Nothing until the battery runs out. I'm just thinking of situations like Texas, the East Coast hurricane season, the West Coast fire season, etc where power cuts can last up to a week.
Or what happens when GCP/AWS/Azure have a bad day and you lose connectivity with your API servers?
yeah the battery only lasts 24 hours, though I suspect we could eventually implement a low-power mode in our firmware to stretch that quite a bit. To be honest, I'm also not sure to what extend we want to over index black-swan events [1] as part of our product roadmap.
Your second point about GCP/AWS/Azure going down is really valid. When we started the company, we saw a few off-the-shelf gateways that relied on a permanent MQTT connection to function correctly, and from our Sonder experience, we knew that this was a non-starter for some of our early customers. Instead, we ended up creating our own hub and we run a ton of logic that runs entirely locally. For example, if an Airbnb reservation comes in, the hub immediately receives the door lock programming instructions even if the reservation is far out in the future. Our hub doesn't program the lock yet, but when the reservation time window arrives, the lock gets programmed by the hub irrespective of whether the internet or AWS is up/down.
[1] well at this point, it's questionable whether we should refer to, for example, wildfires as Black Swan events. But I think you'll agree that most people aren't interested in touring a new home or staying at an Airbnb when the town next door is on fire...
Oh does your company only work with short term rentals (airbnb) and showings? I checked your website and came away with the impression that you might have landlords installing these units on long term rentals as well as business locations potentially. That does lower the stakes here significantly than what I was thinking.
And yeah props for that solution to intermittent connectivity issues :)
Or what happens when GCP/AWS/Azure have a bad day and you lose connectivity with your API servers?