Don't like the look of bare kinked wires? A $5 piece of decorative conduit or mounting tape or a new wall socket will do what an extra $100+ in less reliable specialty tech can accomplish. For people who are suppose to be all about tech you would think something as simple as a bit of wiring wouldn't be so out of their depth.
For something like a door lock, having everything on the lock also makes the integration really easy. Solenoid type electrified levers more or less don't exist as residential products, even though that seems to be the way to end up with a nice looking installation.
I can imagine a single base IR unit with direct LOS to say 10 low power devices (nightlights, wifi motion sensors, IoT devices, etc) could have great utility.
Not sure what on Earth that is, but it doesn't sound too smart to me.
The gimmick is that touching anywhere on the faucet body or its handle toggles some kind of solenoid to cut or resume the flow.
You still use its physical handle to set the flow and temperature—but the act of touching that handle registers as a “cut off water” capacitive touch.
So any time you try to turn on the water, it spits for a fraction of a second then cuts off the flow. Then locks out your subsequent touches as some kind of demented debounce kind of thing.
Same thing if you try to pull out its retractable head to wash down the basin.
I couldn’t wish a dead battery on it fast enough…
I do want the floor control though! We do have the iot addon, so it is wirelessly controllable. Building a non-contact foot detector is on my to-do list.
Via Google Home the delay is 1-2 seconds which kind of sucks, but maybe there's a faster local network control, maybe there's a home-assistant base I can work with.
No surprise but man people are real black holes of energy on these topics, eh? You do you, but after a couple days living here the touch sensor quickly went from occasional accidental bother that was pretty easy to avoid to second mature. Similarly yes a foot sensor might be an issue for some people, but to me, it's be a nice additive on-control.
The company claims to have some sort of unique patent involving retroreflectors in the receiver ensuring that if something disturbs the path, the laser beam is destroyed. I haven't been able to find any other technical details and of course search engines are mostly useless, so if anyone manages to dig deeper into how this works I'd be very curious to hear it.
> one for the Alfred lock on my back door and the higher-power R1HP model in the ceiling of my bathroom, powering an electric toothbrush charger.
Would be weird otherwise, having a doorlock made to be opened from the outside in the bathroom. Or having your toothbrush near your house entrance.
mortar•8mo ago