What's that touchscreen in my room?

https://laplab.me/posts/whats-that-touchscreen-in-my-room/

by todsacerdoti • 3 years ago

1890 560 3 years ago

Small bit about that Wi-Fi remark. Yes in your case it’s close to the server but Wi-Fi lets you mount the touchscreen anywhere. Wi-Fi completely makes sense here.

Retr0id• 3 years ago

The equivalent energy monitoring device in my flat uses an RF link (no idea what kind, I haven't investigated further) to talk to its base station. Wireless seems fine, but WiFi itself seems like overkill.

archi42• 3 years ago

Absolutely. Try retrofitting this into a multi unit home and "just run a digital data cable up there". With some bad luck, this can easily cost as much as the whole unit.

I don't like getting everything on WiFi, too. OTOH I have ~30 devices on an VLAN isolated IoT WiFi network. This easily saved us a 4 digit expense and a lot of time(!) as opposed to installing new additional wire (redoing all the old ones was bad enough). Plus, I can do dumb stuff like control my office's window blinds individually, which is nice when only one of them has the sun blinding me while using the PC (temporary desk location due to ongoing renovations).

crummy• 3 years ago

Did you take notes along the way? Usually when I am "exploring" a problem like that it's hard to reproduce my steps later.

laplab5• 3 years ago

Yes! I started taking some notes when I was halfway through, that helped a lot with the thought reconstruction. There is no chance I would find these TCF links organically again

qingcharles2• 3 years ago

Ah, it's not just me that does this. I also start taking notes from the beginning now, otherwise when I go back to write it up for others I sometimes can't even replicate the starting conditions.

incanus77• 3 years ago

For me, a particular browser window's (many) open tabs are usually a pretty good record.

josu• 3 years ago

DATE & TIME ARE ALWAYS CORRECT AND NEVER NEED TO BE ADJUSTED

Reads like a quote from a Philip K. Dick book.

Ayesh3• 3 years ago

My guess was that it probably had a time correction feature from those British radio tower integration, but this device is from 2015 (says in the article), so probably not.

Aaron2222• 3 years ago

Maybe they originally intended for them to be internet connected? That would also explain the MQTT.

qsantos• 3 years ago

From the Mastodon thread:

Turns out, they found out an even more innovative time sync mechanism. When you open the UI in the browser, they quickly redirect you to "/set-time/" + Date.now(). This sets a global variable in the Node.js app responsible for "now".

(https://mastodon.social/@laplab/111789584104871367)

skrebbel• 3 years ago

Maybe it’s the technical writer’s way of saying “we ping an NTP server so don't worry” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39065780

(Clearly that didn't pan out so well)

niklasrde• 3 years ago

Without internet access?

hacker_newz• 3 years ago

Nice write-up, I wish my apartment had this.

Symbiote16• 3 years ago

If the live and neutral cables of your electricity supply are seperate and accessible, you can buy a meter that measures power use with a clamp (loop) that fits around the live cable. Perfectly safe, they were often given away by electric companies in Britain in the 2010s to encourage thriftiness.

Here's a zigbee one: https://smarthomescene.com/reviews/tuya-zigbee-single-clamp-...

Here's one with an app: https://aeotec.com/products/aeotec-home-energy-meter/

You'll find many more if you search "clamp energy meter".

IlliOnato• 3 years ago

I am curious, what "jira_version" in that listing means. Surely not Jira?.. :-)

SonOfLilit• 3 years ago

Why not? It most likely means "version in the sense of a release version we configured in Jira to attach tickets to"

aworks• 3 years ago

"urban archeology": The device was using an ARM processor extension that could directly execute Java bytecode.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazelle

Something1234• 3 years ago

I want to know more. History of java is just insanely weird.

astrange• 3 years ago

SIM cards and secure elements (contactless credit cards) both use this, or did at one point.

callalex• 3 years ago

I need you to know that the Java Ring was a thing that existed. And yes it’s just as stupidly large as it looks.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/300495374337

Everdred2dx• 3 years ago

The Nintendo Wii’s “Starlet” processor also supported this though never used it!

lawgimenez3• 3 years ago

Very nostalgic, I have developed several apps before with Lollipop and was surprised with their choice of using WebView. I believe they set the NetThings app as a “launcher” app?

laplab5• 3 years ago

I also assumed that they would, but weirdly no. When the tablet booted up, I was greeted with stock launcher.

Also, WebView is only part of the app, they used something else (which did not look like Android native UI) for the WiFi network picker.

mananaysiempre• 3 years ago

The launcher with its Holo tabs and the icon style look more like Android 4.something (I to K) to me, by the way. Android 5 (L) was the first Material Design release (the one[1] that had actual coherent principles behind it).

[1] https://m1.material.io/

exikyut2• 3 years ago

Ooh, what did it look like?

MenhirMike2• 3 years ago

Okay, but: Did the author find the configuration for the energy cost (money and CO2) and update it, so that the touchscreen shows the proper info now?

laplab5• 3 years ago

He did! :) It was located in the `/srv/server/bin/cfg` file.

MenhirMike2• 3 years ago

Awesome! I had some instances of "digging so deep into a fascinating problem that I forgot the initial reason I started digging" :)

It actually looks like a reasonable system overall. Maybe a bit bloated on the node.js side (what isn't?), but I wonder if they just had that toolchain already in place/experience with it, even though it's overkill for the system as-is. Or maybe they just googled how to do networking and copy/pasted the top Stack Overflow answer that included Socket.IO.

qingcharles2• 3 years ago

Did you figure out what the green graph on the right of the display represents? :)

zikohh• 3 years ago

Do a follow up plan with the grafana bit. I'm intrigued

LAC-Tech2• 3 years ago

I really hope we'll look back at this fad of android powered wifi domestic IoT devices one day and laugh about how silly it all was.

Not an IoT hater. I've worked for IoT companies, and there's a lot of very smart embedded engineers doing very cool things in the space. But an old android tablet installed in the wall with a WiFI point? oh dear.

Ancapistani• 3 years ago

To be fair, that particular Android device is still installed and at least marginally useful. How many other Android devices from that era can say that?

lawgimenez3• 3 years ago

Also back then, you can fit an Android OS (pre-lollipop) inside a USB and plug it in a TV. It was really cool.

ilaksh• 3 years ago

What do you recommend as an alternative?

LAC-Tech2• 3 years ago

basic electronics, mostly

matthewaveryusa• 3 years ago

You should host your write-up on the device itself in case your domain succumbs to the sands of time

Brajeshwar• 3 years ago

Hey Nikita, that was an excellent read. It felt like a pivotal scene in a movie that would change the course of the succeeding narrative. I envy the ability to write so nicely and clearly, making it enjoyable for most generally technical people and keeping us engaged. I will watch out for more articles.

rideontime• 3 years ago

Hi Brajeshwar, that was a nice comment. It convinced me to read the article, and I'm glad I did.

tome• 3 years ago

Same! This is my favourite of all recent HN posts.

chefandy5• 3 years ago

Weird to see some micromuse thing listed as the service listed for 1534. I worked for them back in like 2006 and we got eaten by IBM/Tivoli and I don't believe they kept the name for anything? I always knew nobody really updated those but man, really nobody updates those.

Nursie2• 3 years ago

Hah, weird to see micromuse come up. I started working for them two weeks before the acquisition was announced!

chefandy5• 3 years ago

Ha! I did support there for Proviso— the product of a startup that Micromuse had acquired not too long before the IBM acquisition. I started in between the acquisitions.

alexfoo2• 3 years ago

1534 was the port used by the license manager (elmd - Elan license manager). The bane of many a Netcool installation until we joyfully ripped it out post IBM acquisition.

-Alex (Micromuse 1997 to 2021).

chefandy5• 3 years ago

I was wondering what it was. I only worked on Proviso out of Massachusetts so I never even touched anything that was Netcool proper.

BubbleRings• 3 years ago

I like the part where you flip the neighbor’s power off for a couple seconds. That’ll teach ‘em to get a UPS!

borissk2• 3 years ago

Next step - format all their SSDs to teach them to make backups :)

laplab5• 3 years ago

I felt pretty bad about it, but my curiosity took over :) It was only the power for their Energy Manager though, not the power to the entire apartment!

In any case, I doubt they were actually using this Energy Manager thing anyway. The number one feature listed on websites selling these things is "Earn two code credits under the code for sustainable homes". I assume you do not need to teach people how to use the thing to earn these credits...

https://uk-metering.net/products/netthings-energy-manager

virexene• 3 years ago

that was only the power to the energy measuring device i believe.

wkat42424• 3 years ago

Correct, since its only on a 3A fuse it would have blown as soon as the owner tried to make a coffee, if the house power literally ran through it.

Most likely this is just a current clamp style meter. Most of these kinds of meters are.

borissk2• 3 years ago

Curios what was the price the developer paid for these devices.

k1t• 3 years ago

While I doubt they paid the retail price, and the price has probably increased in the 9 years since installation, the current price is £385.00.

https://uk-metering.net/products/netthings-energy-manager

inetknght4• 3 years ago

Turns out, I need a 3A fuse, so I ordered one from Amazon

OP might want to watch Louis Rossmann's video about buying things from Amazon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B90_SNNbcoU

Symbiote16• 3 years ago

I was surprised someone would order this from Amazon, rather than get one from the nearest convenience shop or supermarket. Those places only sell the normal thing for local use.

I was further surprised that someone would be worried about installing the fuse. Is he also worried about plugging things in generally?

xattt3• 3 years ago

I see the recommendation every so often to buy a fuse locally, but I don’t live in Akihabara.

I HAVE to buy online electronic components, and usually it ends up being Amazon, because other national suppliers insist on charging $15 for courier shipping on a $2 part.

neither_color3• 3 years ago

For US readers: The big orange or blue store are probably better for you for anything electric that would go in your walls. I went down a rabbit hole of amazon clones of popular brand things like switches/dimmers/outlets and what I found is dubious UL certificates shared by multiple "brands".

inetknght4• 3 years ago

what I found is dubious UL certificates shared by multiple "brands"

Have you reported it to UL?

https://www.ul.com/resources/market-surveillance-departments

ikt• 3 years ago

That's what immediately stood out to me, why the hell would you order it from Amazon instead of literally driving 5 minutes down the road to pick one up from any electronics or hardware store? what a horribly inefficient way to do things

daviddever23box• 3 years ago

Security through obscurity, I suppose? Seems to be a common thing with UK-based home or energy automation edge devices....

user_7832• 3 years ago

C in IoT stands for “cost-effective” I guess.

Thanks, that got a laugh out of me.

dotancohen2• 3 years ago

The old joke asks what is the S in HTTPS, what is the S in SFTP, what is the S in IoT.

flyinghamster• 3 years ago

Also works for the P (privacy).

Ayesh3• 3 years ago

I'm gonna steal this to use in my casual conversations!

anotherevan3• 3 years ago

I've heard it phrased more directly as, "The S in IoT stands for security."

tim3332• 3 years ago

Slightly surprisingly there's one still for sale. £385+VAT. "worth two code credits under the Code for Sustainable Homes." Further googling finds "The Government scrapped the Code for Sustainable Homes and the national net zero carbon homes standard in 2015".

https://uk-metering.net/products/netthings-energy-manager

geon• 3 years ago

I don't really get his point. Wifi is super cheap. You can get a full stm32 with builtin wifi for like $6 for a single one. Installing a cable would be far more expensive in labor.

bimguy• 3 years ago

He's a software engineer not a electrical engineer/electrician. Before I worked in building services I would never have imagined the astronomical price some contractors charge for labour. Have you never assumed anything in your whole life?

layman51• 3 years ago

I recognize the forum post as being Salesforce Chatter. So it is one of those Experience Cloud sites.

azalemeth2• 3 years ago

A fun read! I feel compelled to say that all British (type G plugs) _have_ to be fused as the ring main has a maximum current of (typically) 30A yet the plug and socket maximum is 13A. So every appliance plug is fused, and the consumer unit has an RCD on most accessible circuits in addition to a circuit breaker.

Some plugs don't make the fuse obvious, but the traditional values are 1A, 3A, 5A, 7A, 10A and 13A (iirc -- for some reason!)

There are actually many features of the British and European wiring system that I think are really quite good. The device is closely related to a "smart meter", which are being slowly rolled out -- the UI is similar to those rolled out nationally, but it's a bit different.

Keep exploring (and don't play with the mains!)

Symbiote16• 3 years ago

Fuses in plugs in Britain are either 3A or 13A, by regulation. 5A used to be another value, but is no longer used (though replacement 5A fuses are easily available.)

I've never seen 7A or 10A fuses, and I was the kind of boy to rummage through my grandparent's workshops. ..

leoedin5• 3 years ago

I've had 10A fused cables before - IEC leads are pretty common. https://www.cablewarehouse.co.uk/10a-uk-plug-to-iec-c13-main... for example.

azalemeth2• 3 years ago

They are available in the sizes I mentioned, plus 2A – https://www.farnell.com/datasheets/1683350.pdf – and your comment made me actually look up the regulation out of curiosity as I know I have seen some of those other sizes in the lab! The wiring regs are enforced in statute by The Plugs and Sockets (Etc) Statutory Instrument 1994 [1] which mandates the compliance of two British standards, BS 1362 and BS 1363 for fuses and plugs respectively. The exact wording of BS 1363 (at least the version of it I can access) is

[...] all rewirable plugs shall be marked on the engagement surface with the rated current. All non-rewirable plugs shall be marked with the rated current of the fuse link fitted, which shall not exceed the value given in Table 2 for the appropriate size of flexible cord

Table 2 itself prescribes a maximum fuse rating of 3 A or "(5 A)" [see below] for a conductor cross-sectional area of 0.5 mm^2, and 13 A for all larger conductor areas (0.75, 1, 1.25, and 1.5 mm^2). It is entitled "Rated current and maximum fuse rating in normal use, and load for flexing and cord grip tests related to size of flexible cord"

[...] The figure in brackets indicates the fuse rating when a non rewirable plug is used with certain types of equipment where the use of a 5 A fuse link is necessary because of the high instantaneous inrush current

So there we go, I think – we're all sort of right. Thanks for sending me down this rabbit hole!

[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1994/1768/made

alanfranz3• 3 years ago

Why don’t you use a 13A circuit breaker in UK? That’s what we do in the rest of the EU, I think.

There’s a main input to the house which usually is around 15A-30A , then we’ve got multiple sublines with individual circuit breakers, typically 10A or 16A.

alanfranz3• 3 years ago

I just read up about radial vs ring circuits; I had seen ring circuits only in industrial contexts here in Italy, so the fused approach makes sense I suppose.

leoedin5• 3 years ago

That seems really low. Most houses in the UK have a 60 - 100A supply. Just my stove alone can draw about 7.3kW - about 32A.

leoedin5• 3 years ago

Ring circuits may have made sense in the past, but they really don't any more. It's basically impossible to test a ring circuit in place - you have to break the connection somewhere to ensure the ring is complete. That's a huge downside. They were conceived at a time when circuit breakers were expensive and wire was in short supply - neither is true now, yet people are still installing them.

Angostura6• 3 years ago

The weirdest bit for me was when he ordered a 3am fuse from Amazon, rather than just wandering down to the corner shop for a little blister pack that has 13amp, 5amp and 3amp fuses. Usually just next to the sewing kits

belinder• 3 years ago

Cool article! You have a small typo towards the end, coincedence -> coincidence

xydac• 3 years ago

this is first time i have read something completely in a long span of time !!

PNWChris• 3 years ago

I agree, I really enjoyed the author’s curiosity and writing style!

kelnos4• 3 years ago

There were two strings printed with labels “SSID” and “Pwd”. I froze in horror. They wouldn’t dare. It is literally 3 meter distance. These are embedded devices, they do not need this complexity…

Not surprising at all. I would expect that a lot of these are bought as retrofits, and not as a part of new construction. Running wires through existing walls can be annoying, and they don't want to put that barrier to sale in front of them. And you can get a good-enough WiFi chipset for a few bucks these days.

I need a 3A fuse [...] After installation, I checked the temperature of the fuse multiple times during the day to get at least some indication that things are not going to get worse. It worked fine for a more than a week now, but I still do not recommend experiments like this to anyone.

Probably don't need to be so worried here. If it's a 3A fuse, the entirety of your apartment's mains power is not running through it. A 3A fuse would burn out in a fraction of a second if you tried to do that.

Also, oh, man, Jazelle. I'd forgotten about that. Hardware support for Java bytecode... that did not pan out well.

inetknght4• 3 years ago

Probably don't need to be so worried here. If it's a 3A fuse, the entirety of your apartment's mains power is not running through it.

If it's a "3A fuse" that doesn't blow at 6A or worse, then it will get very hot (fire hazard) if/when there's a short regardless of the distance to the mains power.

If it truly is a 3A fuse, then great. If it's bought from Amazon then I doubt it's truly a 3A fuse.

naitgacem• 3 years ago

Louis Rossman over at YouTube has been going over this fuses thing from Amazon. All the fuses he tried from top-results didn't blow until he put 4x or 5x the current rating through them.

SoftTalker2• 3 years ago

Fuse needs to protect against 2 main things:

1) a dead short in the circuit. Fuse will blow pretty much instantly.

2) an overload on the circuit. Fuse will blow sooner or later depending on how great the load excess is. If the fuse is rated at 3A, it's not going to be fine at 2.9A and then instantly blow at 3.1A. You'd need actual current monitoring to do that.

And some fuses are "delayed" to allow an overload for a few moments, such as when starting a motor.

None of this disputes that Amazon is well known to sell garbage, and not just limited to fuses. That's why I don't buy anything there.

ssl-3• 3 years ago

Also, too: Wifi has inherent galvanic isolation with a wide gap.

It isn't strictly necessary, as anyone here obviously knows, but it can be a cost-effective way to isolate the [electrical] pokey-bits from the [meat-based] pokey-bits, and to avoid loops when things go wrong.

Wireless has uses beyond just eliminating wires.

mcbishop6• 3 years ago

it can be a cost-effective way to isolate

This never occurred to me, thanks.

xerox13ster• 3 years ago

A 3A fuse would burn out in a fraction of a second if you tried to do that.

he bought it on Amazon. He has every reason to be worried that it won't burn out. Louis Rossman did a video[0] where he put 8 amps through a 2 amp fuse and left the room for quite a long time, I think it was several minutes with 8a going through a 2a fuse.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B90_SNNbcoU

userbinator4• 3 years ago

Fuses are notoriously imprecise, even "fast blow" ones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG11rVcMOnY

fulladder3• 3 years ago

That is very disturbing. Does Amazon reimburse you when your house burns down?

rokweom2• 3 years ago

In general, people have the wrong idea about how fuses work. They're not supposed to blow at their rated current, they're supposed to withstand it indefinitely, and only blow at much higher currents. Look up any datasheet from a well established manufacturer and see for yourself (like this one from littelfuse: https://littelfuse.com/products/fuses/cartridge-fuses/5x20mm... )

jart• 3 years ago

Amazon had one of their buildings in California shut down a few months ago by the fire department when a generator started smoking. It was probably due to a bad fuse they bought off Amazon. https://signalscv.com/2023/07/fire-breaks-out-at-amazon/ That's how blinded by their avarice Amazon has become; they can't even protect their own house. Notice how the Nilight fuses (https://amzn.to/3S06G2n) are still listed, even after a YouTube video with 300,000 views demonstrated that their 2 ampere fuse takes 10 amps to blow. I even had an electrical fire in my house recently, due to components that I purchased off Amazon. I know Amazon monitors Hacker News PR closely, since they took down those ChatGPT generated listings within minutes of us posting them here. Yet they do nothing about product listings that put our lives, and their own lives, in critical danger.

kelnos4• 3 years ago

Well yeah, there's that. My assumption about the worry the author expressed was that it was just an "I'm a little uncomfortable with mains power" type worry, not "did I buy a crappy part that's going to explode" type worry. If it was the latter, that's, well... entirely avoidable.

AnthonyMouse3• 3 years ago

Running wires through existing walls can be annoying, and they don't want to put that barrier to sale in front of them.

It also makes it more convenient to compromise the device from across the street (or across town with a directional antenna). Though of course that's not a problem if your security is up to par and the device continues to receive regular security updates, and we can only surmise that the author has discovered a rare outlier in this space where that is not the case.

inetknght4• 3 years ago

Though of course that's not a problem if your security is up to par and the device continues to receive regular security updates

Just remember that the S in IoT stands for security :)

b1125• 3 years ago

device continues to receive regular security updates

Have to reply to this, and my response was covered a bit by your statement of "security up to par".

Nothing should be considered secure. All those bug bounties are to entice black hats, into giving up juicy pre-0day vulnerabilities.

So just because a device is up to date with security updates, we all must understand, there are countless bugs unknown, needing to be patched, and often, being discovered by those that will never tell, never disclose, never report, and only use them for nefarious purposes.

This is why security is nothing without monitoring.

And why nothing is ever "safe", only likely "more safe" due to a security update.

Consider everything that is network connected as compromised. Everything.

a28002763• 3 years ago

we can only surmise that the author has discovered a rare outlier in this space where that is not the case.

Exactly what I was thinking! What luck that the author found the single IoT device out there that's a cobbled together piece of bodged electronics designed by a graduate from a webdev bootcamp with a Corel Draw focus. A device that, while only ~15 years old is not only hopelessly useless, but also obsolete and insecure.

It's a good thing all other consumer IoT device manufacturers think about and prioritize security, longevity! Also, that customers nowadays are more focused on installing something fit-for-purpose and sustainable once than buying the cheapest shit possible with the blinkiest LEDs.

I shudder to think about how long they tried to get the string-and-cups based telephone to work in my building until the 1930's when they installed the copper still used today for DSL. Or how terrible the paper-straw based water system must have been up to the 1890's when they realized investing in metal pipes has advantages. So glad the days of short-term thinking are behind us.

kelnos4• 3 years ago

Sure, but manufacturers -- as we should well know by now -- don't particularly care about that.

And for a device like this -- a rare one where it seems they sold it without any kind of online subscription service -- their goal is to sell units, and telling people they'll have to cut holes in their walls and run wires (for most people this probably means hiring someone) is certainly going to sell fewer units.

AceJohnny2• 3 years ago

Also, oh, man, Jazelle. I'd forgotten about that. Hardware support for Java bytecode... that did not pan out well.

I'd love someday to learn more about why Jazelle failed.

The first SoC I worked on almost 20 years ago was built around an ARM926EJ-S, just like in the story. It was built for Nokia, who used Symbian OS [1], and supported user-installable apps written against Java Micro Edition [2].

The utter mess of Symbian's app discovery and installation, I suspect, was a prime reason Apple created their App Store for the iPhone.

Nevertheless, the fundamental concept of HW-accelerated Java apps doesn't sound crazy. What happened? Were they just stuck with a sinking ship, Symbian?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Platform,_Micro_Edition

alexambarch• 3 years ago

Also, oh, man, Jazelle. I'd forgotten about that. Hardware support for Java bytecode... that did not pan out well.

As someone who was too young to be paying any attention during this time, what were some of the reasons this didn’t pan out? Java seems so dominant looking back that I’m surprised something like this wouldn’t have been a success.

vanderZwan• 3 years ago

I have also wondered this for years, and always was told "because JITs work better", but that felt a bit handwavy. Luckily for both of us David Chisnall just published an article on ACM about designing ISAs that properly explains the reasoning behind Jazelle and why it did not work in the long run:

Small code is also important [for a simple single-issue in-order core]. A small microcontroller core may be as small as 10KB of SRAM (static random access memory). A small decrease in encoding efficiency can dwarf everything when considering the total area cost: If you need 20 percent more SRAM for your code, then that can be equivalent to doubling the core area. Unfortunately, this constraint almost directly contradicts the previous one [about decoder complexity]. This is why Thumb-2 and RISC-V focused on a variable length encoding that is simple to decode: They save code size without significantly increasing decoder complexity.
This is a complex tradeoff that is made even more complicated when considering multiple languages. For example, Arm briefly supported Jazelle DBX (direct bytecode execution) on some of its mobile cores. This involved decoding Java bytecode directly, with Java VM (virtual machine) state mapped into specific registers. A Java add instruction, implemented in a software interpreter, requires at least one load to read the instruction, a conditional branch to find the right handler, and then another to perform the add. With Jazelle, the load happens via instruction fetch, and the add would add the two registers that represented the top of the Java stack. This was far more efficient than an interpreter but did not perform as well as a JIT (just-in-time) compiler, which could do a bit more analysis between Java bytecodes.
Jazelle DBX is an interesting case study because it made sense only in the context of a specific set of source languages and microarchitectures. It provided no benefits for languages that didn't run in a Java VM. By the time devices had more than about 4MB of RAM, Jazelle was outperformed by a JIT. Within that envelope, however, it was a good design choice.
Jazelle DBX should serve as a reminder that optimizations for one size of core can be incredibly bad choices for other cores

So: a decent JIT works better if you can afford the overhead of the JIT. Jazelle was only a good idea in a very brief period of time when this wasn't true, and even then only if you insist on running a Java VM.

[0] https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3639445

bitwize• 3 years ago

The Lisp machine failed because Lisp compiler technology got better and better at targeting generic 32-bit CPU hardware, which was becoming increasingly cheap and plentiful. So the benefits of having all this custom hardware to specially execute Lisp code were nullified -- leaving only the costs.

The same thing happened to Java in hardware. It seemed like a good idea at the time because it allowed developers to target a language they were already familiar with, and present an alternative to Wintel -- especially when you realize that Java was all the rage as a sort of universal programming environment, and in particular J2ME was a big deal for proto-"smart" phones before the iPhone came along. But embedded Java didn't really pan out, memory and CPU time got cheaper, and compiler and JIT tech improved to the point where there was just no benefit to adding the hardware it took to decode Java instructions. So Jazelle was deprecated and replaced with something called ThumbEE, which was a more generic framework based on ARM's Thumb instruction set for running code for an abstract machine, providing features like automatic null-pointer checking and that. Like you could set up a ThumbEE environment for running Python or .NET code in addition to Java. Nowadays even ThumbEE is deprecated. Neither feature appears in ARMv8 processors, for instance.

dmitrygr• 3 years ago

Because it be behind an NDA and a paywall and the cost of getting the info was not worth the speedup.

madaxe_again2• 3 years ago

> To be honest, the whole thing was a bit scary, since I was very close to the mains

I laughed at this. Changing a fuse is… a bit scary? They literally teach this in elementary school in the U.K. - or they did. As you say, no need to fretfully check the fuse - either it blows or it doesn’t, and you’ll know when it does. At least he didn’t find the receptacle holding a dead fuse, carefully wrapped in the ceremonial aluminium shroud of eternal life and certain death, which is a crime I may have committed in my younger, more fire-prone years.

I find it interesting how uncomfortable some people are outside of their comfort zones - but then I am a person who spends his life sticking his nose in stuff he has no business with.

kelnos4• 3 years ago

I don't know how old the author is, but I'm not surprised when people even 10-15 years younger than I am (I'm in my 40s) shy away from digging into the guts of how things work.

I feel like I was at the tail end of when it was ok to experiment with technology as a kid and teen. The early '00s brought much more in the way of disposable, locked-down devices. Kids growing up today (despite the educational push of orgs like the Raspberry Pi Foundation) are presented with hermetically-sealed devices that present a sanitized interface. Manufacturers explicitly don't want their customers taking things apart, discovering how they work, or tinkering with them in any way... and often even try to put legal barriers in place to keep people from doing stuff like this.

This is a far cry from when I was very young (and before I was born) when computers and kits would come with full schematics and datasheets!

ThrowawayTestr• 3 years ago

I honestly find it pretty sad

Symbiote16• 3 years ago

Secondary school, but it's still in the revision guide so I assume they still teach it.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z6r37nb/revision/6

pmontra2• 3 years ago

Yeah, the author makes this pun

C in IoT stands for “cost-effective” I guess

but it's actually C for cableless.

j1elo• 3 years ago

tcf-agent is [...] probably the second biggest security vulnerability after passwordless root SSH.

I thought that passwordless SSH is actually a good idea in general for servers? Assuming, that is, that the public/private key login mechanism is used as the alternative to passwords.

bombcar• 3 years ago

Passwordless meaning a blank root password allowing login with no credentials- not public/private key.

ncann• 3 years ago

TCF seems to be closedly tied to Eclipse ecosystem. The Getting Started guide suggests several plugins for Eclipse as the main way to interact with tcf-agent. I tried installing these plugins on a new version of Eclipse and it is absolutely impossible. There are dependency issues everywhere and when you actually try to install the missing dependencies, Eclipse does not let you because they conflict with some other dependencies.

I laughed out loud at this part. Some things never changed I guess.

mnw21cam3• 3 years ago

This is also what happens whenever I try to install anything that uses the package managers for python or perl. For some reason, these two always fail with messages about conflicting, non-existent, or failed-to-compile dependencies. I work in bioinformatics - everything is in python or perl. My life is pain.

mixmastamyk2• 3 years ago

Uninstall everything then use a venv for each project.

metadat• 3 years ago

There were two strings printed with labels “SSID” and “Pwd”. I froze in horror. They wouldn’t dare. It is literally 3 meter distance. These are embedded devices, they do not need this complexity...

Responding with disbelief seems a little over the top. It isn't typically easy to run wires in pre-built spaces. Sounds like a resilient design to me.

65a• 3 years ago

Not resiliant, because in the 10-20 year lifespan of a home electrical panel, at least one critical vulnerability is going to allow complete remote pwnage of that device. It's stupid IOT garbage that belongs in ewaste, especially with a trivial remote code execution mechanism.

rini17• 3 years ago

Layperson will always prefer wireless. "But what if I need to move the tablet?"

Never bet against convenience.

leoedin5• 3 years ago

There's not really much those devices can do - they're just metering, and don't have an active internet connection.

WiFi isn't a bad choice of communications protocol.

ajmurmann• 3 years ago

I recently got into microcontrollers and one of the most surprising things to me was the low cost and small size of ESP32s with wifi. Having grown up at a time when it wasn't unusual to buy a PCI card for your desktop computer that added wifi capability I had assumed that we'd still be looking at a target large device that goes for ~$20+ to get WiFi. Explicitly thinking about the ubiquity of cheap devices with wifi around me would immediately correct this view, but I had never done that and I'm sure many others haven't either

efitz• 3 years ago

Did you ever fix the cost per kWh?

wkat42424• 3 years ago

Turns out, I need a 3A fuse, so I ordered one from Amazon and installed it the next day.

Ummm. 3A is 720W. If that tiny box dissipated that much, the entire closet full of them would be a literal oven. Besides there's not much point in an energy meter using that much power. It defeats the purpose. It's like testing matches :P it'll be 10W at most. Even peak inrush current would be nowhere near that high.

1A fuse would be more than enough.

To be honest, the whole thing was a bit scary, since I was very close to the mains.

Nah this is all installed very cleanly.

hales• 3 years ago

Depends on the fuse time rating and the inrush current for the power supply (which can sometimes be more than 10A). Some 1A fuses might occasionally blow when you turn the unit on.

wkat42424• 3 years ago

Hm yreah but if it's 10A it will be really short like < 100ms. A physical melt fuse should have no issues with that. Most general-purpose fuses are really slow.

alphabetter• 3 years ago

The 3A fuse is due to the way the UK wiring system works rather than what is optimal for this device.

All appliances in the UK have a fuse where they connect to the building wiring, normally in the plug, but can be in a fixed fuse-holder like this device. Somewhere in the process it was recognized that having lots of different fuse values would be confusing and awkward for users, so these fuses are the same size and always one of three standard values: 13A, 5A, and 3A. As noted elsewhere, you can buy these particular fuses in UK supermarkets and convenience stores.

If 3A is too high for the appliance then what the designer has to do is to fit it with a flex rated at 3A so that is protected by the fuse at the plug-end and then add additional, lower current, protection at the device end.

The UK system is clever and has subtle details like the standard fuse values which were good at the time it was introduced. But, it is also rather over-engineered, and not optimized for modern homes that have a lot of low-current appliances.

wkat42424• 3 years ago

Oh yeah the UK system.. I lived in Ireland for a long time and it was a bit archaic sometimes.

I like the idea of fuses in every plug, mind you. Because some equipment just can't be trusted. I didn't like the switches in every outlet (even though they're not mandatory, they are very common). And the way the plugs are so huuuge and always fall with the pins up do to the design so they are a foot-piercer.

In Ireland 1A fuses were available though even in the fuse kits in Tesco. With the same size as the others. And the practice doesn't always lead to actual safety, I've seen a lot of tinfoil and paperclips. Yes, really.

But the thing I really thought was the worst was the concept of having only one tap connected to the mains water line in the house, and having all the others fed by a huge dirty water tank in the attic, full of dead insects brewing away in the summer heat (yes even there it can get hot in summer). It seems like an ecological disaster and locals were always warning me to not drink the water from the bathroom or bedrooms taps. It's also a big possible cause of leaks. Here in Spain and in my home country of Holland we just feed all taps onto the mains.

But overall I tend to prefer EU standards rather than BS. The "Schuko" does have a few serious design flaws like the ability to plug it in upside-down so neutral and phase are reversed, but the French have found a solution for that :)

harry8• 3 years ago

Still for sale?

https://uk-metering.net/products/netthings-energy-manager

r4indeer• 3 years ago

Only 2 left, probably for a while already. I'd guess that's old stock.

neilv• 3 years ago

Even if this device (presumably with known vulnerabilities) isn't directly reachable via the Internet, could the device be bumped off the WiFi and onto an impersonating AP, where the device can be taken over?

The photo on the retail box has a tablet camera hole. Does this particular unit have a camera and mic, placed in a living area?

ilikehurdles• 3 years ago

“DATE & TIME ARE ALWAYS CORRECT AND NEVER NEED TO BE ADJUSTED” sounds like it’s straight out of a fever dream

justinator• 3 years ago

THEY'RE MADE OUT OF MEAT.

mlk• 3 years ago

It would if it had an NTP client running

xyst• 3 years ago

Yet another reminder: I really need to get off my ass and isolate all of the IoT junk connected to my network away from home/work/lab devices.

anotherevan3• 3 years ago

Honestly, this is the main reason¹ I just haven't got into IoT much as I love the idea in theory. I don't want an adversarial relationship with the electronics I'm putting in the house, so I just don't.

I want my IoT to work off-line with no talking to the Internet unless I explicitly let it for some reason. I want it to interoperate with other things and not just some shitty app on my phone - I don't carry my phone with me around the house all the time and it's a PITA anyway.

I could go the DIY route and bust out the soldering iron and some ESPHome compatible chips, but that's not my passion and life is too bloody short. And even if I did I'd still have strong reservations doing DIY around the 240V AC mains power.

¹ That, and the first thing I'd automate is light switches², but the regulations around mains power wiring in Australia are pretty stringent and the only AES certified IoT light switches I've seen look like I would have and adversarial relationship with and can only be controlled by a shitty app.

² Automating light bulbs themselves is a sub-optimal solution in most circumstances, in my opinion. Perhaps if I wanted to control the colour, but not for on, off and brightness. If I did that it would just make me feel sad.

BHSPitMonkey• 3 years ago

You can go far using only Zigbee or Z-Wave devices with a Home Assistant server, and then nothing (but the server) has to be networked.

As for switches vs. bulbs, at this point I can't go back to the life I led before picking up a bunch of Hue White Ambiance bulbs and having HA automatically adjust the color temperature throughout the day.

geocrasher• 3 years ago

WiFi is not only reasonable but preferable. Because if a cat5 cable is going to be ran, it'll be done by an electrician. And when they get to the end of a spool, they will break out the wire nuts and splice away. I've seen it first hand.

Not even electricians can screw up WiFi :D

neither_color3• 3 years ago

It's a little more expensive but it's always worth it to get a low voltage specialist to run your ethernet. To an electrician a conductor is just a conductor no matter how you splice it.

rPlayer6554• 3 years ago

This was an extremely well written article. It had me gripped in the story. Thanks for posting!

neither_color3• 3 years ago

More out of desperation than anything else, I decided to look at sshd config of the host and finally found the offending line. sshd_config had PermitRootLogin no line included, which is a very sensible security measure as long as you are not providing a full disk access to anyone on the network.

Enjoyed this article because I've wasted countless hours of my own getting into devices I bought or poking around networks I've airBnB'd at. I'm not as smart as the author but I found his whole approach relatable.

girvo• 3 years ago

C in IoT stands for “cost-effective” I guess

I know this sounds pithy (and it is!) but you'd be surprised exactly how cheap and cost effective Wi-fi enabled SoCs are. A lot of the time we're getting Wi-Fi for free, and most of those SoC's don't have the Ethernet controller by default, so it's more cost-effective to use Wi-fi if it can fit your use-case.

Other physical protocols/connection types can be supported of course (I wonder what the longest I2C run ever is), but when you're talking about a retro-fitted client like this is, Wifi or wireless protocols in general are best.

PeterisP2• 3 years ago

Purely from a materials perspective, 2x cheap WiFi-capable microcontrollers (e.g. esp8266) will cost the manufacturer something like $4-$5 total for both devices - which is comparable to 3m cable+connectors+cheap chips to handle the cable connection (even ignoring the cost of some person to install the cable which is far more expensive than that) so indeed I don't get why the author considers that doing the connection over WiFi is somehow wasteful.

dijit2• 3 years ago

so indeed I don't get why the author considers that doing the connection over WiFi is somehow wasteful.

Power consumption.

Up front vs ongoing cost; the creators chose to minimise the up-front cost in favour of a marginally higher ongoing cost.

paradox460• 3 years ago

ESP32s are basically universal at this point. You can have them for under a dollar if you order in any sort of bulk, and you get Wifi and Bluetooth right out of the box. At this point is more expensive to not use Wifi

userbinator4• 3 years ago

Interesting article but one thing stood out:

The landlord had no idea what this is. There are no buttons or labels on the thing, just a tiny yellow light to let you know it has the power.

You move in and find a mysterious device on the wall that, at least to me, appears somewhat ominous and it's not obvious whether it may have a camera and possibly a microphone (the picture of it on the manual appears to show that it does have at least a camera)...

Roughly a year ago I moved into my new apartment.

...and you were perfectly fine with living in its presence for a year? When I saw the picture, my first thought was closer to "that's a telescreen", and I'd certainly try to find out more about it ASAP.

From what I can tell, this is an Android 5, but I am not exactly sure.

I believe those icons are from 4.1-4.3 - Lines up with the Linux kernel version being mid-2013. Android 5 was released in 2014.

UberFly• 3 years ago

That was my first though as I read it. It would be disabled or removed the first day.

NautilusWave• 3 years ago

He hadn't read 1984

anigbrowl• 3 years ago

The landlord had no idea what this is.

Golgafrincham B Ark candidate detected.

madaxe_again2• 3 years ago

Hey, he might be an exceedingly skilled telephone sanitiser.

tim3332• 3 years ago

As a landlord this is quite common. You buy through an estate, let through a letting agent and have very little idea what gizmos are installed. Until maybe something packs up and you have to pay for a new one.

lynguist2• 3 years ago

It should be Android 4.4 as per https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/51651/which-andr...

Kernel 3.10 is used only for Android 4.4.

fortran772• 3 years ago

From the article:

I am not an embedded Linux expert, but this does seem like a lot after tinkering with Raspberry Pi Pico and such.

...but of course the Pi Pico doesn't run Linux and doesn't need a lot of memory

lynguist2• 3 years ago

Yes, the Pico cannot run an operating system as it has a -M (microcontroller) processor and not an -A (application) processor.

It has no MMU etc etc.

It is built to just run one process in essence with minuscule amounts of RAM.

Narishma• 2 years ago

It can run operating systems, just not Linux.

famicom0• 3 years ago

Probably a long shot, but would anyone happen to know the color scheme used by the author in the snippet of Python code showing an example of tcf-agent? I really like the mix of bold, italics, underline and shading to achieve a distinct syntax highlighting with such a limited color palette.

nurettin• 3 years ago

I loved the final touch where they leave a note in a text file. Feels much like the talos principle.

jonathanlydall5• 3 years ago

A few years ago I came to the realisation that if you want people to be more environmentally conscious or economical in terms of utility consumption, (electricity, water, gas, etc), they need far better data than a single figure per month.

You want to be able to see usage to a resolution of at most 5 minutes.

That way people can spot things like “having my electric heater on for those couple of hours used more electricity than all my lights use for a month”.

I have an inverter and solar panels in my place (very common now in South Africa middle class homes due to unreliable electricity producer) and I can see a full history of electricity usage.

It’s easy for me to see where I can improve my efficiency or why my consumption was so high.

It’s still only an overall figure though, so you have to do an informed assumption as to what caused the consumption.

For example it’s obvious that the 3kw draw for about an hour or so after I shower is the geyser heating itself back up. I can see from the usage stats that my battery was depleted from the night, that the solar production is still low due to my showering in the early morning and that the energy was thus coming from the grid (the inverter records all these figures).

It is then obvious that I can very simply save money on electricity by putting a timer on my geyser so that it only heats after 10am or so, once the sun is high enough for solar production to cover the energy usage.

Now I just wish I had something as convenient for monitoring water consumption.

isoprophlex• 3 years ago

About water consumption: depending on your make of water meter, there's often a small reflective wheel that turns eg. once for every liter. Sometimes these are made out of metal or even slightly magnetic. An arduino with an optical or Hall effect sensor might get you real far in real time, high resolution data collection!

Alternatively I've had success in wiring up a temperature probe directly to the incoming water line, and comparing that temperature to the ambient temperature. Where I live that works because the water arrives from underground & is always much cooler than ambient air. The time-integrated difference between the two is a proxy for how much water you use... this is much more involved to get meaningful data from, tho.

---

Edit: a proximity sensor that detects metal might be the most straightforward thing, if you have a water meter with a rotating metal gauge https://www.alldatasheet.com/view.jsp?Searchword=LJ12A3-4-Z/...

cricalix2• 3 years ago

On mobile so hard to link, but memory says OpenEnergyMonitor's docs site on pulse counters has a computer vision approach too. Think it reads the numbers from the display.

kjkjadksj• 3 years ago

A lot of water meters these days have rfid for the water company to scan so maybe you can just abrogate that directly

systemz• 3 years ago

About monitoring water consumption, maybe using some webcam + OCR would help to recognize reading of a water meter? Then Home Assistant would be helpful to see charts with energy consumption etc

tomqueue• 3 years ago

This is what I am using for this exact purpose: https://github.com/jomjol/AI-on-the-edge-device

8n4vidtmkvmk• 3 years ago

Something in my apartment is consuming a ton of power and I don't know what. I would love a graph with a resolution better than a day.

yread• 3 years ago

Check the coffee machine. Full auto espresso machines can be huge hogs

Jedd2• 3 years ago

Do you have a conventional HWS? These are notoriously power-hungry, often poorly maintained and calibrated, and hard to monitor.

You can buy a power meter plug - that sits between appliance and socket - and work your way around almost all your appliances apart from, typically, oven, air conditioner(s), and hot water systems. For those you're going to need to experiment by turning as many things off as you can, to establish a baseline, and review your switch meter periodically for short (several minute) intervals, with and without the larger appliances turned on.

(You can get induction coil systems to report usage of these larger appliances, but they're typically onerously priced.)

jonathanlydall5• 3 years ago

If you're looking for something simple to try work it out, I bought a smart plug a few years back which could record usage for around 20USD, you can then move it between your devices getting a sense of each's usage.

Long term tracking usage of individual device energy usage is nice, but just knowing from past measurements how much a device tends to use is already very useful.

SoftTalker2• 3 years ago

Need to pop the cover off the main breaker panel and use a clamp-type current meter to see which circuit(s) are using power.

Or hire an electrician to do it, if you aren't totally confident in your ability to do that safely.

ako• 3 years ago

Depending on your water meter this device may be useful: https://www.homewizard.com/watermeter/

bradley13• 3 years ago

Being able to see your usage is helpful - at least, for those of us interested.

For example, I was surprised to see how much our electronics (stereo, amplifier, TV, etc.) in the living room use, even when off (some devices are older, with high standby currents). It motivated me to put everything on a timer that only turns power own in the evenings, since that's the only time they get used.

It's a small thing, but small things add up.

calvinmorrison• 3 years ago

Not when you're on solar. Its more akin to being poor and shopping at dollar tree - cash/solar flow is more important than total cost.

gambiting10• 3 years ago

Yeah we were away from home recently and it was interesting to see that with everything "off" we were still using a constant 200W or so, so even with no one home we used just over 4kWh each day. 120kWh each month just for "idle" usage definitely is not trivial amount of money, at current prices that's £20!

wolpoli• 3 years ago

It motivated me to put everything on a timer that only turns power own in the evenings, since that's the only time they get used.

I was surprised to learn that a timer itself also uses power. I borrowed a Kill-a-watt from the library and found that an 2 decades old timer uses 2.3W while a newer one uses 0.6W. That tells me that I should just keep the old timer for the rare occasions.

failingslowly• 3 years ago

if you want people to be more environmentally conscious [...] they need far better data

This is one of the reasons all UK homes are being fitted for free with smart meters. (There are others, such as enabling better grid control.)

You want to be able to see usage to a resolution of at most 5 minutes.

My one updates every few seconds and has a set of traffic light LEDs at the bottom giving a visible guide to energy use.

https://www.edfenergy.com/smart-meters/using-a-smart-meter/c...

gambiting10• 3 years ago

We have one as well, but since we're on a variable rate tariff(Octopus Tracker) it's completely useless - it doesn't know the current electricity/gas price, it seems to receive rate updates from the network about once every few weeks - so the numbers it displays are just wrong.

I've made my own little Raspberry Pico display that queries today's energy prices and shows those, but I have not been able to show today's energy consumption alongside(and therefore show the day's cost so far). Octopus provides an API to query the kWh used....but only for the last day. I even got their little Octopus Mini that broadcasts live usage to their app but I have not been able to query the live data from it from my raspberry, I don't have the necessary skills in web technologies to do that unfortunately :-(

verisimi2• 3 years ago

The consumer element is the sugar to help the masses swallow the pill. If it was just about the consumer, the unit would never report its findings back to base. But blurting back your information is integral to, well, all smart devices. That is the point.

Once the government has that info, it will be able to come up with bespoke taxes for you according to what it ordains as fair use. 'Your showers are too long', 'your toolshed is too big a draw on the electric' therefore 'you need to buy carbon credits to offset the environmental damage you are causing'.

It's the slow descent to greater tyranny, and loss of personal control. It's amazing that people put up with it, but a slight discount in the short term, or visibility of your own data, is probably enough to get most people to accept spying infrastructure in their lives forever.

jonathanlydall5• 3 years ago

As evidenced by the article, the problem is that some of these devices within less than 10 years can become essentially bricks.

I think these devices must be required to send the data to the utility company and the utility company must be forced to make the data easily accessible in a standard format so that independent analysis is trivially possible.

This way you don't have a situation where a device manufacturer goes out of business and the capability to monitor is lost.

paganel• 3 years ago

I have one here in Bucharest and, while fancy, as in it blips a red light when the power consumptions is higher than usual, it doesn't help me at all.

As in, yeah, running the washing machine is power consuming, I knew that, and the same goes for the electric oven or for the vacuum cleaner, but what am I supposed to do with that information? Not wash my clothes anymore? Not using the oven? Leaving dust all over the place for longer?

albert1802• 3 years ago

Your Grid is operated by the french government? Is there some infrastructure you haven't sold out abroad

cjfd• 3 years ago

Sounds pretty good as such. The worry to have these days, though, is if we can also get this without energy usage data being traded between all sorts of shady companies and/or criminal organizations.

verisimi2• 3 years ago

shady companies and/or criminal organizations.

You mean energy companies and governments?

mtsr• 3 years ago

Home Assistant with a connector for whatever smart meter you have will happily do this for you without the data ever leaving your home.

lloeki• 3 years ago

Per device energy tallies also give you interesting data.

Home Assistant can do that in the Energy dashboard, and you can answer questions/learn surprising things, like how much energy my "rack" (UPS+mac mini+5 disk bay+a few other things) actually uses vs e.g my fridge or my washing machine, or my desk compute actually is quite low but boy does the screen costs a lot when active, or what does charging the electric bike costs, or what's the effect of setting thermostat to 19 instead of 20 in winter, or oh wow in summer this fan that we use a lot to make things bearable actually ends up using as much energy as our water heater!

(power measurements are done using Shelly Plug Plus S + 3EM + 4PM devices, thermal measurements using Shelly H&T Plus)

nijave2• 3 years ago

like how much energy my "rack" (UPS+mac mini+5 disk bay+a few other things) actually uses

I find it better to remain ignorant in that regard. Jokes aside, it's also interesting seeing wall draw vs UPS draw vs PSU draw if each piece of your equipment supports that.

The Shelly stuff is also quite fun to play with (I recommend a AC adapter for H&T). I have the little black spherical sensors and the data resolution is significantly worse on battery since it tries to sleep in low power state as much as possible. It's fun to see the server cabinet (mine's enclosed) vs room vs different room temps. You can also see when the HVAC cycles on and off and when someone takes a shower (humidity spikes).

stdbrouw• 3 years ago

Your experience also points to the limits of monitoring and subsequent behavioral change, though. I mean, yeah, it might prompt you to start your washing machine a bit earlier or a bit later to align with high production by your solar panels... but how much consumption can you really move around like that, and how many energy hogs can you just decide to not use? If you notice high energy use while cooking, are you going to start eating more salads instead? Across Europe electricity meters are being replaced by smart meters and people are really hyping up the advantages of being able to continuously monitor your energy usage, but I think the jury is still out whether it'll actually lead to significant energy savings.

Ultimately the biggest wins are when big appliances and heating/cooling respond to self-production or take advantage of times when electricity is cheap (if you're on a per-hour or per-day dynamic contract), whether that's with a simple timer like the one you installed, a relay that shuts down heating when you're cooking or something fancier like a Fronius Ohmpilot [1] that tweaks heating power to exactly match PV (over)production.

[1] https://www.fronius.com/en/solar-energy/installers-partners/...

jonathanlydall5• 3 years ago

Agree completely.

However, knowing that a particular device is bad means that when I eventually need to replace it in the future, I will also factor in energy efficiency and features such as it being able to check energy prices in my purchasing decision.

helsinkiandrew• 3 years ago

There's been a few simple experiments in the UK - where consumers have been encouraged to reduce usage at peak time that have been successful. But as you say its going to need the appliances to support it. Everything needs a "Get this done by X o'clock" whether thats a dishwasher/washing machine/car charger.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/jan/23/households-gre...

sampo• 3 years ago

I think the jury is still out whether it'll actually lead to significant energy savings.

In Finland you can get an electricity contract that follows the hourly spot prices. Usually the hourly prices varies in the range from 5c to 20c/kWh, but sometimes it jumps up to 40c, even 80c/kWh. The record was 2€/kWh for a couple hours in one day.

Current hourly prices for today and tomorrow:

https://oomi.fi/en/electricity/electricity-contracts/active/...

People who have chosen this kind of contract, usually reduce their consumption during the ridiculously expensive hours, which usually occur when there happens both low wind energy production, and simultaneously some power plant being offline for maintenance.

You can also get a contract with a fixed price, if you want.

avgcorrection7• 3 years ago

but how much consumption can you really move around like that, and how many energy hogs can you just decide to not use? If you notice high energy use while cooking, are you going to start eating more salads instead?

There’s been some interest in this locally due to energy regulation moving to a more punishing system for peak usage. Also high electricity prices. And the topic came up that people would be encouraged to do things that are considered unsafe like washing their clothes while they are sleeping.

Things like this need to be automated. (And be safe.) Manually following fancy gadgets won’t make much of a difference.

Meanwhile we’re (or were, don’t know the current status) selling hydropower to the rest of the Europe during the fall, emptying the reservoirs before the winter so that electricity prices become unreasonable (leading to strategies like washing your clothes while you sleep or just being content to freeze while indoors).

And I have never seen a good argument for the export/import (Europe) arrangement. But I guess we can try to sideline that whole conversation by nagging people to turn off the light in the bathroom when it’s not busy.

flagrant_taco3• 3 years ago

If you notice high energy use while cooking, are you going to start eating more salads instead?

Of course, why wouldn't you? If the assumption isn't that effectively unlimited power is available on demand you adjust use accordingly.

On sunny days with excess power maybe you charge and do laundry. On a stretch of cloudy days you avoid long periods of cooking or using large tools like sellers or air compressors.

Adjusting to our environment rather that chasing convenience is a very reasonable approach to makinh a real dent in reducing our environmental impact.

teekert6• 3 years ago

I agree fully, I believe that my Home Assistant energy dashboard has done more for our energy consumption than any other measure.

If you’re in the Netherland you can get something like a “slimme lezer”, plug it into the p1 port of your energy meter and it will pop up in Home Assistant with the right sensors.

The energy dashboard will give an overview of your gas and electricity usage, solar production, proportion used from grid/solar and even a home battery if present. It’s really great.

Combine it with some Aqara (zigbee but easily overloaded) or Shelly (WiFi and I find them very robust) energy monitoring power sockets and you get a very good idea of the simplest measures to take to save power. You can even add cost/kWh and M3 (gas) to the sensors in HA.

kabes3• 3 years ago

I have the same setup. I used it to make a green light go on when we have more than 500 watt excess solar production, so my wife knows she can turn on the washing machine for free.

alkonaut• 3 years ago

If you’re in the Netherland you can get something like a “slimme lezer”, plug it into the p1 port of your energy meter and it will pop up in Home Assistant with the right sensors.

If only the meters had ny power nearby or offered a 5V USB port on it so you could plug in your reader and forget it. But no. Now I'd have to keep a small Li-ion battery living in -20C since the meters are typically outside and there is never any power nearby since they are in a closed cabinet. Only the people who have indoor power meters (I know zero cases of that with detached houses, I think the power companies require the meter to be outside in a cabinet they can access without access to the house.

swozey2• 3 years ago

I have no frame of reference but I have a feeling here (usa) it's super illegal to "tamper" with any pub utilities infrastructure. Could be wrong, though, but no usb ports.

That's really cool though I wish we could do that.

RayyanNafees• 3 years ago

yes

zilti• 3 years ago

Corollary: people are cheap and lazy, so if you want them to not do something, make it cumbersome in a way that does not justify the cost difference, or vice versa.

risyachka• 3 years ago

I’d argue that if you want people to be environmentally friendly, you need to abstract all data, dashboards , etc,

The system must just work behind the scenes and optimise energy use as much as possible automatically.

ChrisMarshallNY• 3 years ago

I have a friend that is diabetic (a number of friends, actually).

He has been doing a pretty lousy job of managing his diet.

Until his doctor prescribed a monitor for a few weeks.

This is a device that looks like a big Band-Aid that you put on your arm, inserting a fine needle under the skin, and communicates with an app on the phone, reporting things like glucose levels.

Once he realized the effects of the foods he was eating, he immediately changed his diet, and has been sticking to it, since (he no longer wears the monitor).

The UI of the app was pretty good. The historical data readout is what did it for him.

wkjagt3• 3 years ago

I think even people who don’t have diabetes could benefit from this. Would having access to my own glucose levels throughout the day give me some insights into how what I eat influences my own mood, energy levels etc?

mywacaday• 3 years ago

This company is offering it as a service https://www.limborevolution.com/, it's expensive though. I haven't used it but the owner has had a few success. Shaq is also an investor.

autoexec3• 3 years ago

It'd be cool to give something like that a try, but I love that we have so much technology to monitor our bodies but I'd never use anything if it required a cell phone app since you'd have to worry about who else is collected/selling that data. We need more devices that work entirely offline, but they're hard to find because companies know they can make so much more money by collecting/selling your personal data and pushing ads

bradknowles3• 3 years ago

I have a Libre3 CGM. It works pretty well, except for the fact that it frequently loses Bluetooth connectivity to my phone.

I can confirm that being more aware of the results you get when you eat the wrong food can be a strong incentive to help you choose better food.

slow_typist• 3 years ago

Thanks for sharing. Does the system supply grid voltage to your home autonomously, i.e. when the grid is offline? Does it work on all three phases? In Germany, most of the systems need the grid to be online in order to work.

tibbydudeza• 3 years ago

Like you I have a solar system (Sunsynk) and it gives all sorts of wonderful stats, but I hardly bother looking at it as it is meaningless information - just wish it was more intelligent to balance battery discharge vs loadshedding schedule vs weather of the day.

I have to manually set things up for winter vs summer.

My geyser which is not on solar is on a IOT controller (Hotbot) and I set the times I want the water to be heated and it knows when there is loadshedding (3G) so it can intelligently deviate from my set times.

DilutedMetrics• 3 years ago

Realtime data is nice, especially when I can get it from the source instead of having to fiddle with individual outlets. When we upgraded to smart meters in the UK (which you actually get an account credit for doing), our power company gave us a portable touch display that read from both the gas and electricity with different breakdowns of consumption.

TheRoque• 3 years ago

Also, we need to stop gaslighting people with fake solutions like "planting trees" or "deleting emails". Sure, it's good, but the scale is so small that you're actually losing focus on what really makes changes.

nagisa2• 3 years ago

Now I just wish I had something as convenient for monitoring water consumption.

You can set this up non-invasively with ultrasonic flow meters like the TUF-2000M. It isn’t cheap, but it does work quite alright if you don't want any of the risks associated with cracking open your pipes.

(There are also cheaper options if you don’t mind opening up your pipes too.)

yelite• 3 years ago

If your meter is not too old, it probably sends wireless signal for consumption data. It can be read with https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr

nijave2• 3 years ago

Overlaying outdoor temperature is also helpful. One degree HVAC change makes a lot bigger difference when it's 0F (-18C) vs 40F (4C) outside

I've seen decent reviews on the "no plumbing required" water meters. Flume has a product available in the U.S. that gets pretty good reviews (https://www.amazon.com/Flume-Smart-Water-Monitor-Detector/dp...).

roland35• 3 years ago

The Sense system is great for this, gives you second level data, and identifies most appliances when they turn on. I enjoy using it!

barelyauser• 3 years ago

This problem can easily be solved without any device at all. Of course, it demands education and "intelligent behavior". If people only had the curiosity to read the specs on a heater and see "2000W" of power, and compare it to "15W" of power on the specs of the LED bulb. Same for water. One can just place a bowl under the faucet and measure the time it takes to fill up. Now you have your water consumption rate. We can choose the "device based" route, but this road end with Idiocracy and problems so "big" nobody can solve them.

argiopetech• 3 years ago

If we're comparing apples to apples all the time, sure. I think it's pretty obvious to most people who care to look that a 60w conventional bulb uses more energy than a 15w LED bulb (which, for the record, is the 100w conventional equivalent). Consider, however, these questions:

If my 2000w heater is running on the 800w setting and turns on when my room has dropped below the point I consider acceptably chilly and turns off above that point, how much electricity have I used in the last hour?

If I have 3 15w LEDs on a dimmer and run them intermittently throughout the day, how much electricity have I used in the last hour?

If my TV is off, but plugged in, and accesses the Internet a few times a day automatically to check for new versions, how much power has it used today?

I think this makes the case for, at least, a kill-a-watt style device. A whole home solution with sufficient report granularity and a report interface visible in the home would be worth the extra trouble, IMHO.

Edit: For the record, these are all real-scenarios from my house.

SergeAx2• 3 years ago

Unpopular opinion: shifting environmental blame to individual consumers is a form of gaslighting (pun not intended, but still good). You may use spend a fortune on solar, heating pumps and A-clsss appliances, but will never save a fraction of power consumption of a single datacenter cabinet or aluminium furnace. One large enough manufacturing plant cancels out all environmental initiatives of a medium town, including public spaces.

runamok2• 3 years ago

SDGE started breaking down our energy usage by "type" a few months ago. Not exactly sure how but they can categorize things as laundry, lights, entertainment, computers, always on, etc.

There are some screenshots here that kind of give you the idea: https://www.sdge.com/energy-management-tool

andirk• 3 years ago

My PGE (Bay area) does the same but I'm pretty sure it's an estimate according to house size, # of people, and a questionnaire I filled out such as "how many times do you run the dishwasher per week". Your house pulls electricity through the breaker box or doesn't.

Then again, it's possible different appliances have a specific electrical signatures like +5KWH x 1.5 hours = dishwasher.

cwassert• 3 years ago

I second this wholeheartedly.

As a toy project I put a raspi with a small screen in my living room that would show the temperature and humidity for the last three days as a graph. It was somewhat of an eye catcher in the living room. The data was always interesting. Even if the humidity did not change much, at the very least you could always see that it was colder during the nights, which told me it was working.

It taught me so many things. The effect of opening the windows short vs. long on temperature and humidity. That the sun shining into my room was way more effective then my heating. How the temperature goes down exponentially when my heating turns off, and how the length of the of/off cycles depend on the temperature outside. Etc.

ahrjay• 3 years ago

In my home state of Victoria Australia the government had a program to give out these powerpal[1] units for free that could measure your usage in realtime using the flashing led on our smart meters, we also require all energy grid operators (the people who own the poles and wires) to have an energy portal where users can get near realtime data to the nearest 30mins, soon to be 5 with some new legislation.

The former most people have no idea about but the powerpal has been a smashing success for consumers to understand what is using energy.

[1] https://www.powerpal.net/

HPsquared• 3 years ago

Instead of a single usage figure per month, it should be a cumulative line chart with high resolution, preferably zoomable. The customer would see long periods of almost nothing, and occasional big jumps (e.g. When the heater is on).

jonathanlydall5• 3 years ago

Exactly.

jokethrowaway2• 3 years ago

It's ridiculous we don't have unlimited free or almost free energy, the future truly sucks.

Likewise it's ridiculous devices are not automatically saving energy when unused, it's such a simple change it should be standard.

Asking the user to worry about it should not be needed. That's the goal we should strive for. For now monitoring will have to do but I think a combination of solar + iron air battery will make everybody living in a sunny-enough place independent from the grid with ample margin - and we can supply the rest with nuclear.

BrandoElFollito2• 3 years ago

I had this hope when the energy companies in France installed the national "smart meter" (Linky). It was a fun story because it was linked to spying you at home, 5G, COVID and radiation.

Unfortunately this is a closed system where the energy company will not let you access the data outside of their own dashboard. I would like to think that this is against the national trend toward Open Data but it is what it is.

There are some funky solutions where you connect a board to an input of the meter and somehow get the data in Home Assistant but it is like I said "funky" (completely guerilla style, without any backing of the power company and if you have a problem it will probably be your fault).

didntcheck2• 2 years ago

It was a fun story because it was linked to spying you at home, 5G, COVID and radiation.

The first of those is a genuine concern

In Australia debt collectors can make use of the data to know when people are at home.[63] Used as evidence in a court case in Austin, Texas, police agencies secretly collected smart meter power usage data from thousands of residences to determine which used more power than "typical" to identify marijuana growing operations.[64]
Smart meter power data usage patterns can reveal much more than how much power is being used. Research has demonstrated that smart meters sampling power levels at two-second intervals can reliably identify when different electrical devices are in use.

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_meter#Privacy_concerns

IIRC my smart meter in the UK lets me choose between 30m and 24h reporting, probably as a response to these fears, but you just set it as a preference on the provider website, not locally on the meter. It would be trivial for them to just be lying about that and logging data to GCHQ at the maximum precision. That may seem outlandish, but so did PRISM until it was revealed

Some people also refuse to have one so that they can't be forced onto a dynamic-priced tariff. At the moment those are opt-in, but I think their concern is a fair one too. Though if the powers that be wanted to coerce people onto them, they could simply crank the price of fixed tariffs anyway

31337Logic• 2 years ago

Great post! Also, TIL that South Africans call their water heaters "geysers". ;-)

Affric• 3 years ago

Great article.

Not so sure about the usefulness of these devices without having a battery though.

miellaby• 3 years ago

I like how the author is surprised by the technological aberration that form Linux powered home appliances. A node server to power and publish over wifi a web site, an API, a web socket, while the site is being displayed by a outdated webview engine within an heavily constrained terminal which cant be reused for anything else. That's... the norm.

All this is very common. And yet displaying a couple of digits and a bar graph could be done with a pair of microcontrollers communicating onto some wired bus.

With the power supplies of this era, this pair of devices probably pumps 16w idle. Running 24/24 7/7, they probably consume as much as a small fridge as a whole. The LCA of the solution must be consterning as well, especially compared with few one dollard microcontrollers.

The worst of all is that this whole mess turned into bricks probably 3 years after it was installed, maybe less.

thrwwycbr• 3 years ago

The reason why the Mirai botnet is still at large is: Android.

From a business perspective nobody wants to pay the costly people that can do microcontroller programming. Frontend devs are dirt cheap, especially for something as simple as that interface displaying the bar charts.

justinclift• 3 years ago

nobody wants to pay the costly people that can do microcontroller programming

The embedded world isn't known for paying well.

throw310822• 3 years ago

There is also an enormous amount of flexibility gained when, instead if designing and building your own single-purpose device, you just use a cheap, mass produced, off the shelf, general purpose device.

PeterisP2• 3 years ago

From employee perspective it was my impression that EE developers tend to get lower salaries than web developers.

But it could be the case that building an android or web app for a simple UI would take less dev-months than an embedded app with similar functionality.

XorNot• 3 years ago

Pulling wires through anywhere after it's finished is an immense installation hassle though. It might be possible...or it might be completely impractical even if you can (i.e. low voltage buses and unshielded power wires don't play nice together if they're parallel).

IshKebab3• 3 years ago

Yeah I don't understand why he is shocked that this communicates wirelessly. He even bought a modern flat with Ethernet because he clearly knows how much pain it is to add wiring to a house. Very weird.

freetanga• 3 years ago

He probably would get more savings by removing the fuse again than keeping that useless thing on…

squarefoot2• 3 years ago

within an heavily constrained terminal which cant be reused for anything else.

Except for botnets and/or spying. Some of those boards already contain MEMS microphones and cameras (the box in the picture even shows the camera objective). I'd have took apart the device to take a look inside, or at least run some diagnostics to explore which hardware was installed/detected.

netsharc• 3 years ago

I wonder if cat /dev/video1 would be enough to turn it into a surveillance device..

jimmaswell• 3 years ago

With the power supplies of this era, this pair of devices probably pumps 16w idle. Running 24/24 7/7, they probably consume as much as a small fridge as a whole. The LCA of the solution must be consterning as well, especially compared with few one dollard microcontrollers.

At the average cost of electric in the USA this amounts to under $2/month. Seems negligible to me?

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=16+watts+*+24+hours+*+3...

israrkhan• 3 years ago

$2 is median daily wage for several countries. Negligible in US but not everywhere

source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income

bdavbdav2• 3 years ago

Still cheap, but the cost per KWH in UK is at least twice the average in the US.

mindslight• 3 years ago

For a device with so little functionality and non-critical functionality at that, I wouldn't call $24/year negligible. My whole home Ryzen router/server idles around there. Honestly I'd bet the fuse was missing because the last tenant was an engineer, investigated this thing themselves, found it a useless waste, and pulled it.

seb12044• 3 years ago

Please send me 2$/month if you don't mind.

Hbruz0• 3 years ago

And yet displaying a couple of digits and a bar graph could be done with a pair of microcontrollers communicating onto some wired bus

Can you expand on that? Would 7 segment displays and a couple of leds be enough ? Which hardware would you use ?

fouc2• 3 years ago

A node server to power and publish over wifi a web site, an API, a web socket, while the site is being displayed by a outdated webview engine within an heavily constrained terminal which cant be reused for anything else. That's... the norm.

I really wonder why this happens. Seems penny wise & pound foolish. Perhaps they failed to hire the right developer for the right abstraction level, and ended up with "web developers" I guess.

mrd3v0• 3 years ago

Money. That's almost always the reason for "why would they do that?"

It's much cheaper and more sustainable for the wealthy and powerful to train individuals on very high level technologies then reuse their skills in every way they can, regardless of how feasible, the economic and ecological footprint, or any concern outside of making profit.

Electron is not some comic book villain. JavaScript is not horrible and can be the optimal choice for many software applications.

But these technologies and tools are easy to teach to many workers who may or may not: understand the computational architecture to come up with better economic efficiencies, have interest in applying their skills to properly solve a problem rather than put food on the table, and so on.

The higher level the skill is, the less interest and deep systemic understanding needed for the job: many new jobs created.

SergeAx2• 3 years ago

On the contrary, using HTML, age-proven open tech, guarantees that even decades later, the product will be usable and easily expandable.

On the other hand, adding one more graph to the microcontroller-powered solution will probably mean redoing it from scratch.

cm21872• 3 years ago

A bit of a dick move to remove the root password on an IOT device of a flat you only rent.

caslon2• 3 years ago

It was completely non-functional before, so there's really no loss.

cm21872• 3 years ago

I see half of the article about how he struggled to get the password, so not that dysfunctional.

denysvitali2• 3 years ago

Considering that: - the Wi-Fi is password protected - root privileges can already be granted via the "backdoor" - exactly as the author did

I don't think it's a dick move, the device security wasn't decreased (or increased) since RCE was already possible via the tcf port

n_plus_1_acc• 3 years ago

The landlord didn't know what it was and apparently doesn't care at all.

acdha• 3 years ago

If it was powered off before, it’s clearly not a selling point of the apartment.

yashg• 3 years ago

I thought it would a Telescreen. (1984 reference)

petepete3• 3 years ago

On a related note, I had a new boiler installed last year with Vaillant's smart controls. There's a little puck shaped 'control unit' with WiFi/radio which allows the app to talk to it, and it to talk to the thermostat.

Like most people in the UK, the boiler's in the garage. A brick rectangle separate from the house. Did Vaillant include an ethernet port? You bet they didn't. The support team suggested I installed WiFi in my garage, which definitely wasn't going to happen.

I had to get the installer back and he ran the cable through the wall so it's now inside and working fine - but how did this ever make it to market? No wonder the reviews are all terrible.

knolan• 3 years ago

Most people in the UK don’t have a garage. Almost every home I’ve lived in has had a gas boiler somewhere inside.

petepete3• 3 years ago

Fair. But I strongly suspect nearly every house with a garage has the boiler in it.

Edit. So having done a little research this probably isn't the case. Maybe it's a regional thing, all the (mostly suburban) houses I've lived in and visited, in the north west of England, are set up that way.

sdflhasjd• 3 years ago

There's enough boilers in garages, lofts, the other side of the house, etc, once you overlap it with UK houses being brick, you get enough situations where getting WiFi from one place to another becomes a pain. A lot of the time, the WiFi AP is 30 cm from where the phone line came into the house when it was built (before the internet even existed), which is not optimally placed for coverage.

pinkahd• 3 years ago

Not quite I’ve noticed in east of England the boiler is in the garage only when a conservatory or kitchen extension is made.

I’ve also tried to move mine from kitchen to garage and the builder I had at the time wasn’t aware of such things.

But agree with the point, I think if a wifi is added to an appliance an ethernet port should also be added.

Angostura6• 3 years ago

I probably would have just installed an an extender plug that extends Wifi by signalling through the mains. Cheap and works quite well

petepete3• 3 years ago

I totally could have run a cable through the wall and installed an extra access point - I was planning on running the cable anyway to connect the control unit via ethernet, until I found that it didn't have one (yeah, I should have checked, I assumed it would).

I didn't really like the idea of having an access point in the garage just to service my boiler. Seems very wasteful.

oynqr• 3 years ago

If you actually want to crack a password, use hashcat. Although even md5crypt is comparatively hard to crack.

M6WIQ• 3 years ago

The name of the company (Netthings) seemed familiar with me, turns out I had read an blog article regarding the hardcoded NTP servers that they used in their devices being firewalled off and therefore losing time sync.

Article: https://strugglers.net/~andy/blog/2018/12/24/the-internet-of...

It also appears that they went into liquidation in 2018, so good luck getting any support with that device from them!

laplab5• 3 years ago

This is absolutely amazing, thank you for sharing that! I have added the link in the end of the article.

justusthane• 3 years ago

That makes the “ DATE & TIME ARE ALWAYS CORRECT AND NEVER NEED TO BE ADJUSTED” from the manual even better!

DougBTX• 3 years ago

Interesting point about not having internet access: these smart meters typically report usage to the energy supplier for billing. I’d go look for a mobile network connection, maybe still up?

cr3ative• 3 years ago

These aren't meters (in that sense) - generally they're reading from CT clamps placed on the tails from your meter.

smingo• 3 years ago

Putting the WiFi SSID and password on the side of the energy monitor sensor box allowed for this:

The whole thing was quite dissapointing. However, I do have a few Raspberry Pico microcontrollers lying around at home. If I could connect to the WiFi network of the energy manager directly and get the data from the server, I could just extract kW consumption from the API, multiply it by a correct rate and then display it on some Grafana instance.

Love it!

P5210• 3 years ago

laplab, awesome job and great writeup!

I had a similar experience when moving into my "smart apartment" 9 years ago and finding a wall-mounted Galaxy Tab 3. I went on to develop a one-click root to allow my neighbors to "free" their systems, too:

https://hackaday.io/project/181646-hacking-tabs/logs?sort=ol...

methou• 3 years ago

I remember when I rented a palace in Singapore, my landlord asked me to download an app called MyKNX to control the lights and blinds in the room. I dumped some packets, and found system is using tcp/ip and the KNX is standardized protocol.

The box is more like a PLC than “smart things”, so it doesn’t need internet to function.

It’s also supported by home-assistant. I want to get one when I’m building my own home.

Edit: added something details

55555• 3 years ago

Please, please write a blog to document the build of your next palace.

wkjagt3• 3 years ago

I’m curious about the palace in Singapore.

cybrox• 3 years ago

As someone who works in IoT, I very much enjoyed your disbelief.

I'd place this right about in the middle in terms of useless complexity. There's a lot worse and a lot better.

A lot better usually only comes from bigger vendors that can afford dev teams with possible rotations.

As a small company or startup, good luck finding a successor to your embedded developer if they leave, so they just slap everyday tech on way overpowered hardware which makes it easier to find devs.

INTPenis• 3 years ago

That was so interesting because around 2015 they built some new apartment buildings in Malmö Sweden and they also included touch screens in every apartment.

Not the same system, but I wonder if that system is as abandoned today as this one was 8 years later.

jacobr• 3 years ago

"The concrete description of what is going on here is spread atom-thin across several websites, all of which expect you to know the terminology. Each of these websites provides you with a tiny piece of the puzzle and you are expected to combine it together on your own."

Oh how I unironically love these types of quests.

promiseofbeans• 3 years ago

I relate to this a lot. As part of my job, I'm regularly given IoT devices that do similar tasks, but from different manufacturers and with varying age ranges (new last year with a raspberry pi 4 inside, to something over a decade old with custom firmware on an ancient microcontroller).

I have to figure out how they work, and somehow coerce their data into a standard format before sending it to our server.

Often, they'll have a built-in mechanism for retrieving data programmatically, but it's usually too slow and sends data in large batches, so I end up needing to reverse engineer their socket IO + handlebars web UI for closer to real-time data streaming. It's a janky nightmare, but it's so satisfying once you make it work.

walterbell• 3 years ago

Have you/employer considered sharing some of this reverse engineering work via github, indexed by IoT device model number?

bloqs• 3 years ago

Slid out, not slided :)

rwky• 3 years ago

I wonder if the previous tenant removed the fuse to stop the box broadcasting a wifi signal. In an apartment block the 2.4ghz band will already be congested!

jenadine• 3 years ago

If you were to develop a device like that "properly", how would you do it? What kind of hardware and what software stack would one use?

konschubert• 3 years ago

Probably an esp32 on both ends. And an eink screen.

The tricky part is passing the networking and auth credentials from the server to the client. But you can marry them during manufacturing.

conradfr2• 3 years ago

That was fun.

Are the csv files rotated or can they hypothetically make the device run out of space in n^n years? :)

layer8• 3 years ago

The space was probably calculated to be sufficient until 2038, after which the clock won’t be correct anymore anyway. ;)

living_room_pc• 3 years ago

Now that you have root access. Check for a microphone device or other things that could be utilized for surveillance.

Im always skeptical of IoT devices.

atribecalledqst• 3 years ago

I was thinking about how the future software engineer to move into the house is probably more likely to curse him rather than thank him for making the server MORE vulnerable than it was before, by removing the SSH password.

seba_dos1• 3 years ago

I now have access to one of the weirdest Edge Computing platforms imaginable.

If you think that's "weird", I have a bad news for you...

Not that your intuition is bad. It's sensible and fully justified. It's just weird to call common things weird ;)

joemaller1• 3 years ago

“hello_stranger.txt” feels like something I would’ve written as a 11 year old pretending to be a mad scientist.

I’m going to start leaving those files on every system I touch. Thank you Nikita.

kilroy123• 3 years ago

I do something like that but it's actually a Canary token. So I can know if someone is snooping.

denysvitali2• 3 years ago

Try "Human Injection" next: https://github.com/minimaxir/big-list-of-naughty-strings/blo...

bouk• 3 years ago

For those wondering _why_ this device is there, it seems it gave points under the Code for Sustainable Homes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_for_Sustainable_Homes so the apartment could have a better environmental rating, as mentioned at https://uk-metering.net/products/netthings-energy-manager

Seems that making sure the device actually works and is accurate was not a requirement however...

orenlindsey• 3 years ago

There were two strings printed with labels “SSID” and “Pwd”. I froze in horror. They wouldn’t dare. It is literally 3 meter distance. These are embedded devices, they do not need this complexity…
Socket.IO! Wow, I honestly did not expect that. Client literally needs to receive 5 numbers from the server, Socket.IO seems to be a complete overkill for this usecase.
The client code also looks very complicated for what it does. There are at least 6 RequireJS modules, all loading dynamically through different requests of course. There is Handlebars, Backbone.js, Underscore.js

I just kept getting more incredulous throughout this article. No way someone would put in that much effort for a device like this. The laziest option is usually the most common in software development. I guess in this case, it's not.

worldsayshi• 3 years ago

Laziest option would probably be the option that developer is most familiar with.

guptaneil• 3 years ago

If anyone is interested in having this type of real-time usage data for their own own home, I highly recommend IoTaWatt: https://iotawatt.com

It's a completely local energy monitor that you can install into your home's circuit breaker panel, and then view dashboards or read data via an API from a local web server running on-device. You choose how many sensors you want, but you can monitor your whole home as well as individual circuits.

For example, I track and trigger automations when my various appliances (laundry, dishwasher, microwave, etc) start/stop. It's very cool. Just be warned that it does require some research, basic understanding of electricity, and comfort working with high voltage mains connections if you plan to DIY it but I found it approachable and easy to setup.

What it looks like: https://i.ibb.co/qBVmBD1/IMG-1595.jpg

tartrate• 3 years ago

I'm curious, how do people record the history of their adventures like this? I assume this doesn't all come from memory. And writing some kind of diary for everything you mess around with must be hard. Or is it common?

haswell• 3 years ago

Personally, I tend to create a master note for each project like this I dig into, and dump as much information into it as I can. This helps me keep track of what I’ve looked at and avoid retracing my steps too much, and in the end would be a good basis for a blog post.

I used to be able to write about things like this from memory, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to rely quite a bit more on journaling and using “2nd brain” tools like Obsidian.

One of the most useful habits I ever started is using Obsidian’s daily journal feature to jot things down every day:

- Things I’m working on that day

- How I’m feeling

- Ideas that pop up about projects

- References to useful sites / code snippets / various explorations

It’s one of the few tools I’ve found that lets me dump truly just about everything into it, and by the end of a project, I either have a nice collection of draft paragraphs to clean up in a blog post, or a nice future reference for myself when I want to do something similar in the future. And because of the automatic note-to-note connections that Obsidian builds, the daily journal always links back to the more concrete topic notes I’ve touched that day.

writing some kind of diary for everything you mess around with must be hard

It was only hard until I had established the habit. Now I can’t imagine not doing it because of the productivity gains that come with it. I get further on things because everything I do leaves behind a tangible bit of progress (in the form of a note) that I can pick back up later.

CliffStoll• 3 years ago

  Keeping a logbook is a part of experimental physics.  In grad school, I learned "If you don't write it down, it didn't happen." 

  And a diary is easy and fun - just a sentence or two every day (even on a wall calendar) reminds you of experiences, travels, travails, and the daily whatnot of life.

  Useful?  Sure!  My lab notebook and home diary were prime ingredients in writing m'book, The Cuckoo's Egg.

boulos• 3 years ago

I made a simple bash alias for this:

  mknote () {
   emacs -nw $HOME/notes/`date "+%Y-%m-%d-"`${1}.txt
  }

so that I can do:

  $ mknote FooTopic

and start recording things.

I also have enote:

  enote () {
   local newest=$(ls -Ft $HOME/notes/\*.txt | grep "$1" | head -n 1) 
   emacs -nw $newest
  }

to go back and edit them by name.

scotty79• 3 years ago

The bit about how this device gets it's "Always accurate time" is the best part:

The device itself does not seem to be connected to the internet at all.

Actually, the time on the device itself is entirely incorrect, somewhere in 2015. But when I open the web UI, it now shows the correct time, even without an initial 15 minute delay.

Turns out, they found out an even more innovative time sync mechanism. When you open the UI in the browser, they quickly redirect you to "/set-time/" + Date.now(). This sets a global variable in the Node.js app responsible for "now".

https://mastodon.social/@laplab/111789584104871367

yieldcrv• 3 years ago

ChatGPT4V is pretty good at this by the way

fiznool• 3 years ago

After reading this (very entertaining) article, I think I can guess why the fuse on his machine was missing. This is exactly what I would do, if I was met with this monstrosity!

rezonant• 3 years ago

This was an incredible read! I'm diving into my own hobbyist IoT project and it was super interesting to see how this spelunk turned out. The extra bits about NetThings exploits are the icing on the cake!

hsuduebc2• 3 years ago

Very interesting read. Thank you.

ainiriand• 3 years ago

That's why when companies like this dissappear they should release the source code to help the users.

fnord77• 3 years ago

The construction was finished in 2015, which ensured pretty good thermal isolation for winters

I made this mistake

camtarn• 3 years ago

Heh, small world. They were briefly a client of ours back when I joined my current company in 2015. We were hired to develop a prototype PLC-based energy monitoring system for a cafe, based on the idea of profiling various devices' energy usage (and maybe mains harmonics?) so you could tell which devices were switching on and off. The project was already underway when I joined, so my involvement was limited to drilling some holes in enclosures.

I never really heard anything more from them after the project was complete. Interesting to see what else they did.

masterrr• 3 years ago

When I first moved to London NW3 in 2016 I also had this thing in my apt but it always seemed to crash right after you boot it using the pin.

This article finally gave me closure.

mrb• 3 years ago

FWIW I asked the OP to send me the /etc/shadow file which he tried to bruteforce with John The Ripper (unsuccessfully). And because it contains old school UNIX crypt() hashes I was able to crack the root pw in ~7 hours with hashcat on 12 x RTX 4090: the root password is Newt@rd$

Not that it's particularly useful as this device let's you gain root access via TCF anyway without authentication. But maybe this password is reused in other areas...

roydivision• 3 years ago

I live in the UK and if anything, this is a country of electrical fuses. The more fuses the better, everything is fused, even some plugs.

All plugs are fused in the UK aren't they?

hbossy• 2 years ago

  I am not even sure how that would work, since the device does not have an internet access.

If it can act as Wi-Fi host it can most likely connect to other clients as well. It's pretty common to run small configuration page hosted on device that let's you enter your main Wi-Fi credentials. All you need to do is change wpa_supplicant setting in /etc/.

whywhywhywhy• 2 years ago

Now the distance between them is actually very short - just a few meters and maybe 2-3 walls, totally reasonable setup for a cable connection ..... There were two strings printed with labels “SSID” and “Pwd”. I froze in horror. They wouldn’t dare. It is literally 3 meter distance. These are embedded devices, they do not need this complexity

Dunno how someone can be so completely shocked that people would rather just do it over wireless instead of drill a cable through "2-3 walls" and have the ugly cable running up a wall and across a doorframe or whatever.

Could have been done over a non-wifi type radio, but then the tablet would need custom hardware too.

I understand the security concerns but like people will choose those over having a house with ugly wires all over the walls or having to deal with wires that get chewed through in the floors and roof.

jdc0589• 2 years ago

I'm a big fan of having energy monitors like this. I installed one (different brand) on a subpanel recently to monitor usage in my garage/shop, but honestly now I'm thinking about doing everything with them (can't just do one at only at the main panel, no one makes a reasonable 400amp mains setup i've found).

I went with an Emporia Vue. each one can do 16 circuit monitors, you can nest multiple together in their app/platform, and if you want to abandon hosted stuff there's an open source community out there that supports their hardware for now. The price is also better than most of the others I cross-shopped.

puhitaku• 2 years ago

The Freescale (NXP) i.MX28 series is the only possible SoC that has ARM9. It doesn't have any Android BSP IIRC. The screenshot looks like a modified AOSP of Android 4.x. How on earth can Android 4.x run on only 128MB-ish DRAM? So many questions are left here.

What's that touchscreen in my room?

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