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The Internet of Things (IoT) may have a somewhat bad rap on SN, but big companies are forging alliances and appliance manufacturers are in the mix. From GE's May 11 press release:
Canonical is collaborating with some of the world's smartest technology brands, including GE's FirstBuild, Acer, Microsoft and DataArt, to reveal a slew of new and innovative IoT devices; all built on 'Snappy' Ubuntu Core and designed to delight developers and consumers alike.
ChillHub is a refrigerator with two USB ports, Wi-Fi and an open-source iOS-compatible app:
Developed by FirstBuild community members, ChillHub is not only a refrigerator, but an open development platform designed for makers, hackers, tinkerers and developers. FirstBuild community members continue to collaborate on products and features to customize and create new uses for their refrigerators. ChillHub, an 18-cubic-foot top-freezer refrigerator, will retail for $999 and can be ordered through FirstBuild.com. Limited pre-orders will also be available at an early-bird price of $799.
Hopefully no one will keep spam in their fridge. Spotted on ZDNet.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Wednesday May 13 2015, @04:30AM
If it could bar codes on the way in and out, you could date things and warn of expiration.
That would require you to scan the original package when you take things out and when you put them back in. Who has time for that, and for what purpose? This would also prevent altering the original package; for example, I put an opened bar of cheese into another plastic bag, so that it doesn't dry out. Bar codes do not contain expiration dates, by the way - these are printed in human-readable (barely!) form somewhere else on the package, and sometimes it takes an effort to find that text. To make things worse, expiration dates on many products have little to do with their real expiration, as that depends - for example - on when the package was opened.
Of course there is no bar code on that plate of left over pizza, but maybe they could just do it with images.
Yes. And then you end up with 100+ photos of your pizza. What do you do with them? It's even more work to sort it out - and you already know that you have eaten all your pizza, and none is left. What's the point of fiddling with images?
IMO, these smart appliances are useful only to people with weak memory. Maybe they are of use to very old people, those who do not remember what they have in the refrigerator and who don't want to walk all the way to it to check. Those are edge cases that relate to medical equipment. Perhaps cameras and scanners would be useful to those patients. But the vast majority of population does not need this technology. It's not too hard to remember what you have; and if it is too hard, download an application for your smartphone that either scans the item that you are about to run out of, or simply records your voice message: "Need more vinegar" - if, for some reason, it is too hard for you to type this word in.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by sudo rm -rf on Wednesday May 13 2015, @03:43PM
>Those are edge cases that relate to medical equipment.
I always struggled to find arguments for IoT, but this is the first time an argument really makes sense to me, albeit in a slightly different manner than you perhaps intended: smart fridges make sense in a hospital environment, where expired meds or blood bottles lead to more serious problems than let's say expired milk.