
Thread is a mesh network to connect products around the home - e15ctr0n
http://www.threadgroup.org/Home.aspx
======
freyr
The Internet of Things hype hasn't hit HN hard yet, but it seems to be ramping
up. Is anybody else skeptical?

The strongest push for IoT seems to be from the wireless hardware
manufacturers (Cisco, Qualcomm, etc.) and of course, they have the most to
benefit from putting a wireless chip in _everything_. It's a wonderful
solution to their problem of "How do we sell more chips?"

Now Google and Apple are hopping on board. They also have something to gain;
Apple sells more hardware, Google collects more information.

But from a consumer's perspective, it seems like a solution in search of
problem, and I haven't yet seen a single truly compelling use case that will
impact a large segment of the population (turning heating/AC or lights on and
off automatically is cool, but not _that_ cool for most people when initial
cost is factored in). Can somebody illuminate this for me?

~~~
bandushrew
I believe that the main reason it is hard to see the benefits is that we dont
yet have the interesting infrastructure inside that house that an IoT will
allow.

ie, I think it is actually too early in the IoT life cycle to really visualise
the impact it will have.

Let me explain - currently our lighting and applicances are designed entirely
around the idea that they will be manually operated and standalone pieces of
equipment.

Once that assumption is taken away, and houses are built with a different
assumption, suddenly magic begins to happen - imagine that instead of a few
lights in the lounge, there was a ceiling and walls covered in thousands of
LED lights that could be independently controlled via the internet. The
average home could literally have lighting shows. An entire wall could be
utilised as alternately a television or a photo viewer, even a wall in every
room.

etc, etc. Use your imagination here. The point is that the impact of an IoT on
the average middle class house as they are built today is currently pretty
small because neither the house nor the contents of the house were designed
with an IoT in mind. Once we actually have an IoT houses will be build from
the ground up with different assumptions .

At least, that is my opinion.

tl;dr: The IoT has a chicken and egg problem.

~~~
x1798DE
I still don't see a compelling argument here. Who cares about having a "light
show" in their house? What does that even have to do with the internet? We
already have huge televisions that aren't very expensive. If we want the whole
wall to be a TV, we can get a projector. A wall covered in individually-
addressable LEDs is probably not going to be cheaper than a wall covered in
televisions or just a big projector.

The question the parent was asking was "Why hasn't anyone shown me a concept
that makes me think, 'Now I want an internet of things in MY house!'?" Not,
"Why haven't I seen quick adoption of these IoT concepts out there?"

~~~
bandushrew
"Who cares about having a "light show" in their house?"

People do - "mood lighting" is already a thing, that is why we have dimmers on
some light switches now. Going further than that we can change lighting color,
create patterns etc.

Many people, including myself and my kids, would LOVE to have that in their
houses.

But only if it was easy, it needs to come essentially for nothing, ie, to be
builtin from the start.

"What does that even have to do with the internet?"

Internet Of Things I have always understood to mean "Things that we can talk
to and control using our devices, possibly over the internet" but in terms of
the internet as it is widely understood, not much really. I am not sure I
understand the question?

"We already have huge televisions that aren't very expensive. If we want the
whole wall to be a TV, we can get a projector. A wall covered in individually-
addressable LEDs is probably not going to be cheaper than a wall covered in
televisions or just a big projector."

Right, and who knows whether that specific leap of imagination is realistic, I
certainly do not - but I was not trying to make you want a TV in your wall, or
even arguing that it specifically was a good idea, it was merely one possible
example to make a point.

"The question the parent was asking was "Why hasn't anyone shown me a concept
that makes me think, 'Now I want an internet of things in MY house!'?"

Yes. and I was attempting to suggest that one possible reason is that our
imagination is balking because we keep looking at what we have in our houses
_now_ \- all of which is extremely functional and works fine according to our
expectations and desires, which have been moulded by what is available and by
what has always been available.

ie, we are looking at our existing house infrastructure, the idea of an IoT
and saying "but the Internet Of Things is not going to give me a faster horse,
so why would I want it?".

I think I am doing a bad job of explaining myself, so I will bow out :)

~~~
x1798DE
> ie, we are looking at our existing house infrastructure, the idea of an IoT
> and saying "but the Internet Of Things is not going to give me a faster
> horse, so why would I want it?".

I think again you're missing the point with this. An LED light show is a
trifle, it's not something that will really affect you in any way _and it 's
already possible with current technology_. A cell-phone controlled LED light
show _is_ the faster horse. What the parent (and now, by extension, I) was
saying was that I'm looking at the way an inter-connected house would look and
I'm not seeing anything fundamentally _new_ , just marginal and possibly
dubious improvements on our existing technologies.

With Nest it's obvious that the appeal is that you'd have the ability to
remotely change your thermostat settings, which is neat, but how often does
that really come up? If I were to program my thermostat with my work schedule
generally, how often would I _really_ need the internet-connectivity? Once a
month maybe? Is that _really_ worth it? It's an improvement, but it doesn't
seem like it's a whole new _platform_ like you and other people are
suggesting. Not yet, anyway.

>Internet Of Things I have always understood to mean "Things that we can talk
to and control using our devices, possibly over the internet" but in terms of
the internet as it is widely understood, not much really. I am not sure I
understand the question?

I was mostly referring to the LEDs-wall, thing, which isn't inherently a
_networking_ problem any more than addressing each pixel in a television is a
networking problem. If you're building a wall of LEDs for "light shows",
chances are you'll just connect them all to a single controller anyway which
can individually address each LED "pixel", and then that controller will be
either plugged into your "internet of things" or it will be controlled by some
physical panel.

The two big advantages of device connectivity are going to be that you don't
have to be in the same room as your device to mess with it (not having to get
up basically doesn't count, because we already have remote controls for almost
everything), and that your interface with a device can be much, much more
robust (you can essentially use your tablet or phone to give a full touch-
screen UX to a small, cheap device like a coffee maker or a lightbulb). The
first advantage seems to be getting a lot of hype because people can mess with
things at home from when they are out, but that's a benefit that I find
marginal at best (how often do I really need to interact with physical things
in my home when I'm not even there). The second benefit is much more valuable,
but again it is likely to be marginal, because chances are your major devices
are ones where you don't actually need to change the settings (or replace
parts, etc) very often, so it's a convenience maybe 2 or 3 times a year, not a
revolution in the way we interact with our homes and devices.

~~~
jkestner
In your last point you touch on something important - do we need a rich
digital UI for everything? Is the dryer that has essentially an Android tablet
embedded in it superior to the two knobs and a button my current one has? (And
of that, I use 10% of my options.) Do I need yet finer control? I only have so
much attention to give; _no_ interface is more appealing to me. An appliance
can be "smart" without having the trappings of computers, I hope.

And likewise, do we need an Internet connection in order for the object to be
smart? If context awareness is the name of the game, there's quite a bit you
can glean by being a physical object with a memory of how it's used, and
beyond that, a local network.

The Drift lightbulb is interesting because it adds some smarts to a dumb
object but doesn't add more I/O - it still uses a light switch and an LED
bulb, and it isn't trying to get on the network. There are computers that are
taking on the form factor of a light bulb, and there are light bulbs that are
taking on the force multiplier of a computing device. The latter philosophy
needs to be explored more.

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agentultra
And then there were N+1 competing protocols...

Bureaucracies and committees are good at developing protocol specifications.
Instead of throwing spaghetti at the wall maybe those of us interested in
pervasive network computing should get an ANSI committee (or IETF-like task
force) together to develop the de-facto standard language.

I don't want to have to build out an API in front of my cluster that speaks
every possible permutation of language from every device and sensor. As a
hardware vendor I wouldn't want to lock myself out of an ecosystem because my
device only speaks a particular language that only a portion of the cloud
speaks (or may become obsolete in a few years).

It's nice that this stuff is happening... but a Cambrian explosion of
protocols isn't going to make the IoT very robust, IMHO.

~~~
bravo22
I prefer IETF CoAp standard. Look it up. Much better I think.

~~~
jchrisa
CoAP is very compelling, here is the spec:
[http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7252](http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7252)

Cool that it maps to HTTP / REST so you can proxy it to the web. All the
tricks it gets from UDP + TURN ICE STUN are p2p friendly.

~~~
agentultra
Thanks, I will definitely look into this.

------
matthewmacleod
I am super-glad this is finally happening; I was getting close to starting it
myself, given the rubbish options which are currently available for building a
proper end-to-end home automation system.

However, I'm concerned about the openness of it. I'm like 99% certain that the
only realistic way to get a system like this to work is a 100% open,
unlicensed, freely-implementable protocol with absolutely no restrictions. It
doesn't currently sound like that will be the case, which is going to be a
problem.

Perhaps I'll be working on this after all…

~~~
bravo22
It looks like a transport, which has been around for a long time. 6LowPan has
certainly been.

From what I read, it doesn't give you things like send command X to dim
lights. Zigbee HA already defines those but everyone violates them in some
way.

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duncan_bayne
From a brief read of their site, they intend the protocol to be available to
paying members only under FRAND terms.

Here's hoping it dies off quickly.

~~~
DannyBee
Read again: "The Thread technology will be licensed to members under RAND-RF
terms. "

RAND-RF = royalty free

~~~
forgottenpass
I wonder what the catch is. Requiring membership to use a zero-cost technology
is a way of enforcing constraints on implementers.

If I were to bet, I'd say it's a way of guaranteeing they retain external
access to in-home data. Just market it as ensuring interoperability and the
apologists will be coming out of the woodwork.

~~~
IanCal
> Requiring membership to use a zero-cost technology is a way of enforcing
> constraints on implementers.

I assume it's so you don't have thousands of non-compliant devices being sold
with the same name on them. Avoids the "Oh no, that's spec+- not spec-+,
they're not compatible unless you've got a bridge with a chipset with part ID
starting with 71204, 71205xxx are _not_ compatible".

------
bravo22
Google is doing this so they can give you another reason to buy Nest -- it now
acts as a bridge!

Yale is doing this because they have locks that already have Zigbee.

ARM is doing this to sell chips. They have their fingers in a million
different protocols. I don't blame them.

Funny enough, there are very few things in home automation that actually need
battery. Everything from light switches to light bulbs to smoke alarms and
security systems are wired.

The better way would be to use BLE which has the same benefits of 802.15.4
stack. BLE 4.1 allows you to do mesh routing, like Zigbee. The biggest boon is
that you can talk to the nodes directly with your phone.

~~~
wlesieutre
Light switches don't _need_ to be wired either, we've just been doing them
that way because it's the obvious thing when you're just turning a 120v
circuit on and off.

When your lightbulbs become smart devices, they no longer want to be on an
on/off circuit. In fact, it doesn't even matter if a group of them is on the
same circuit or not. You just need a switch to talk to them wirelessly over
Thread, ZigBee, Enocean, or similar. At that point, you don't have to run the
circuits to your light switches either.

Enocean's switches are all powered by kinetic energy, but if you don't mind
replacing all of your batteries every few years, that can work too.

~~~
alexchamberlain
From a safety perspective, it's probably better that they are wired, though
I'd prefer them to be wired to Ethernet and powered by PoE, rather than with
120/240V.

~~~
atwebb
What am I missing that it is safer to be wired? There's no guarantee that the
bulbs going to be good when you hit the switch so I'd guess the battery
concern would be the same. Unless you mean for hacking/tech security in which
case I can see the difference.

~~~
alexchamberlain
I simply meant safer in the same way that wired smoke alarms are safer: you
can't forget to change the battery because you don't use it very often. Think
of a cupboard's light switch, for example.

------
johnvschmitt
They didn't launch any protocol. They launched a site to get (paying) members
to come up with a protocol. Big difference.

I'm not too hopeful yet. Maybe it's just their ".aspx" website that has a
proprietary flavor to it, when we terribly need an open standard here.

We do need an open standard, so each inventor just needs to implement their
idea, & not spend 90% of their time building the whole supporting
architecture, and trying to train the customers in the differences in the
setup. The wearables/IoT ecosystem will continue to flounder until the
equivalent of W3C arises.

~~~
atonse
Err, saying that a site has a proprietary flavor just because it's hosted on
Windows, is like saying this open standard is proprietary since the
documentation was authored in MS Word.

~~~
jnbiche
>is like saying this open standard is proprietary since the documentation was
authored in MS Word.

And yes, that gives off the same vibe. It's a vibe that says, "we're not
really into open source". I say that in spite of Microsoft's recent -- and
welcome -- forays into open source. Their technology is still used primarily
among people and organizations who are not very welcoming to open source
technology.

~~~
atonse
I just can't agree with this, I'm afraid.

Even though I'm a web developer who _loves_ open source on the server side and
has pushed for as many open source technologies as possible in my daily work
as a web developer, I much prefer the experience of MS's office suite to many
of the open source alternatives.

And that doesn't undermine any of the work I do as a programmer. My job is to
pick the superior option and weigh pros and cons for a given set of
circumstances, whether it's open source or closed source.

I'm happy being a user and advocate of open source technologies without having
to be an absolutist who won't use anything else.

------
mrbill
So, this is what, ZigBee+? Any plans on integration or gateways for
interoperation with existing ZWave/Zigbee networks?

------
atonse
Today I learned there's a fan company called "Big Ass Fans" \- and they're a
partner in this!

~~~
fixedd
You should really see some of the fans they make, they earn their name:
[http://i.imgur.com/GxuVHDx.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/GxuVHDx.jpg)

~~~
pizza
Wow, those blades have got to be really stiff to not buckle. Nice small feat
of engineering.

~~~
angersock
That is, in fact, a big ass fan.

Good to see truth in advertising.

------
chimeracoder
Time Warner has been creeping into home automation - I've been getting ads for
their home automation service for "only" $40/month with my monthly bills for
the last few months.

If TWC has their way I imagine this will go about as well as Google Wallet
did, which was killed because all the mobile carriers wanted to promote their
own version (formerly Isis), and had the power to do so (since they could
prevent Google Wallet from working on their devices.

~~~
maxerickson
AT&T has also been advertising home automation and security (on national
television).

I think they don't care too much about the technology, they want to market the
monitoring and connection services, which I guess means they will still choose
whatever favors collecting those monthly fees.

------
paletoy
In my eyes, the ideal rotocol would be one that fits, but doesn't need any
router at all. While not excatly that, lora , a long range(kilometers) low
power/cost protocol, seems like the right choice. Just find the right model
for personal deployment some open routers(similar to wifi) and let nodes seek
those open nodes , and we all win.

But i'm probably missing something here, since i haven't heard of anybody
doing this. I wonder what ?

~~~
bravo22
Lora is like 10 bits per second... really slow.

~~~
JetSpiegel
I only need a bit to turn a light on, so we may be onto something here.

~~~
Sanddancer
Dimmers need a few bits, probably 8+ for decent control. Waiting a few seconds
for a light to dim would be rather annoying. Doing RGB effects would be even
slower. Ovens need at least 10 for a decent temperature range. Authenticating
a door lock would require at least 128 bits one way, and another 128 the
other; 30 seconds would be way too long for that purpose. Plus, you need to
take into account addressing, a protocol for the type of message, and other
aspects in order to route commands to the proper node. 10 bits per second just
isn't going to cut it.

~~~
JetSpiegel
If I'm 50cm from the door, there no need to use this protocol. This for the
times you're not at home, but somewhat close.

If I want to turn the lights off and I'm at home, I just flick a switch.

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xexers
But the software industry already uses the word "Thread" to describe something
else. This will get confusing fast.

~~~
sangnoir
The knitting industry also uses the word "Thread" to describe some other
thing. This is going to be a nightmare, I tell you.

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SEJeff
This is basically ontop of zigbee. Perhaps zigbee will finally compete with
the likes of stuff like insteon which is cheap and for the most part "just
works TM".

------
alexchamberlain
This is fantastic; it is _just_ an IP based home automation protocol, with
backing from some of the biggest players in the industry.

~~~
duncan_bayne
... and which can be used only by group members, under RAND-RF terms. It is
_not_ an open protocol.

------
chubot
How likely is it that they will create an open source reference implementation
(e.g. C code anybody can use)?

------
atarkmani
interesting development. just think about the impact of automation on the
hotel industry. Samsung has created a smart room control solution for BLOC
boutique hotels in the UK. i wonder if this protocol embedded into the fabric
of their automation solution

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pocketstar
Looks cool! Though someone should have edited their website

"Extensive support for sleepy nodes operating for years using even on a single
AA battery" \-
[http://www.threadgroup.org/Technology.aspx](http://www.threadgroup.org/Technology.aspx)

Why is there no easy way to report errors on websites these days?

------
ausjke
as a developer who dealt with zigbee, it sucks. z-wave is great, but not open
enough and not IP-friendly. 6lowpan is a logical choice for IT companies,
which is what Thread about here. I hope it becomes more popular over time.

------
eximius
Why is there no information for individual developers?

