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I fucking hate Internet of Things, I think that it's a ridiculous idea to connect things, that work perfectly fine, to the internet.
The 'convenience' you get is minimalistic and most of the time non existent.
It is also often insanely insecure and expensive. The burdans it brings with it most of the time just outweigh the positive sides of it.

Now today happened something that made me hate it even more. Today was the First Lego Lego (Lego competition with ev3 robots, etc.) and one part of the tournament is to find a solution for a given problem. This year the general topic was hydro-dynamics and so the problem was how you can reduce water usage and 'save' water.

Our idea was to make reusable coffee cups and give them to the local coffee shops. One time use paper cups use take around 400ml water when produced) Basically you buy a cup once for 5 bucks and you get your coffee served in it. After drinking the coffee you return the cup to a local cafe and get a chip as pawn. When you buy your next coffee, you give them your chip and get it served in another reusable cup. The are at the moment already around 1000 cups going around the city.

Now this was our idea and we got ranked third. I am not too mad about our rank but what really drives me fucking mad is the team who ranked first.

Their idea was to make a pump (using an arduino) and a humidity sensor which you stick into a plant and the pump pumps water when the plant is too dry.
However (you probably guessed it already) they went a step further and connected it to the internet. They also made a web 'interface' for it so you can control the pump with your smartphone / computer / smartwatch / tv / whatever the fuck is connected to the internet nowadays 'thanks' to the iot 'revolution'.

So it is a pump that waters your plant when it is too dry BUT it is also connected to the internet.

WHY THE FUCK DOES THIS HAVE TO BE CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET.

"Oh look it is connected to the internet, wow awesome, oh it is also 'smart'. oh cooool. Nice I don't have to water my plants anymore"

A funny thing is that one of my friends built basically the same thing without connecting it to the internet. He built a small box with a pump and a humidity sensor that measures if the dirt is too dry and then waters the plant. It checks every few hours and the also is a small 16x2 LCD and a knob that you can turn to control how much water it should give the plant each time it waters it. He built it and I programmed it for him. Works perfectly fine and I don't see any reason why there should be any need to connect something like this to the internet.

Anyway we got ranked third, they first. I guess we should connect our coffee cups to the internet in some way ...

Comments
  • 13
    Make a "Locate my cup" option, 1st place right away ;)
  • 4
    fucking buzzwords…

    plus, i think you meant "first lego league," not "first lego lego"
  • 15
    Is the agile iot deep learning blockchain application ready?
  • 3
    @hube splendid. Lets make sure that the quantum cluster waffles are set correctly and deploy it to the cloud using intelligent containers. Everything should be rfp.
  • 4
    Iot exists for data accumulation only , efficient or not this idea is being forced into us by corps . Potentially what this pump could do with iot is have a remote server analyze the water requirements of the plant and determine how much water other plants need in the long run hence getting rid of the sensor and an Arduino and replacing them with a data powered pump. Well, this doesn't make too much sense as the pump is a stupid idea nevertheless . Water given to plants is not wasted for fucks sake . Seriously ??? How about save the water that's used to clean your ass . Why not put a pump there . This is what should be conveyed to those first rank holes.
  • 2
    Internet of Shits
  • 2
    There are actually some good applications of using IoT by using stuff like node-red (i.e a sensor reads a number, something turns on or off etc.) and using the proper protocols that are made secure. There are of course things you wouldn't want to add to the list of IoT.

    I can think of one application to the thing they made, plants often need sunlight or a strong grow lamp and how fast the humidity changes or how much water it requires actually changes by the day, a plant might actually also get too much light and get sunburned. If you connected up blinds and a local weather station, you can actually control the humidity, sun exposure and with the pump add additional humidity as it's needed (tons of sun one day or clouded another day) rather than just controlling the watering. A good system often consists of things that actually seem redundant to add IoT to.
  • 0
    Also I bet the concept were based upon the types of sensors that measure the resistance in earth. Those cheap humidity sensors often corrode fairly quickly (due to electrolysis) unless you mean the ones that are expensive as hell which I doubt most people would buy for their plants (and you need several). So the project would never actually help reduce waste as you'd need to buy a new sensor every week or so.
  • 4
    @gnuuu I thought IoT stands dor Internet of Trash...
  • 2
    Or, like one of my friends, just cut the bottom of a bottle and push its thin side into the dirt. Physics will manage the rest for you.

    #lifeHack
  • 1
    How the hell did they win with just that? IoT greenhouses and gardening are already so overdone.
  • 0
    Yeah and is it pure renewable energy?
  • 0
    @MrJimmy thank you 😊
  • 0
    @insanealec it would use quite some electricity because of the motors but mostly because of the fact that it has to be connected to the Internet at all times
  • 0
    @insanealec they showed how to remove the salt from salt water using sunlight. I am pretty sure that this way has been the standard thing to do this for quite some time already
  • 1
    Honestly agreed. I understand sending a pic of the things in your refregerator to your phone but why do you need to play music from ur fridge when you also have a voice assistant? My problem is this was in one of Samsung's ads and I'm like???????
  • 0
    OK... To make it clear.. Iot is not for connecting the coffe machine and the flower pot. In my company we have around 10000 devices, rfid readers, sensors connected to communicate with plc and each other. Now think...
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