This is pretty funny. I doubt its authenticity but confess that when I worked at Intel (a looooooooooong time ago) and Andy Grove suggested there would be an 8086 in every Toaster I thought he was nuts, because the minimum system was about 4 sq inches (I had one as a demo board Intel sold) and who would want a CPU in a toaster anyway? A timer and a heating element, how hard is that?
Flash forward to today when playing with an Electric Imp[1] and noting that you don't need 4 sq inches, you don't even need 1 sq inch and you can network the damn thing.
So it certainly becomes feasible to do this sort of thing but I'm unable to construct a non-targeted reason why it would be worthwhile to do it. Now if you said, "A shipment of toasters headed for the US Embassy" or something where there was some actionable intelligence to be gained by snooping the network, perhaps. but randomly? Not so much.
I know the net enabled toaster is a running joke, but I would kill for one. Typically toasters are cheaply made and give varying results.
I'd love to see a Nest-like toaster. I'd buy it in a second. Not sure if it needs net access, but it can certainly use intelligence. Might be nice for it to email me when its crumb tray gets full or download updates (toasting times for new items like gluten free bagels, etc).
Dear god no. I have a Nest thermostat and it drives me nuts with its inappropriate learning behaviour. I can just imagine the toaster learning, incorrectly, to what degree I wish my bread to be toasted and thus giving me levels of crispiness that I did not expect or want.
I really think there's a problem with over-engineered products these days. Not every appliance needs a motor or batteries, let alone a computer. I'm still very happy with my manual can-opener (the most reliable ones are the most basic, in my experience, like this one: http://meridianvale.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/can_opener.j...) and my analog meat thermometer.
Things aren't over-engineered, they're poorly engineered. It's supposed to be the art of taking away until nothing unnecessary left. The common practice is to replace things which are difficult to engineer or expensive to manufacture with electronics and _that_ is the failure.
The Nest isn't that kind of engineering. It took a programmable thermostat (already overkill for most people's use cases) and added even more automation on top.
His point isn't that a programmable thermostat isn't worthwhile, but that most people don't want it even if they should. Moreover, the OP notes that the Nest is overkill as far as programmable thermostats go.
> It's supposed to be the art of taking away until nothing unnecessary left.
Except if I can't understand your use case, none of the complexity related to it is needed, so it's all excess and must be removed. After all, we have a Model T, so why do we need a Ford Focus? They both move you along under engine power.
In other words, a lot of engineers seem to have a Procrustean Bed and a deep need to cut problems down to size in the name of cutting solutions down to size.
You're taking it too literally. Since Model T, cars have improved tremendously. Efficiency, comfort, and safety are still getting better year after year. That is engineering with a goal, to make a better vehicle.
Things like hydraulic power steering is a good thing. It is there for a reason, and taking it away does not make better engineering. It is however being replaced with electronic power steering, for the exact engineering reasons. Before we could make reasonable good electronic power steering, there was nothing to take away from the hydraulic steering, but taking away the power steering itself, would be a step back.
> Not every appliance needs a motor or batteries, let alone a computer.
So true.
What's even worse is the half-baked stuff. There are, like, a dozen clocks embedded in various objects in my house. I've learned the whole list. How, you ask? I need to change them back or forward 1 hour twice a year.
The darned things are not DST-aware, to say nothing about the absence of any capability of syncing to NTP or GSM or GPS.
Incidentally, those aren't the most basic can openers; it's possible to make a can opener with no moving parts. Search for "swiss army knife can opener" to see some pictures.
Personally, I first learned to use the simpler design; when I saw the kind with the gears and handle, it seemed over-engineered to me. I find them equally easy to use, but I've seen the handles break on the more complicated kind (they were plastic, not metal) and I've also seen the gears go out of alignment. Yet the simpler design is rarely seen except in swiss army knives and military rations. This seems to support the idea that some added complexity can be worthwhile for most users as long as the product is otherwise well-designed and well-built.
Wow, those american-style can openers are the worst piece of engineering I have ever seen. The first time I saw one of those, it took me 15 minutes to figure out how it's operated, and I was baffled why there was a need to invent such a thing. Exemplary over-engineering.
Amen. In the market for a new garbage disposal recently, I was looking at the top-of-the-line Insinkerator Evolution Excel model until I saw a note about the delay in power-up being due to "microprocessor initialization". Microprocessor in a garbage disposal?!?
Let me start with the positive: the Nest is beautifully designed and easy to install and in every respect appears to be a high quality product.
The negative, for me and my coworkers (the Nest is at my office - it was a gift from a client), is very simple: there are times when you find yourself asking the question, "Why the hell is the heat / air conditioning on right now?"
This never happens with a normal thermostat.
The basic issue, as far as I can tell, is that the Nest learns from people. This seems like a benefit but when you consider the way people behave doesn't work out that way in practice. People get hot because they just exercised; or they get cold because they got a chill waiting for the bus; or they are naturally warmer or colder than someone else; or they're coming down with something, etc.
They change the temperature of the office as a result. And maybe a bit later someone else changes it back, or changes it more, or whatever. So you end up with these weird patterns where the heat is at 19C usually, but for a two hour period in the morning it jumps to 22C, then goes back to 19C, then back to 20C for an hour in the afternoon, etc.
Our previous office thermostat, where you programmed a weekly schedule but could set it to a new temperature for three hours before it went back to its schedule, worked much better in practice.
These days I believe we have the Nest just set to keep things at a constant temperature all the time, which really defeats the purpose and is worse for resource usage than our old thermostat.
All of Nest's learning features can be individually enabled/disabled, at least. If you don't want the automatic scheduling, you can turn it off and set the schedule yourself.
You'll still benefit from the other things it does that other thermostats don't (learn when it's in direct sunlight to compensate, manage your humidity, learn how efficient your heat/air is so that it can reach scheduled temperatures at the scheduled time by turning on early, keep your office cooler with less a/c usage by running the fan a while even after the condenser shuts off).
In a home, being able to turn the temperature up or down a degree with your phone when you're on a different floor than the thermostat is nice.
* it will wait for you to insert two slices, then gently lower the toast on its own (or you can press the toast button)
* when the toast is done, it will gently be lifted (instead of popping up, which is a little more violent and probably wears out the toaster a bit if you think about it)
* If you leave the popped-up toast alone for half a minute, the toaster will lower it down again to do a 'keep warm' function
* it's got the "a little longer" button that actually works, instead of just a thermostat which you need to guesstimate turning up
so now I just wish I had an amazon referral account to make a quick buck here :P
You might like this video [1]. I used to scoff at the idea of 'tweeting toasters' etc but watching this gave me a different perspective on why things like this are going to be big.
I will keep my old Toastmaster 1B14. Fully automatic, drop toast in, it goes down, toast is done it comes up automatically. Haven't changed the setting in years.
A Nest Toaster? So three hundred dollars to make toast, I wonder if it would chat with you like the one from Red Dwarf?
Some items don't need new incarnations, there are many old appliances you can buy on auction sites that will cost you about the same as new ones and provide you years and years of great use. Best yet, most are super easy to fix, if they do break.
Not for me, thanks... The appeal of having a classic Dualit is that I can replace any of the three parts that might fail (elements, on/off switch, clockwork timer) in a couple of minutes with a screwdriver. Everything is serviceable and fixable, and it isn't really that hard to learn how to make toast manually...
His usage of "powered" is a very common english colloquialism. For example the phrase “powered by wordpress” doesn’t indicate that someone is obtaining energy from the wordpress software product.
Somewhere along the way, a cpu became the cheapest way to build the timer.
If I had to build a reliable variable timer these days, I'd choose a PIC and a few lines of code instead of a 555 and fiddling with resistor and capacitor values.
Flash forward to today when playing with an Electric Imp[1] and noting that you don't need 4 sq inches, you don't even need 1 sq inch and you can network the damn thing.
So it certainly becomes feasible to do this sort of thing but I'm unable to construct a non-targeted reason why it would be worthwhile to do it. Now if you said, "A shipment of toasters headed for the US Embassy" or something where there was some actionable intelligence to be gained by snooping the network, perhaps. but randomly? Not so much.
[1] http://electricimp.com