jtoberon
Joined 13 years ago
Joined 13 years ago
Here are some examples from my team’s 2019 work: We contributed numerous changes to containerd. We open sourced firecracker-containerd, and we also created a Go SDK that others are using to work with Firecracker. We contributed to Debian and the Debian kernel team. We contributed to Envoy. We collaborated with a number of communities, including Kata Containers, Red Hat’s Clair, and the Open Container Initiative. All of these examples are sustained investments, not one offs.
Many of these utility programs actively recruit customers, so chances are (a) you'll get a chance to sign up even if you own a different type of connected (e.g. WiFi) thermostat, and (b) the sign up process won't be hard.
There are lots of reasons why most fancy thermostats need a lot of power. For example, a fancy screen is hungry, WiFi is an expensive protocol (e.g. as compared to ZWave), etc.. Compare the Lux screen to the Nest, and you'll see at least one reason why they think they can get away with batteries.
Another option, patented by Honeywell I think, is called "power stealing." Here's an interesting article on the subject: https://www.ecobee.com/2014/01/the-problem-with-power-steali....
They argue in favor of both designing and manufacturing locally. A quote from their blog: "If you kind of just prototype something and bring it to China expecting that then thousands of these things can be made easily without understanding the processes and materiality of manufacturing, that is gonna be a big problem for you. What works is when the design process is iterated alongside the manufacturing process."