Title text:
It’s important for devices to have internet connectivity so the manufacturer can patch remote exploits.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3109/
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Do they have a model with AI?
Or Alexa?
Shh shh shh, don’t give them ideas.
I work at a dispensary. In theory this could actually be helpful for my job.
I feel like I’d benefit from a smart dehumidifier.
I’m on a Time Of Use tariff where my electricity is very cheap at night. I’d like to be able to schedule for it to come on for those 5hrs in the winter to take the moisture out of my shed-office. It achieves nothing to put it on a smart meter as you have to physically press go on the dehumidifier
Just use a smart timer with a dehumidifier that either doesn’t have a switch, or has an analog one that can stay in the on position when power is off
Unless you have an even dumber dehumidifier that starts working the moment you plug it in.
Yeah, I wish I did but alas not
Just use a power timer or whatever those devices are called.
They just said the smart timers/meters don’t work. Maybe a non internet one with some regular timers. I have grow lights that have 12, 6, or 3 hour timers that repeat the start time daily as long as a power outage doesn’t reset them.
Lower tech solution that would probably work for them, but someone would still have to make it. Not sure if they exist but wouldn’t be surprised if they do.
You need a smart button pressing device. Something like :
I have not used this personally, but I have a home assistant setup that does operate based on real time energy prices and it’s awesome.
Hah, that’s a cool solution [no pun intended]
I guess you have one with a digital on switch? Because every appliance I’ve ever owned with an analogue power switch can be left in on state for things like this.
Yup, spot on, I didn’t explain it clearly enough but how you articulate it is better: it does indeed have a digital “On” switch so just giving it power doesn’t achieve what I need
I got new appliances a couple weeks ago and they’re all “smart”. Turns out a smart microwave just sends you a phone notification when it’s done. By default.
As someone with multiple people living in the house, I can confidently say this is the dumbest “smart” feature ever. Promptly disabled.
My appliances are ‘smart’ but I didn’t bother actually connecting them to my WiFi. I guess preheating the oven remotely could be cool(?) but nah.
The stuff I do use…
The microwave above the stove can talk via Bluetooth(no app or phone involvement at all). Turn on a burner and you can set it to turn on the light and/or vent fan. Another nicety is being able to set the clock on the stove with the full keypad and it just syncs to the microwave.
My stove won’t preheat, I guess because it’s a safety issue. Apparently you can set a remote start capability ahead of time that gets reset if you open the over door. But I’ve never tried it, since that seems like a lot.
Any appliance with IoT is a value-subtract.
They do it so in the future they can monetize you in perpetuity in some way
I can see value in HVAC IoT. Away from home and there’s a cold spell? Turn up the heating so your pipes don’t freeze, but also run it higher when electricity is cheaper (if you have variable pricing).
I don’t think I’d want my microwave, washing machine, or toilet to have IoT features though.
I want my washing machine to notify my phone when a cycle completes… But maybe not quite that much
Mine chimes a quaint little song. It’s enough because it can be heard pretty much anywhere in the house unless I’m in the basement. If I’m not home, the notification wouldn’t be particularly useful - I might as well just check when I get home.
I mean the idea isn’t the absolute worst. I just don’t think it’s a huge QoL improvement either.
Most people tend to stay in the same room (or a neighbouring room) when they’re microwaving something. They could probably save on the cost of having a full-blown computer with wifi inside the microwave by just having the noisy thing from an alarm clock. But, ah, the fuck do I know?
Some 90’s microwaves actually used some chips to measure humidity and using a little reference table adjust how long certain foods need to cook for, for instance, popcorn can be popped perfectly without burning and almost without leftover kernels if you can measure how much water is being released. The same goes for cooking frozen meats, vegetables, and so on.
But what we get in modern ones instead are horrendous touchscreens, simple timers that never quite match the food they promise to work on, and Wi-Fi.
a full blown computer, depending on how one defines the term, is so cheap that they are available in disposable pregnancy tests. This shouldn’t be a thing because of the E waste and inefficiency but it’s how things are.
I’ve looked into many WiFi dehumidifier’s and the one thing I wanted from it was to notify my phone if it’s full. None of them do that. All they do is let you change speed and stuff. Nothing that is important to me. I just want to know if I need to go to the basement and empty it or not.
I put mine on a zigbee plug into my home assistant (docker on nas), and created an automation to notify me when the power consumption drops below 1 W or so (lower than when it’s only running the fan when the hunidity is near setpoint). All local, works so far.
Right? Like half of what I want from these things is when is the battery low? When is the outbox full? When is the feeder empty? And metrics to verify the device is generally operating safely.
Controlling the device? We’ve known how to do that for 50+ years. Help me maintain the device.
I feel you, trying to find a smart gadget that is actually smart in 2025 and not just a data collector is nearly impossible. Learning to DIY a lot of these projects. Throw one of these or similar in there with a little control board set to email you if 0 changes to 1 or w/e
I need to look into this and see if I can have it send me a text or something when it’s full. Another diy project to add to the list.
This is the around the long way method, but it’ll start you on a crippling hobby to instrument your entire life.
Raspberry Pi home assistant zigbee USB zigbee water sensor.
you could stop here at notifications.
or
Descend into madness, put a small ac submersible pump into your dehumidifier tray with a smart outlet. When the sensor trips full, have it run the submersible pump for x minutes.
Jokes on you I have like 5 raspberry pi’s that aren’t doing anything labeled future projects.
Hey if your list of projects isn’t insurmountable what are you even doing with with your life?
Most carriers have an email to sms gateway address Usually your [email protected] or similar.
https://aeotec.com/products/aeotec-water-sensor-7-pro/
This little thing is a beast :)
Do they at least tell you how wet your wifi is?
Haha no they don’t which is why I went with one that didn’t have WiFi to save like 20$
Meanwhile here I am installing ESP32C3’s into everything in my house to automate everything.
I can turn on my floor heat, hallway light, or even open a vent from an app on my phone. And bonus, no shady manufacturers to spy on me. Just China.
It would be a lot more difficult to hide a backdoor on a bare ESP device, than a proprietary Tuya one, just putting that out there. Regardless, I still block internet access from my ESPHome devices, because I don’t want to feel like I need to constantly be on top of updates, that can cause things to break at times. I do them every couple months when I have the time to sit down and make sure everything’s still working, or roll it back where it’s not.
that vent thing is surprisingly clever, thumbs up 👍
Hey thanks, I’ve got tons of cool projects and gifs like these, and I love to share them and read the comments, but I don’t know where to post them on Lemmy. I used to post them to Reddit but they started shadowbanning my github for some reason. Didn’t even find out until the ESP32 mod messaged me and was like “we can’t even manually approve your posts”.
What about [email protected]?
Or if you are using Home Assistant you could post in [email protected]
There is a Lemmy community search function here if you want to check other options: https://lemmyverse.net/communities
What about [email protected]?
I tried there but my posts never showed up. Tried twice. Not sure what I’m doing wrong. I’m on old.lemmy.world so it looks like old reddit.
That’s odd. How far did you get? Any error?
Federation from your instance Lemmy.world to the instance the community is on (programming.dev) is healthy, so that doesn’t seem to be the issue.
My guess would be that you’ve tried to upload an image that is over the size limit - I think this is imposed by your own instance (Lemmy.world), and I’m not sure what the size limit is but I think 5MB per image is pretty common. If you drop the image size or upload elsewhere then link it, does that work?
I just hit submit and it spat me back out to the new posts, but mine wasn’t there.
I wasn’t trying to directly upload an image, just directly link to an imgur gifv.
Hmm odd. Maybe just try again?
I just installed motorized dampers in my crawl space using Shelly smart relays! Now I have an automatic schedule so I’m not cooling rooms that aren’t in use (like the bedrooms during the day and the lower level of the house at night). Already seen significant power savings!
welll… devils advocate… i could see the wifi being used so the device can be incorporated into the home automation system [climate control]. its not about dehumidifying, its solely about engaging the dehumidifying as needed.
Yeah, or the manufacturer bricks the device bcz they want to sell you a new one.
That’s why projects like this are great: https://github.com/Hypfer/esp8266-midea-dehumidifier
My Midea Cube dehumidifier can never be bricked and will never send data outside of my home. It talks to Home Assistant via MQTT and nothing else.
A dehumidifier that doesn’t have any wifi can’t be bricked either.
Yeah but I want to control it with the average humidity from sensors across my house
It’s almost like you can just set the dehumidifier to a certain humidity level and fan speed and then never touch the settings again. That’s what I did with my humidifier. It’s as dumb as a box of rocks, but it quits working during the summer when the humidity goes up and then turns back on the rest of the year with zero interaction besides adding more water
You can, but it only measures the humidity at the (de)humidifier. I want it to account for the state of the whole house.
1st world problems
Ones that have first world solutions
Wahhh
Lmao
I mean, yeah. I wouldn’t have found that project and gone to the effort of using it if a simple dehu was all I needed. I wanted something I could control with my local home assistant install, and you can’t just hard power cycle a dehumidifier, it kills them.
Ok
What is “hard power cycle” a dehumidifier? Have you never used a normal dehumidifier before or something?
Literally nobody is doing this shit.
“Nobody” like in “SONOS literally bricking its old devices and telling you to buy a new one”? https://www.whathifi.com/news/sonos-explains-why-recycle-mode-bricks-old-speakers
They didn’t brick anything. They gave a button for you to get a discount if you did it yourself
But they can close their server and render the device inoperable, just like what happened to a water sensor I had.
That’s why it’s important to make sure the device can also run purely locally (e.g. via HomeAssistant).
(Not meant as a rebuke, just good advice for the future)
Exactly this. The device either needs to be open enough that it can easily integrate to HA without internet access.
Or dumb enough that I can mod it with an ESP.Anything that has to go through the manufacturer’s servers goes in the bin, the risks of data theft/rent seeking are too damned high.
They didn’t brick it, but the Nest thermostats that customers bought before Google acquired the company will be offline only now. No opening of the firmware, so they’ll become useless at some point, and already have lost major functionality.
Literally false and you’re retarded.
Hey bud, no need to attack someone’s intelligence. You can pick apart their argument with sources like a big kid but nobody logged in to see you be a butthead online today.
Bullshit asymmetry principle, been there done that. Name-calling serves a small but real purpose in the right contexts.
Doofus.
Dehumidifiers aren’t there to make your house more comfortable though, they are there to keep (usually basements or garages) from growing mold. In fact they usually heat up the space they’re in. So unless you want to have a log of humidity, there’s stop no reason to automate it over WiFi, since the humidity setting on the unit is automatic.
As others have said, an alert if the tank is full would be legitimately useful, for a model that doesn’t have a drain line.
dont be dictatatin’ my humidity comfort level.
But he is right though, you should be using your air conditioner not dehumidifier for climate control, it works better for that purpose. Watch this video to learn why
and youre both wrong for assuming the temperature and humidity are the only reasons to want to control this device. It literally generates water as output… god forbid my home automation wants to manage that output.
Dehumidifiers already do that. They’re equipped with hygrometers that kick the machine on or off depending on the relative humidity. It’s old tech and it’s pretty reliable, wifi isn’t really necessary for it.
The built-in hygrometer’s not necessarily going to be as good as a well-designed home automation system, especially if the fan’s not running all the time, so it has to wait for damp air to diffuse into the machine. It also lets you do other things, like not bother turning the dehumidifier on if there are open windows if you’ve got some way to detect that, or report the humidity to something that will graph it. It’s not stuff that most consumers will care about, but a microcontroller with WiFi like the ESP8266 or ESP32-C3 costs less than an accurate hygrometer chip, so it doesn’t make much, if any, difference to the final price, particularly if the product was going to use a microcontroller anyway.
And how does a well designed automation system measure how much moisture in the air? There must be some kind of measuring device that measures moisture, a moisture scope! Ooh wait let’s latinize it to make it sound more impressive and sophisticated a hygro…me…ter… oh… uh… this is embarrassing.
In the UK, it’s common for electric showers to be on a separate isolator that needs to be turned on before they’ll heat up, and it also activates an extractor fan, and most people turn it off again when they’re done showering. It’s pretty simple for a home automation hobbyist to swap the regular isolator switch for a smart one, and then their system can know when they’re about to shower and activate the dehumidifier immediately. This can be much better than waiting ten minutes for enough humidity to diffuse into the dehumidifier for the humidistat to activate then waiting another ten minutes for the cold side to cool enough for any dehumidification to start.
I didn’t say a home automation system would be measuring the humidity and reacting. The opportunity to do better comes from the potential to be more proactive if you can figure out a way to tell a computer about impending humidity.
but a microcontroller with WiFi like the ESP8266 or ESP32-C3 costs less than an accurate hygrometer chip
Ok, two things.
First, the cost of the Wi-Fi chip is clearly not the issue here. The real expense/concern is the effort and software mechanisms needed to secure that network connection. Connecting to the Internet is easy, securing that connected device is hard.
Secondly, at some point you still need the hygrometer, there’s no way around that. Either your dehumidifier is tracking humidity, or your home automation system needs to track humidity. And you can’t like… get that data from the web somehow, you need a local sensor, and it will generally only make sense to have it in the same room as the dehumidifier (meaning not necessarily where other smart home components are set up).
You’re missing my point. It’s likely that the cheapest way to design and build a dehumidifier these days will already include a microcontroller interpreting results from a digital hygrometer because these components are cheap and easier to work with than purely electronic/electromechanical designs with no microcontroller. The cost of switching from a non-WiFi/Bluetooth/Zigbee microcontroller to one with one or more of these networks is negligible, and once you’ve got it, it’s not meaningfully more expensive to pay a software engineer to expose the on/off switch and hygrometer readings via that network and have the marketing people write Smart! Now with WiFi! than it is to skip it and pay the marketing people to come up with some other nonsense to put on the box. If you care about security as little as the average IoT vendor does, then it’s nearly free to turn a dumb device into a smart one, so if it makes a handful of extra people buy the device, manufacturers will make things smart. For a dehumidifier, there are reasons why a handful of people will prefer a smart one, so smart dehumidifiers get made.
It’s likely that the cheapest way to design and build a dehumidifier these days will already include a microcontroller interpreting results from a digital hygrometer because these components are cheap and easier to work with than purely electronic/electromechanical designs with no microcontroller.
Well this part is definitely not true. A microcontroller and Wi-Fi chip are definitely more expensive than a wire, a variable resistor and a knob, which is all a purely electro-mechanical system would need in addition to the hydrometer.
The fancy digital version wouldn’t be a lot more expensive, but it certainly wouldn’t be the cheapest way to go.
That said, I think you’re right that most companies will opt to go the fancy digital route to try to sell a “smart” product with more features. But then I expect there will also always be companies that manufacture simpler, cheaper products as well.
The cheapest hygrometers these days only have a digital output, and a wire and a potentiometer aren’t going to be able to query an i2c bus to ask the hygrometer what it’s measured without the help of a microcontroller (and the microcontroller might be cheaper than the potentiometer anyway depending on the specific model of each - have you actually looked at the 2025 prices of things before making assertions about what they cost?). The analogue component of a hygrometer that actually does the measurement gives fairly small changes to the resistance/capacitance (depending on the kind of hygrometer), so the results need amplifying. If you’re measuring on the same chip, you can get away with a simpler amplifier and digitally compensate for any nonlinearity, whereas to get a strong enough signal to make it to the rest of an analogue circuit without much degradation, you’d need an amplifier that ends up being more complicated than doing everything digitally.
So, first off, smart devices shouldn’t need to connect to the internet, only the local network. I have everything connected to Home Assistant, and then for access outside the house I have HA connected to the internet, meaning I only have one point I need to secure.
On your second point, I think the poster above was talking about having both an in-built as well as wifi-accessible external sensor. It makes it possible to have a more powerful dehumidifier in one space, running to a lower humidity than needed based off what’s going on in other rooms. Then have that air circulated by other fans, etc.
It’s ironic that you can implement all this cool automation for a device but in the end still have to manually lug water to it.
Well it’s a **de-**humidifier. You need to lug water from it. For the dehumidifier in my basement, we have it hooked up to a hose that takes the water right down the drain.
But I do take your point, it is pretty funny.
Like how every source of power is still steam since before the industrial revolution.
Just most sources of power. Photovoltaic, wind and hydro aren’t steam based.
And your moms power is hip based.
I’m not going to knock her putting them to good use! It’s done well by her so far. 👍
a microcontroller with WiFi like the ESP8266 or ESP32-C3 costs less than an accurate hygrometer chip
No it doesn’t. Those micros go for $1-2 bulk, but capacitive hygrometers are 10x cheaper.
I can get a board from AliExpress with an ESP32-C3 on it with free shipping for £1.10, so I’m not inclined to believe the £0.765 unit cost for a 5000-part reel from Mouser is really the cheapest way to get them in bulk as the other parts on the same board and the shipping have to cost something.
The cheapest hygrometer that Mouser sell is £0.748 per unit for a 10,000-part reel, and its datasheet says not to leave it for more than 60 hours in greater than 80% relative humidity (which is a pretty likely scenario for a dehumidifier) as it’ll drift, and if it happens often, it’ll age faster. You need to spend more to get rid of that restriction. I’ll concede that the accuracy penalty if you cheap out isn’t as bad as I thought - I’d not actually looked at a datasheet to see how badly modern hygrometers would drift, I just knew that they did - so plenty of manufacturers wouldn’t care, but the parts are still comparable prices, not a factor of ten like you’re claiming.
To steel-man the argument some more, if you have variable-rate electricity, it could turn on when electricity is cheap.
This can be done with something like Zigbee. Or even simpler: you hook a non-connected device up to a “smart” power socket. No need for the device itself to talk to the outside world.
The solution to too many unnecessarily-connected devices is more connected devices?
Now you’re getting it!
ZigBee is Bluetooth, so controls can be done entirely locally.
We have Aqara (ZigBee) water leak detectors for our sink and basement, a 3rd party USB ZigBee dongle and a raspberry pi running home assistant. This gives me a discount on our home insurance that is more than the devices. Everything runs only locally.
(Admittedly I am not including the cost of the pi, but you could salvage an old laptop or something instead. My pi has other things on it other than HA, its multipurpose)
I also have some WiFi RGB bulbs/led. Using home assistant I can swap their colors for the holidays and I never have to decorate again. I’m lazy, and I hate Christmas.
The solution is not more but different connected devices so I can decide for myself what needs to be connected and by which protocol. Get the dumbest device on the market, no wifi, no internal clock, maybe not even a humidity sensor and then, if and only if I need to remote control it, for example to put it on a schedule, I can use the cheapest “smart” device on the market to connect it to an in-house machine that can turn it on and off.
You still have to have some device connected to the internet. This just transfers the problem from the humidifier to the outlet.
Zigbee is local and if you really wanted to you can use Home Assistant 100% offline it will be just neutered and basic.
im not sure why all these people jumped from ‘wifi’ to ‘internet’ as if they were the same thing. no one should be exposing their automation devices directly to the interwebs
Honestly, having any of these vulnerable devices on your network is exposing your whole network, assuming the network is connected to the web.
Your best off using either a separate network for your smart devices with its own router, or setting up a vlan to keep your smart appliances and actual computers separate.
In this case the OP was explicitly about internet connectivity
Sadly, many wifi-enabled devices only work with some proprietary cloud-service and even if not, they’re only one configuration error (or intentional backdoor) away from talking to the outside. Better have something that isn’t physically able to talk to the internet no matter how badly I fuck up its configuration and my firewall.
Clearly I just trust my abilities to disable a devices internet access in my router more than you. I also know that my risk factor is really low, because I’m not a journalist or a politician.
As well, I only buy smart devices that I can lock down, brands like LIFX & Shelly that have cloud services, but don’t require you to connect to them for the device to function over LAN.
I run home automation with lights, switches, outlets, heaters and some more and not a single device has internet access. They all use Zigbee (a simple radio protocol) to talk to homeassistant which is open source and hosted on a machine that lives under my desk.
Separating tasks between the dehumidifier and outlet has the advantage that each individual device can be a lot simpler, leaving less attack surface. My power outlet can’t read the humidity sensor, it doesn’t need to talk to an external server, it doesn’t even need to know that the thing connected to it is a dehumidifier. It’s just a chip that receives a radio signal and toggles a relay on or off. That’s it.
Separating the two concerns also lets me replace the devices separately if one breaks or my requirements change. If I suddenly need wifi or bluetooth instead of Zigbee or if it’s for some reason no longer supported by homeassistant, I can just replace a 9€ outlet instead of the whole dehumidifier that could get bricked by the proprietary app losing support.
Home automation is still a dark art as far as the common person is concerned. Full of fear mongering from the media.
Much like 3D printing was very mystical and full of “oh no 3d printed guns!” We have gone full appliance with 3d printing and it’s no longer gatekeeped by geeks in their basements.
I’m glad I still have at least one hobby that hasn’t gone mainstream and I can still geek out on ESPHome.
You could do all that without internet connectivity, just sayin.
who said anything about internet connectivity? wifi != internet
🙄
Because times when electricity is cheap coincide with the need for lowering humidity?
Some places do electricity costs in 30 minute periods. If you know cost will spike when everyone gets home, and the sun sets, then running early makes sense. Other times, holding off for an hour might be more useful.
That’s the feature they sell. But, its real purpose is to monetize your data and/or lock you into some sort of ridiculous subscription service and/or run ads.
That’s pretty much ubiquitous for “smart” devices.
That’s right, this would mean that the device has an api to activate or deactivate it through WiFi by sending it commands and I can make it unable to connect to the outside internet right?
Or I can only activate it with the proprietary app that doesn’t even have a working schedule?
Connecting to WiFi is good when I have full control but not when the manufacturer does
Yeah, devices that can run fully local are the best. They can be integrated into Home Assistant (or similar), with full control over them. No reliance on a remote server or proprietary app.
Johnson. You’re hired!
Better solution: smart plug
There really is an xkcd for everything.
