Hackaday Newsletter 0xDC

DIY or Buy? DIY or Die! [Hackaday] Sticking Up For the Stick Shift [Read article now »]( How Much is DIY Worth to You? By [Elliot Williams]( It all started with an article about [Wink Labs putting a monthly fee on their previously free service](. It wasn't so much the amount they were asking ($5 / month) that raised my hackles, but rather the fact that they would essentially render a device that you ostensibly bought worthless unless you paid up. I've [ranted about this enough recently]( and the quick summary is that IoT companies seem very bad at estimating their true costs, and the consumer ends up suffering for it. So I started thinking about the price myself. Is $5 per month for a home automation service a lot or a little? On one hand, if you stretch that out to, say, 10 years, you end up with a net present value of something north of $400, plus $70 for the device. That's a lot, right? Surely, I could DIY myself a solution for less? Or am I falling into the same IoT trap? This isn't hypothetical, because I already have a [modest DIY home automation system](. We run a bunch of switches, have temperature and humidity loggers in relevant rooms, and the [washer and dryer notify us]( when they're done. I also use the [MQTT infrastructure]( for all sorts of fun projects, but that's a bonus. Our hub is a $10 Orange Pi and a long-since depreciated WRT54g router, and it's run for four years now, and probably will last another six. So that looks like $460 in my pocket. On the other hand, it's only really a bargain for me because I already knew what I was doing when I set the system up, and what I didn't know I wanted to learn. Realistically, I probably spent around 20 hours on the system in total, but most of that has been adding in new devices and tweaking old ones. You'd have to do this sort of thing with any other system too, although my guess is that the professional systems are more streamlined at enrolling new gadgets: I have a whole directory full of Python scripts running as daemons and have to do a lot of hand editing. Still, assuming nothing else drastic happens to the system, I'm probably winning by DIYing here. But imagine that I had little or no technical clue, and even flashing an image of a pre-configured home automation system to a Raspberry Pi were new. How much time does it take to learn how to do something like that? How much time to learn to administer even such a simple system on your home network? If it took the real me 20 hours, it could be easily twice that much for the hypothetical me. Let's say 46 hours of time invested. $10 / hour is below minimum wage in many places, and this isn't minimum wage labor, and that was fairly optimistic. In the end, the $5 per month is probably pretty fair if the system works. Indeed, when I look around at all of the systems I've built, most all of them have taken more time to build than I thought when I was starting. Of course, I've enjoyed it most of the time, so maybe it's not fair to apply my full consulting rates. (Which if I charged my father-in-law for tech support, I'd be rich!) But it'd probably be naive to say that everyone should just DIY themselves a home automation solution when the going gets tough. So look around you and revel in the hours you've spent on your various DIY projects. Who knew that they were worth so much? From The Blog [Ask Hackaday: Wink Hubs, Extortion as a Service?]( By [Elliot Williams]( The Wink Hub is “transitioning to a $4.99 monthly subscription, starting on May 13, 2020.” If you don't pay, your home automation system turns off. [Read more »]( [This Week in Security: Firewall 0-day, Apple’s response, and an Android Bluetooth Bug]( By [Jonathan Bennett]( Everything that can be broken will be. [Read more »]( [New Part Day: Raspberry Pi Camera Gets Serious with 12 Megapixels & Proper Lenses]( By [Jenny List]( $50 gets you a 12 Megapixel sensor and a C-mount. Is your next camera a Raspberry Pi? [Read more »]( [Hackaday Podcast EP066]( By [Hackaday Editors]( What happened last week on Hackaday? Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams get you up to speed in no time. [Read more »]( If You Missed It [Nintendo Switch Laptop Isn’t As BASIC As It Looks]( [Old Laptop Gets New Lease on Life with Raspberry Pi]( [Linux Command Line Productivity with tmux]( [Cheap Smartwatch Hacking, To Run Your Own Code]( [Any Remote Can Be A Universal Remote]( [A smart DIY metal detector]( [Hackaday]( NEVER MISS A HACK [Share]( [Share]( [Share]( [Terms of Use]( [Privacy Policy]( [Hackaday.io]( [Hackaday.com]( This email was sent to {EMAIL} [why did I get this?]( [unsubscribe from this list]( [update subscription preferences]( Hackaday.com · 61 S Fair Oaks Ave Ste 200 · Pasadena, CA 91105-2270 · USA