> Imagine a bottle of laundry detergent that can sense when you’re running low on soap — and automatically connect to the internet to place an order for more.
Why. Why why why do all IoT-related articles always use awful consumer goods examples like this. Nobody, or next-to-nobody, would want to have that. There are so many good ideas and existing uses of IoT tech outside of the consumer goods sector, and pretty much every application in the consumer goods sector is hot garbage, and consumers know it.
I cringed at that too, but to be honest, this is the least ridiculous implementation of the "automatically order consumables from Amazon" idea - because all the prior versions required you to buy an expensive piece of electronics to mount on something that itself is ~100x cheaper. Here we have a disposable dumb device with no electronics, that could be 3D-printed or mass-produced via the usual techniques.
That said, the usual caveats to this idea apply: it's too easy to have the device order stuff when you don't need it or don't order stuff when you need it, and I definitely don't want to tie myself to a particular retailer.
> Nobody, or next-to-nobody, would want to have that.
I wouldn't say that. I think that everyone would want it if it didn't add more work, cost or mental overhead than it would remove. And to do that it would have to be ridiculously reliable and simple and be integrated into the products rather than work as an add-on. That won't happen for many years for many of those products.
> Nobody, or next-to-nobody, would want to have that.
Hi, I'm your nobody. I'm constantly running out of soap and shampoo and other trivial home goods because I always forget that I need them until the moment I get back home. Why wouldn't I want a feature like that?
The consumer sector is a great way to make money. People love buying stupid gadgets. And people already schedule purchases on Amazon every month - the sensor method is just an extension of this to save money/prevent waste. Eventually, if any company actually tries to do it right, sensor-driven consumer goods will become the norm. There's too many actually productive uses for sensors in the home for it not to be pursued.
The other reason you only see this stuff in the consumer sector is that non-consumer use of IoT is a hot garbage fire. Mesh networks used for industrial sensor tracking at scale are shit, no matter what high or low level protocols you use, and nobody has developed standards ubiquitous and unencumbered enough for everyone to adopt. And everyone already has connectivity for the devices and sensors that need them.
It's not about whether or not you want to have it. It's about monetizing you. These features could be included in products without your knowledge and could communicate with other surveillance devices (Echo, Smart TV, Google Home, etc.) to relay to advertisers and product vendors information about your use of the product. This in turn could be used to sell hyper-targeted ads such as ads for detergent that are timed precisely for when you are low on detergent.
Your attention is one of the most valuable products in the world. Sub-dividing and parceling off that attention in as fine-grained a manner possible is extremely profitable.
I'm really concerned about this. It's not ads I'm worried about but the long term potential for truly unethical misuse of this technology. Combined with AI this stuff could be used to build psychological models on every human. The potential for misuse by everyone from governments to criminals is just insane.
We are building the infrastructure for a hellish dystopia just to get people to click ads.
I cringed at that as well! This is absolutely amazing tech why use it for such mundane and lame things? Especially, like you said, to order things for me automatically. I absolutely would never want something ordering more of itself on its own. I'd guess maybe they did it for funding? "See? Our product can make you money!"
Amazon already offers such buttons but I haven't used them. I can certainly imagine that being convenient, although I'd want them to be a) unbranded/programmable; b) optionally adding to a shared shopping list rather than directly ordering c) possibly a bit more subtle and/or smaller in size.
I also don't fully understand the attention given to home consumables in these kinds of IoT applications- for me devices like Amazon's one press ordering button thing are better for this type of problem as it keeps you in the loop while still saving you the time. It's actually the automated purchasing that saves me time - not the automated sensing that something is running out. I already see that incidentally (often as part of my day) and in a second.
Edit: the physical re-ordering button I referenced is called the Amazon Dash; it's not exactly what I thought it was but it's pretty close.
- Recurring revenue
- Frictionless transactions
- Vendor lock in
To a business, this stuff is irresistible. Of course consumers would hate this. But consumers also hated DRM, and they managed to shove that down our throats.
"connect to WiFi" is not remotely accurate. It should be: "Reflect wifi signals in a predictable pattern." This technique, while impressive, requires custom hardware/software to detect and interpret (presumably via filtering and a fourier transform) the back-scatter signal.
Exactly. And when they say "Wi-Fi", they mean "2.4GHz signals". Wi-Fi is a protocol, and "connection" means bidirectional communication, which is not happening here.
I try to not nitpick too often, but things like this really irk me. And before someone says that it's a simplification for non-specialists - this is exactly the problem. Such stupid "simplifications" only serve to confuse people, instead of educating them. They promote fairy tales (easy to exploit later) instead of building an accurate model of reality.
Writing things like that is wrong, and hurtful to the readers. Writing things like that intentionally is simply malicious.
Yup, only plastic is also misleading since they need some conductive antenna. It's still very interesting and impressive, but somebody please fix the title.
The article is incredibly light on detail. Making 3D printed items with switches in them is really easy. It's the receiver that's the hard part.
It would be great if they actually gave details. I want to know:
1. What device is receiving the signals. Is it commodity hardware (like a phone or laptop) or do they have to build a custom RF receive chain?
2. What software is used? What signal processing do they have to do? How does the software differentiate between one device and another one?
The interesting, ground breaking stuff is all in the electronics and software. The 3D printing stuff is fluff - it's just taking 100 year old technology and adding "3D printed" to it to make it seem modern.
- uses MAX2829 802.11a/b/g transceiver
- if WiFi preamble is detected, pass it further up the stack
- otherwise normalise the signal and apply apply a 10th order 100 Hz low pass filter.
- bitrate is 45bps :)
OK, we've updated the headline by omitting words from this phrase from the article, “...3-D printing plastic objects and sensors that can collect useful data and communicate with other WiFi-connected devices...”.
This is a truly awesome technology. But ITT an abundance of nit-pickiness on how this isn't exactly what the title says it is or how it could be presented better.
Yes, the nitpicks are correct. But wouldn't it be more inspiring to talk about how it could be used?
"Without electronics" except for the computer devices that have to be dedicated to monitoring for the back-scatter created by the 3-D printed objects and translate it into something meaningful.
This is a surprisingly simple solution to the problem: Make the working "device" (3D printed object) do as little work as possible - just enough to be detectable by the surrounding devices that are "real" computers anyway.
Actually, I wonder how much those devices would interfere with the normal wifi, like "when the wind starts to move at higher speeds, my movie stops playing" ;-)
It's a clever idea, but without a 1:1 connection between an object and a network, it seems too dumb to be useful.
How is my WiFi network supposed to know that the interference in the signal came from my detergent bottle - not my neighbor's, and not from some other random object passing by? Do I have to do some sort of pairing every time I buy a new detergent brand to teach my network about it?
If pairing became an issue, amazon could associate a new bottle with your account before they ship it to you, and automagically register the device with your router. As an added bonus you could get a real confirmation that the box arrived when it is delivered.
This is a really interesting idea for IOT. I'm really excited by the possibilities it could open up.
Curious to see the impact this would have on wifi performance. Wouldn't this cause all of the really fun stuff making WiFi fast (beamforming, channel hopping, etc.) a lot less effective? Would be curious to see more information.
I imagine this would be really good for things like weather sensors or even security systems... but I have serious doubts of the efficacy of what they are doing.
So my WiFi should easily be able to detect if my (all metal) garage door is open or closed? I would like this. I run dd-wrt. Is there an all-software solution to this? Or does this research rely on fairly specialized hardware? (sorry, didn't have time to read the whole article)
Probably, the first thing I thought about when I saw this was WiSee ("Whole-home gesture recognition using wireless signals"), which is also from UW: http://wisee.cs.washington.edu/
The research relies on special hardware, but you don't. I wouldn't be surprised if you could tell whether your door was open or not just from signal strengths of external wifi signals.
On reading the paper rather than the article: it's even simpler than I thought. No custom hardware necessary.
It requires a custom 3D-printed "device" on the door, which would modulate the Wi-Fi waves being scattered around (by your router, laptop, etc) into a signal that would indicate "open" or "closed".
Look at the other 3d sensing systems using Wifi by the University of Washington. It already is possible to form 3d pictures using microwave backscatter from ambient emissions.
Ignore the soap example and just focus on the underlying Wi-Fi backscatter technology. There are many applications in extreme low power or no power devices. Most are missing the point.
How can this _possibly_ work? You can't make a connection to Wifi or implement any of the protocols that run over by passively reflecting some signals. All of them require some processing and two way communication. The article just makes no sense at all. It is 1st April?
It's explained in the article, although the title is inaccurate. The 3D printed devices do not, themselves, connect to WiFi. The backscatter is picked up by a WiFi receiver which is connected to the WiFi. But if you're going to comment, why not take the time to understand the article instead?
[+] [-] gipp|8 years ago|reply
Why. Why why why do all IoT-related articles always use awful consumer goods examples like this. Nobody, or next-to-nobody, would want to have that. There are so many good ideas and existing uses of IoT tech outside of the consumer goods sector, and pretty much every application in the consumer goods sector is hot garbage, and consumers know it.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|8 years ago|reply
That said, the usual caveats to this idea apply: it's too easy to have the device order stuff when you don't need it or don't order stuff when you need it, and I definitely don't want to tie myself to a particular retailer.
[+] [-] sweezyjeezy|8 years ago|reply
Could you give some examples? I've yet to hear a single IoT thing I'd be willing to pay money for.
[+] [-] worldsayshi|8 years ago|reply
I wouldn't say that. I think that everyone would want it if it didn't add more work, cost or mental overhead than it would remove. And to do that it would have to be ridiculously reliable and simple and be integrated into the products rather than work as an add-on. That won't happen for many years for many of those products.
[+] [-] golergka|8 years ago|reply
Hi, I'm your nobody. I'm constantly running out of soap and shampoo and other trivial home goods because I always forget that I need them until the moment I get back home. Why wouldn't I want a feature like that?
[+] [-] peterwwillis|8 years ago|reply
"Convince Me Why Washer Must Talk to Grill" https://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1323...
The other reason you only see this stuff in the consumer sector is that non-consumer use of IoT is a hot garbage fire. Mesh networks used for industrial sensor tracking at scale are shit, no matter what high or low level protocols you use, and nobody has developed standards ubiquitous and unencumbered enough for everyone to adopt. And everyone already has connectivity for the devices and sensors that need them.
[+] [-] api|8 years ago|reply
Your attention is one of the most valuable products in the world. Sub-dividing and parceling off that attention in as fine-grained a manner possible is extremely profitable.
I'm really concerned about this. It's not ads I'm worried about but the long term potential for truly unethical misuse of this technology. Combined with AI this stuff could be used to build psychological models on every human. The potential for misuse by everyone from governments to criminals is just insane.
We are building the infrastructure for a hellish dystopia just to get people to click ads.
[+] [-] zodPod|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sambe|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chesimov|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zzzeek|8 years ago|reply
because consumer goods manufacturers have the big bucks to throw at research like this
[+] [-] cwei932|8 years ago|reply
- Recurring revenue - Frictionless transactions - Vendor lock in
To a business, this stuff is irresistible. Of course consumers would hate this. But consumers also hated DRM, and they managed to shove that down our throats.
[+] [-] slantaclaus|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teilo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|8 years ago|reply
I try to not nitpick too often, but things like this really irk me. And before someone says that it's a simplification for non-specialists - this is exactly the problem. Such stupid "simplifications" only serve to confuse people, instead of educating them. They promote fairy tales (easy to exploit later) instead of building an accurate model of reality.
Writing things like that is wrong, and hurtful to the readers. Writing things like that intentionally is simply malicious.
[+] [-] comboy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leoedin|8 years ago|reply
It would be great if they actually gave details. I want to know:
1. What device is receiving the signals. Is it commodity hardware (like a phone or laptop) or do they have to build a custom RF receive chain?
2. What software is used? What signal processing do they have to do? How does the software differentiate between one device and another one?
The interesting, ground breaking stuff is all in the electronics and software. The 3D printing stuff is fluff - it's just taking 100 year old technology and adding "3D printed" to it to make it seem modern.
[+] [-] smarx007|8 years ago|reply
- uses MAX2829 802.11a/b/g transceiver - if WiFi preamble is detected, pass it further up the stack - otherwise normalise the signal and apply apply a 10th order 100 Hz low pass filter. - bitrate is 45bps :)
[1]: http://printedwifi.cs.washington.edu/printedwifi.pdf
[+] [-] sctb|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stephengillie|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wonderous|8 years ago|reply
EDIT: Here are some diagrams of how it works:
https://hackaday.com/2015/12/08/theremins-bug/
[+] [-] malikNF|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mxuribe|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] worldsayshi|8 years ago|reply
Yes, the nitpicks are correct. But wouldn't it be more inspiring to talk about how it could be used?
[+] [-] iamnotlarry|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] worldsayshi|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vog|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JepZ|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsimpson|8 years ago|reply
How is my WiFi network supposed to know that the interference in the signal came from my detergent bottle - not my neighbor's, and not from some other random object passing by? Do I have to do some sort of pairing every time I buy a new detergent brand to teach my network about it?
[+] [-] jrowley|8 years ago|reply
This is a really interesting idea for IOT. I'm really excited by the possibilities it could open up.
[+] [-] nvahalik|8 years ago|reply
I imagine this would be really good for things like weather sensors or even security systems... but I have serious doubts of the efficacy of what they are doing.
[+] [-] lakechfoma|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bpowah|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] siegecraft|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] regularfry|8 years ago|reply
On reading the paper rather than the article: it's even simpler than I thought. No custom hardware necessary.
[+] [-] icebraining|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adrianN|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k__|8 years ago|reply
With machine learning someone could probably train models that know what you are doing in your home.
[+] [-] sitkack|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|8 years ago|reply
The level of security you seek is unattainable in practice.
[+] [-] quirkot|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sitkack|8 years ago|reply
This development will probably lead to a new combination of something like RFID, WiFi and electromagnetic power delivery (AM radio).
[+] [-] XnoiVeX|8 years ago|reply
More details here. http://iotwifi.cs.washington.edu/
[+] [-] baybal2|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jbb67|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justusthane|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tinus_hn|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ogre_magi|8 years ago|reply