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If you find one that meets your requirements that is an option. Granted maybe your requirements are ridiculous. But I also had cases where I DIYed a solution b

by atoav 17d ago

If you find one that meets your requirements that is an option. Granted maybe your requirements are ridiculous. But I also had cases where I DIYed a solution because the commercially available solutions all either didn't fulfil the requirements and/or had anti-features that ruled out their use. I haven't had any regret so far with these solutions, with some of these being active for over a decade. There may be over engineering, but replacing a bought solution that needs to connect to the internet and someone else's computer to ring a bell with a simple 433MHz sender and a MP4-player module isn't that. Do you know what is required for a device to even connect to a WiFi? That alone is more complex than the whole system the user built here.

methyl 17d ago
> That alone is more complex than the whole system the user built here. so what?
- atoav 16d ago
  Your comment got downvoted, because on this site it is frowned upon to write lazy, confrontative and uninformative comments. If you don't have an argument that furthers the discussion consider not writing instead. Simple systems have the advantage that there are less moving parts. Less moving parts means less chance of failure. That is a trade-off an engineer will sometimes take even if it means building a new thing, sometimes something with more moving parts is needed and that is okay as well. Maybe your requirement is to have a doorbell that does work when the internet is out. Who knows? OP might live in a place where this happens more often. Or they might not and like the idea to never again have to think about their doorbell-manufacturers cloud and the latests exploits targeting that IoT product. There are many reasons why simple can be the right choice and any true engineer would say: "depends" instead of "so what".
  - selcuka 16d ago
    > If you don't have an argument that furthers the discussion consider not writing instead. You are correct in general, but I think "so what?" was an adequate response (even though I don't agree with it) in this case that actually furthered the discussion as can be seen from your long reply. We don't always need LLM-like, long comments. Sometimes "so what?" can be intriguing enough.

by atoav 17d ago

methyl 17d ago

> That alone is more complex than the whole system the user built here. so what?

atoav 16d ago
Your comment got downvoted, because on this site it is frowned upon to write lazy, confrontative and uninformative comments. If you don't have an argument that furthers the discussion consider not writing instead. Simple systems have the advantage that there are less moving parts. Less moving parts means less chance of failure. That is a trade-off an engineer will sometimes take even if it means building a new thing, sometimes something with more moving parts is needed and that is okay as well. Maybe your requirement is to have a doorbell that does work when the internet is out. Who knows? OP might live in a place where this happens more often. Or they might not and like the idea to never again have to think about their doorbell-manufacturers cloud and the latests exploits targeting that IoT product. There are many reasons why simple can be the right choice and any true engineer would say: "depends" instead of "so what".
- selcuka 16d ago
  > If you don't have an argument that furthers the discussion consider not writing instead. You are correct in general, but I think "so what?" was an adequate response (even though I don't agree with it) in this case that actually furthered the discussion as can be seen from your long reply. We don't always need LLM-like, long comments. Sometimes "so what?" can be intriguing enough.