RE: Building an IoT System: Weighing the Trade-Offs

Former Member — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 15:15:11 GMT

Having read through all of your posts on this subject, I'd say I generally agree. Couple of things stand out though.

There's a common thing that you repeat often, but mostly skip over: "Install App, Sign Up". Those are two things that I'd like to see go away. There's a real reason behind that.. You've just bought your shiny and expensive IoT thingy.. The company behind it rapidly goes bust and now you have a very expensive paperweight because it simply doesn't work without the backend. I like the IoT concept, but only as long as it works standalone or can be pointed at a backend that I can run on something locally thereby safeguarding my investment.

You keep talking about needing an RTOS, either we have a completely different idea of what an RTOS means, or I'm totally missing something. While I agree you might need/want an OS of some description, I have some difficulty with the concept that a consumer level something that was probably previously manually controlled needs RTanything..

Lastly, in one of the posts you mentioned having 'potentially dangerous' things connected so that you could turn them off remotely. Personally I'd really rather that anything potentially dangerous is not connected. As, if you are able to turn it off remotely, what's to prevent someone gaining access and turning in on remotely too. That also plays into the security angle which I'm glad to see you take seriously, I suspect that a lot of consumers and manufacturers alike don't pay security enough attention.