/out a shipping product they aren't clearly a leader. All early reviews of their car indicate that it's currently too conservative. There's also an issue: do people actually want the whole product? It looks like Tesla and Mercedes will very likely beat Google to market with core self-driving features. I agree with parent-of-parent that Google appears to be trying to position itself more aggressively in many consumer product markets. Google is an excellent technology company, but most of their products have been niche hits. There's plenty of room for their competitors to leverage better customer relationships to own good chunks of the markets that Goog

in “Google stock spikes after reporting better than expected Q2 earnings” · View on HN