Yesterday, one of the younger electricians was telling me about the beauty of the new alarm systems he installs.
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Yesterday, one of the younger electricians was telling me about the beauty of the new alarm systems he installs. While acknowledging the quality of my current one, he said, "It uses a SIM card and calls you. The new ones are 4G or Wi-Fi and use the cloud, so notifications go straight to your smartphone, it's not calling anymore."
I asked him, "And what if the cloud stops working? Why should I have to depend on the company’s cloud to receive alerts from my alarm? My alarm is 10 years old and works perfectly. Can you say with certainty that the company’s cloud will still be effective 10 years from now?"
He looked puzzled for a moment, then admitted he had never thought about it.
The real problem is that people do not realize what this means until things actually happen.
@stefano The vulnerability tech giants have thoughtlessly placed the world in terrifies me.
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Yesterday, one of the younger electricians was telling me about the beauty of the new alarm systems he installs. While acknowledging the quality of my current one, he said, "It uses a SIM card and calls you. The new ones are 4G or Wi-Fi and use the cloud, so notifications go straight to your smartphone, it's not calling anymore."
I asked him, "And what if the cloud stops working? Why should I have to depend on the company’s cloud to receive alerts from my alarm? My alarm is 10 years old and works perfectly. Can you say with certainty that the company’s cloud will still be effective 10 years from now?"
He looked puzzled for a moment, then admitted he had never thought about it.
The real problem is that people do not realize what this means until things actually happen.
Yes. Like here,last week. A widespread power outage. So the mobile phone masts and repeaters were out as well, everyone's on fibre, so no Internet, no mobile phone, no landline.
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Yesterday, one of the younger electricians was telling me about the beauty of the new alarm systems he installs. While acknowledging the quality of my current one, he said, "It uses a SIM card and calls you. The new ones are 4G or Wi-Fi and use the cloud, so notifications go straight to your smartphone, it's not calling anymore."
I asked him, "And what if the cloud stops working? Why should I have to depend on the company’s cloud to receive alerts from my alarm? My alarm is 10 years old and works perfectly. Can you say with certainty that the company’s cloud will still be effective 10 years from now?"
He looked puzzled for a moment, then admitted he had never thought about it.
The real problem is that people do not realize what this means until things actually happen.
Same issue I had when they started replacing phone lines with VOIP.
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R relay@relay.mycrowd.ca shared this topic
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@theolodian @s1m0n4 @raymaccarthy @stefano Afaik there are 2g, 3g and 4g modem-modules out there which can be controlled by a arduino/ESP level device to send out SMS alerts.
Still has it's own complexity but should be accessible without going too deep into microcontroller programming.
[...]
Heh, a simple search brought up this:
esphome.io/components/sim800l/
"The SIM800L Component provides the ability to dial, answer calls, send/receive SMS text messages and send/receive USSD codes. The device must be connected via a UART bus supporting both receiving and transmitting line."
So .. doing that within home-assistant and the esphome addon should be possible..
@hackbyte @stefano @s1m0n4 @theolodian
Done it with an RS232 cable, an old Nokia and VB6 decades ago.I think some modules use like old modem AT commands.
EDIT
Modules have TTL Serial I/O & 5V on on DIL SOM socket and aerial connector. A small scrap of stripboard and cheap PIC running a simple C, JAL or Basic program can be done in a day or two. Arduino / ESP and Home Assistant is more complication than needed unless you want more than entry switches & movement sensors. WiFi is vulnerable. -
Yesterday, one of the younger electricians was telling me about the beauty of the new alarm systems he installs. While acknowledging the quality of my current one, he said, "It uses a SIM card and calls you. The new ones are 4G or Wi-Fi and use the cloud, so notifications go straight to your smartphone, it's not calling anymore."
I asked him, "And what if the cloud stops working? Why should I have to depend on the company’s cloud to receive alerts from my alarm? My alarm is 10 years old and works perfectly. Can you say with certainty that the company’s cloud will still be effective 10 years from now?"
He looked puzzled for a moment, then admitted he had never thought about it.
The real problem is that people do not realize what this means until things actually happen.
@stefano The most recent alarm and camera system I dealt with required a static IP for the client system to authenticate to their cloud. They owned the hardware on both sides of the connection but still needed a static IP. ;<(
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Yesterday, one of the younger electricians was telling me about the beauty of the new alarm systems he installs. While acknowledging the quality of my current one, he said, "It uses a SIM card and calls you. The new ones are 4G or Wi-Fi and use the cloud, so notifications go straight to your smartphone, it's not calling anymore."
I asked him, "And what if the cloud stops working? Why should I have to depend on the company’s cloud to receive alerts from my alarm? My alarm is 10 years old and works perfectly. Can you say with certainty that the company’s cloud will still be effective 10 years from now?"
He looked puzzled for a moment, then admitted he had never thought about it.
The real problem is that people do not realize what this means until things actually happen.
@stefano Sure does seem like all this technology going wrong in unprecedented ways is because this seems to be the first time where we expanded technology this aggressively and just chucked the old system that could easily have been an emergency backup into a landfill.
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@stefano and he didnt say to buy a new one?
@antdude no, he suggested to keep this one. Honest guy.
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@stefano Isn’t it a matter of network infrastructure reliability and ubiquitousness more than the tech itself?
One could have said the same about cell phone networks when they first appeared.
Your data transits regardless via a network service provider…?
@tmstamp it's ok if it's using 4g instead of calling.
It's not ok if it needs to pass through the producer's cloud server to send me a notification. -
@elston_ if the cell towers go down, there's the ethernet module that will still send me an email and notifications using ntfy, thanks to a custom python script I've created years ago
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Yesterday, one of the younger electricians was telling me about the beauty of the new alarm systems he installs. While acknowledging the quality of my current one, he said, "It uses a SIM card and calls you. The new ones are 4G or Wi-Fi and use the cloud, so notifications go straight to your smartphone, it's not calling anymore."
I asked him, "And what if the cloud stops working? Why should I have to depend on the company’s cloud to receive alerts from my alarm? My alarm is 10 years old and works perfectly. Can you say with certainty that the company’s cloud will still be effective 10 years from now?"
He looked puzzled for a moment, then admitted he had never thought about it.
The real problem is that people do not realize what this means until things actually happen.
@stefano We're having a new kitchen, to replace one that's around 40 years old. The salesman was trying to sell us all sorts of gizmos. Our response to most was:
* Will the server still be working in 40 years time when this new kitchen wears out?
And even for things that didn't need servers
* Isn't that just another complicated gadget to break down? - will the spare parts still be available in 40 years time?
