Title text:
It's important for devices to have internet connectivity so the manufacturer can patch remote exploits.
Transcript:
[A store salesman, Hairy, is showing Cueball a dehumidifier, with a "SALE" label on it. Several other unidentified devices, possibly other dehumidifier models, are shown in the store as well.]
Salesman: This dehumidifier model features built-in WiFi for remote updates.
Cueball: Great! That will be really useful if they discover a new kind of water.
Source: https://xkcd.com/3109/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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 could do all that without internet connectivity, just sayin.
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