
Ex-Mozilla team behind smart home hub Sense refunds backers, focuses on software - rdoherty
http://techcrunch.com/2016/06/08/ex-mozilla-team-behind-smart-home-hub-sense-refunds-kickstarter-backers-focuses-on-software/
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Fej
Definitely interested in the software platform. Have been wary of Echo and
Google's new thing due to privacy concerns... you're literally bugging
yourself. Having all the logic run locally is a nice breath of fresh air.

Although I wonder if Emerson will force them to change the name, they have a
smart thermostat called Sensi. Sense is a really unremarkable and un-
googleable term anyway.

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mxuribe
Your reasons were the same that i had for not wanting to get an echo or
google's device. Let's hope this software platform takes off _AND_ that
hardware device makers latch onto and run with this!

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inframouse
Right now this seems mostly to consist of javascript wrappers around existing
platform libraries? E.g. to let me read a gpio pin or blink a led? Not that
it's a bad thing but it seems a little skinny as a thing right now, and the
pitch seems to be that more and more platform stuff arrives. Smells more like
a replay for firefox os less innovating on the platform? Any insights?

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Matthias247
I just took at look at the linked repo and thought the same. I've tried the
node on embedded devices recently and most likely would not go that route
again. I would at least recommend to do it in Typescript. However I still
think that a big bunch of JS with the usual amount of external dependencies
can turn quite fast into an unmaintainable mess if you are not super careful.

Another thing that has to be considered is that that if an OEM then uses this
SDK to build his own device his software will be open too (in the sense of
extractable in code form, not by license). In my experience most device
manufacturers won't be happy with that. But I don't know who Silklabs is
dealing with and what their expectations are - so things might be different
here.

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lacker
It seems like $100,000 was too low of a goal for their Kickstarter campaign.
That's not really enough to justify multiple people working for a year to
launch a hardware product. They got $160k, but that's still not enough, which
leaves them in this awkward spot.

They should have just set a goal high enough that achieving it would have been
a success for them. Kind of true for any sort of goal-setting, but especially
committing yourself to selling hardware via Kickstarter.

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mancerayder
That's kind of too bad.

Are there any other recommended hubs these days that allow a fair amount of
programmability? I just returned a VeraPlus since it wasn't very interoperable
with my devices, had some distance issues (with no battery to move it to pair)
among other things.

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digi_owl
Why do this "smart home hub" thing reminds me of Apple's attempt at making the
Mac the hub of our digital lives, only to get nowhere?

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notatoad
The thing about smart home hubs is that you actually need one. Zigbee or
z-wave or some other 900MHz channel is a really good way for these smart home
devices to talk to each other, and for that to happen you need some sort of
radio operating as a 900MHz hub.

It's not just that all these vendors want to be the hub, something has to do
the communication.

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unwind
I'd say that recent developments in long-range low-power radio networks (like
LoRa, but see the list at
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LPWAN](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LPWAN))
might change this.

Of course it still makes sense to many here to run their own gateway for
reasons of privacy and control, but perhaps the market at large could go for
city-wide third-party networks, or something. Of course not everyone lives in
cities, but perhaps shared networks might work in more rural settings, too.

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deprave
Edit: Disregard this comment, my mistake.

Mozilla is such a disappointment. Instead of focusing on their raison d'etre
they're busy branching out to one unsuccessful venture after another.

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detaro
How is employees leaving and starting a startup a failure of Mozilla?

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deprave
Oh, wow, you're right. My brain completely ignored that "Ex-" at the
beginning.

