Smart Homes and the Internet of Things
Just bought a Lidl smart power strip... quality is really good and is part of smart home devices. But...Here's my usual but, the usual product improvement request, I find to be missing ...
Just bought a Lidl smart power strip... quality is really good and is part of smart home devices...
Here's my usual but, the usual product improvement request, I find to be missing on this particular product
I just bought the power strip, however, it requires an additional device, the gateway. in total, the cost goes up into the vicinity of 50 euros. And I don"t want to spend all that money. A regular power strip costs me on eBay, delivered, less than a quarter of that amount. Plus the electronics on the gateway sold separately, can be so easily integrated into the power strip, at a really, really low cost (production-wise), to a point a power strip with an embedded gateway will cost only 1 additional euro when compared to the current sell price. Moreover, the gateway is a wired eth0 gateway that connects to yet another product, the traditional home WIFI router. Here's the thing, in 2021, I no longer use a traditional router, instead I use one of my smartphones to do that job! and I like it that way. Many, many advantages, for instance, connecting wirelessly via miracast to my home LCD TV for YouTubing and alike.
In conclusion,
the power strip is good. I recommended it, but not for that price.
The smartness of it is going to be dormant, unused simply because I don't like to have at my home that many electronics/devices lying around wherever I look.
In regards to the Lidl home app, I didn't like the fact I needed to register for an account to use it. Again, it's 2021, and registering an account to use an app is so 2010! Time to move the mindset to edge computing. Where the #fun is! nowadays.
Until next time, don’t forget to share, and if possible, subscribe for fairness of work1 and a fairer economy, or instead buy me a coffee and promote at the same time open source writing.
This article is looking for sponsors to grow. Consider giving a donation by Paypal to the author using the email mtpsilva@gmail.com or at least buy him a coffee by clicking on the above image link.
This is the very first draft version of a future document. As part of my research on online live writing, no proofreading was made to this text. Only Basic automated corrections. Over time the reader can expect additional changes to the text without prior notification: bugs, error correction, and also content adding. So make sure to check back later the article.
If the reader, instead, prefers reading well-formatted text paragraphs, error-free; perfect notations; high-resolution graphics, figures, photos, and videos, please consider subscribing on substack.com to a monthly or yearly plan. To do so, the reader can start by clicking on the “subscribe now” button above.