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I'm not so sure, I think it would go the way of smart speakers - a solution without much of a problem to solve
You say that as though people aren't buying the shit out of them
I agree it's kind of a dumb product, but people buy the shit out of smart speakers. Their market size in 2022 was 10.8 billion USD and rising every year.
I could absolutely see a consumer driven home wall panel selling like crazy - I have a HA driven wall panel at my house and every guest thinks it's the coolest thing and asks where they can get one
What's an ha driven panel?
Sorry, Home Assistant - it's a self hosted home automation platform.
Supports practically every smart device out there, can be totally self hosted, and has a great framework for building home automation dashboards for phones and tablets
I've got an instance running on my network and a few cheap Fire tablets running the HA app as wall panels mounted around my house, they display the weather and family photos by default, but when you touch them they have controls for all our smart lights, thermostat, etc
My house came with air-conditioning controlled by an absolute piece of shit android tablet connected to the air con unit by an ethernet cable running through a hole in the wall which also powers the tablet. It runs as the server for a proprietary app called ezone that you can connect clients to by downloading the ezone app from the play store on other devices. It frequently decides it can't use the wifi (despite being connected to it) and therefore can't communicate with the clients for about 3-6 months at a time before it randomly works again, it also changes the temperature from whatever you asked for, to 18C about 20 seconds after you turn it on so you have to stand there for 20 seconds ready to catch it and change the temperature back. I hate it!
The reason I mention this is, is there any way I could somehow rig up this Home Assistant software to work with the aircon via this ethernet cable? I called the company that installed the crap I got stuck with and they don't exist anymore but someone else took them over and to get a replacement tablet costs something in the order of $600 AUD. I tried to investigate getting my own android tablet but I'd have to first find a way to get the server software off the old tablet (I wonder if I can just pull the APK off and transfer it to another device?) and still somehow have the whole endeavour cost less then just paying the bastards for a replacement piece of shit, which was surprisingly harder than I thought it'd be.
Transfering the APK should be easy if you can launch other apps. Installing it and authenticating may be proprietary...
Possibly, what's the brand of this crazy setup?
Well I think I should probably avoid saying the company name that sells the air-conditioning system with the bullshit app and tablet as a package only because it's fairly specific to where I live but the app is called ezone and when I called them about replacement and balked at the outrageous cost they said it's because they have the tablets put together for them so they're custom and not mass produced the same way as an off the shelf tablet. If you go in to the settings on android for it and the about section it says the model number is just ezone1.
They have it pretty well sewn up.i love controlling the aircon from any room easily but the bullshit with the broken connectivity and secretly changing my temperature to 18c all the time is enough that I'd rather have had a traditional IR remote with a digital clock style display. At least it works reliably.
You know what else sucks about this thing? Obviously it doesn't need to be fast or high performance, but they cheaped out so much that it barely manages to run the only app it's supposed to run. When we first got it, it was slow and unreliable and connected only intermittently (rather than solidly for months followed by not at all for months) so we updated the app, but now they've updated the app to have little animations and it's too much for the tablet to bear and it almost crashes trying to run a little spinning fan animation and takes forever to wake from the lock screen. So dumb, why make it do that when you know exactly what hardware a huge proportion of the user base will be stuck with? I'm sure if you bought it now the tablet might be slightly better but what am I supposed to do? I'm not paying a goddamn ransom to be able to operate my otherwise perfectly functional airconditioning. A machine that controls temperature is supposed to be the impressive hard to make part not the damned control surface.
This would be great for those of us with Home Assistant or other home automation setups. Still not a huge market, but a market none the less.
Phones kind of suck for the 'at a glance' function.
Smart home dashboards also seem like a perfect fit with this. A low power, regular refreshing, touch sensitive controlled? That could hang on a wall with a battery? Sounds great.