I am a simple man. When I see people buy devices with Zigbee, Z-Wave, or other fully local protocols, I nod. When I see people reward vendors that lock in with their money, I shake.

You love to see it!

I (with heavy LLM help) recently R.E. a golf cart motor controller which had a USB interface for programming, but only a crappy proprietary windows application, and it was super satisfying to see it hum attached to Linux.

What would be even more satisfying to see would be companies that were chill about this kind of work, instead of sending[1] legal threats[2] to people doing the work that they should be doing in the first place.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50443824

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50363968

Anyone want to help create a generic service to do this for any IOT device?

Basically a git repo with instructions that would maybe pull in rea and set all this up.

I'm with you in theory but why on earth is anyone buying an air purifier that requires cloud connectivity at all?

I really can't understand why the hell these manufacturers don't just provide open source firmware. Nobody is buying a Conway purifier for the software and there are no trade secrets there.

[dead]