Pretty relevant because I've never seen the reason for "smart" gadgets at all. Physical switches are simply better.
90% of smart devices are for novelty, or for you to spend more time setting up and maintaining their automations than they save you in being automated.<p>But that 10% is magic. A fan that switches on when air quality falls below a threshold? Not that useful in a living room, but in a workshop setting - especially a shared workshop setting? Awesome. Just awesome.<p>A well defined use case, in the right setting, and smart stuff can be genuinely very useful. Usually that’s not how they’re used - i know, because of the 15-20 smart things i have only one or two are genuinely useful.
> A fan that switches on when air quality falls below a threshold? Not that useful in a living room,<p>Why wouldn't that be useful? People be surprised how poor their air quality generally are inside, unless they already measure it, making it better sounds useful in oh so many ways.<p>> i know, because of the 15-20 smart things i have only one or two are genuinely useful.<p>What are those things? I have about 70-80 "smart things" by now, but every single one is genuinely useful, otherwise I wouldn't install them in the first place. Lots of open/closed sensors, soil moisture, temperature+pm2.5 sensors, water taps and so on.
You can have the best of both worlds with a hand-off-auto switch.
The reason is UI.<p>There's only a limited number of features that you can pack into a few buttons and a 7-segment display. If you want to sell outside the US and need to support the long-tail of non-English languages, preferably without per-country product variants, you can't even label the buttons any more, you have to rely on simple pictograms and icons.<p>If there's a $1 microcontroller in your device (and there often is), you're very tempted to implement lots of features which cost you almost nothing, but that kind of UI just doesn't really let you do so. Sure, you could add a proper touch screen with a localizable UI stack, with reflowable text and support for displaying Kanji and RTL languages, but that's often more expensive (and less practical) than slapping on a BLE or WiFi chip.
If your fan isn't Byzantine fault tolerant, you're irrelevant
The example in the OP doesn’t even appear to check to prove the fan is running so it’s not exactly fault tolerant, it doesn’t know if the enable/disable commands worked or not.<p>If you are turning a motor on and off you almost always want to know if it is actually on or off, the OP example appears to lack that but maybe they can grab the status from the relay.
I have lots of smart gadgets that also have physical switches. It's convenient to be able to control them in more than one way, from more than one location.<p>Anyway, why are you commenting here if you're not into this sort of thing? Feels like you're just trying to stir up an argument.
And some people don’t see any reason for the internet and just wanna use phones and physical mail. To each their own.
> Physical switches are simply better<p>Pff, assuming that everyone have arms and hands much?<p>Also I don't see the point of a fan, I live right next to the ocean, if you want moving air, why don't you just open a window?! Talk about useless invention