Why do toothbrushes need to be able to make web connections in the first place? I get that it's for tracking brushing habits, but can't that be done with local connectivity only, like LAN or something?
Not every toothbrush user has a server at home and the skills to attach to it. I would even say that most of those users had no idea what they enabled when they activated their toothbrushes. And let's not forget about vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, washing machines, coffee makers and the other zillions of "smart" personal data channeling smart appliances. I'd dare a survey, how many HN people actually work on exactly these technologies, how many read these words, and how many actually care?
I have several gizmos which use Bluetooth. They're a little bit slower to connect to than the WiFi ones, but they work fine, and "a bit slower to connect" seems fine for a toothbrush.
I also have several gizmos, including lightbulbs, which use WiFi. To my chagrin, I've had internet outages which meant that I can't turn on a given light until the Internet comes back. I put up with it, because telling my computer to change the lights is too much fun, but when the internet goes out, I'm embarrassed both personally and professionally.
Somehow we've failed as a profession to provide people with a home network which continues to function as long as the router has power, and that sucks.
> Somehow we've failed as a profession to provide people with a home network which continues to function as long as the router has power, and that sucks.
Wikipedia says the computer interface was 80's, but if you managed to have a computer in the seventies, you probably knew enough electronics to homebrew something.
yeah, everything keeps getting reinvented worse or made worse by adding unwanted, poorly implemented features. My unstated point was that a version existed decades ago which was more robust than the new, reinvented version.
I'm not sure that people (in general) want these things. It seems like product managers adding stuff to justify their existence and people buying what they find on the shelf. You get an internet connected oven because you have no choice anymore. (Hyperbole, but the non-internet choices are narrowing.)
Maybe people want to change the color of their lightbulb (I'm guessing it gets old quick), but I suspect they're not asking for it to be on the internet.
I find it a genuine quality-of-life improvement to adjust the color of light. The temperature matters more, but being able to do strong hues is really nice. Not everyone is into mood lighting, but I like it.
And I don't care as much about whether or not the bulb uses IP to reach my phone, but why should my outside connection going down ever matter? As long as the router has power, the internal network should continue to function. It's a shame is what it is. I figure I could put in the sweat to make it "work on my machine" but that doesn't solve Joe Normal's problem, and it doesn't sound like a fun hobby to me either.
Separate access points from the router are a thing, and if the command and control for the lights are local they'd continue to work. People just mostly choose to go with a single integrated unit instead of a router, a switch, and one or more access points.
Just have the toothbrush run a web server and then the user can point a web browser at it. It can also come with a mobile app that would scan the local network looking for the device in order to discover the IP.
> I'd dare a survey, how many HN people actually work on exactly these
technologies, how many read these words, and how many actually care?
This is an excellent question. We'd likely find that there is an
enormous disconnect between high IQ, well educated engineers and high
emotional and social intelligence.
The perennial excuses; "it's just a job" , "everybody's doing it", "if
I didn't build <monstrosity x> then someone else would" ... these have
grown tiresome and weak. Everybody now knows these are stupid and
dangerous things we are doing.
Is there a kind of fatalistic malice at work? How do people who work on
this kind of thing manage the dissonance?
What data though? How would it be valuable? From what I saw they are getting money from the device sale itself. These iot toothbrushes are like $400 and basically just track brushing time and pressure. Those don't seem like super valuable ad tracking metrics.
Let's assume we have the following data: the user's email address, some sort of smartphone identifying value, their ip address, and their brushing habits. That's not very much; who would want that?
Well, we know this is a person who will drop $400 on a toothbrush. They like shiny things, they have at least a middle-class disposable income, and they don't mind the headaches of internet-connected devices. Let's sell this information to big-box electronics retailers and other smart appliance manufacturers. Maybe this person would like to buy a $500 toaster too, or espresso machine, or soda machine, or bread machine, or microwave.
They care a little bit about oral hygiene. Have they seen a dentist lately? If they have $400 for a toothbrush, then they probably have better than average dental insurance. Let's also sell their information to the larger dental offices in their area (as determined by IP).
Do they need mouthwash? Let's pop up an ad for a subscription mouthwash service. How about floss? Would they perhaps also appreciate a razor made out of aerospace titanium?
Oh, but wait ... their IP address just changed, and they are brushing their teeth 3 hours later than typical. They're traveling! They're traveling and they took their expensive toothbrush with them. This opens up an entirely new set of possibilities. Travel insurance? A credit card with travel incentives? New luggage? How about offers for travel upgrades? There are hundreds of companies paying for the opportunity to contact pre-qualified customers that travel with disposable income.
Oh, wait ... they just bought a set of lightbulbs that we also make...
I was at the store looking at them recently and all the toothbrushes advertise having "AI", an app, wifi/bluetooth etc. I guess it's hard to come up with reasonable upsells on this stuff.
It's possible but its really unreliable. A device trying to reach out to an app on your phone to proxy the data while your phone is sleeping/app not running just doesn't work that well. You don't want to have to open the app while using the device, you just want all the data to be there when you look in a week.
These devices almost always have wifi since the chips usually have both anyway. And reaching out to a fixed wifi is so much more reliable.
And then the user goes out for the day, opens up the app, and wonders why the last 3 days of data is missing. Meanwhile the chip that does Bluetooth also just has wifi bundled in. Aside from the security risk, directly connecting to wifi is a vastly superior experience.
How much data can a toothbrush collect? Surely just a few hundred bytes per brushing session. The ESP32 has 160 kB of usable RAM out of the 520 kB total capacity. Surely enough for weeks of data even if the data structures are badly designed.