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Comment by jve | Hacker News Reader

I hope you all know that Nest fire alarm aka Nest Protect v2 features microphone for automatic sound (health) checks.

Yeah so the nest protect is, when you look at it objectively, a ceiling mounted general purpose remote sensing package. It’s basically only lacking a wide angle camera and I suspect that’s because they figured it would cross too far into “creepy” for it to be saleable.

It seems to me like a team sat for a while, looked at all the possible ways they could get people to mount a package like this in every room and settled on calling it a smoke alarm.

At the most optimistic they started with a smoke alarm and gradually realised they could build a general purpose platform based on the hardware being deployed in lots of rooms and many types of sensors being dirt cheap now.

Decided they could enable new capabilities (and data goldmines!) in software later.

It’s a pity there’s not an actually customer controlled version of it.

Are there any alternatives to nest protect that would: Sense Carbon Monoxyde AND smoke AND fire off some event to mobile phone via wifi/sms/whatever?

Yes, depending how comfortable you are with soldering.

https://hackaday.com/2014/07/29/a-cheap-diy-smoke-detector-t...

There's the first alert onelink. May have the same issues though, it has a microphone and an alexa integration. Also support homekit, unlike the Nest Protect.

Are there any best practices for using a device like this but not having it communicate with the wider world? I.e. It can communicate with you via a homekit hub, but can't connect outside your LAN

https://onelink.firstalert.com/withalexa/

I use a z-wave smoke detector to supplement the wired smoked detectors in my house: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KMHXFAI

I then paired it with https://www.home-assistant.io/ to send alerts to my phone, google home, etc.

Haven't had to actually test that the carbon monoxide alarm works yet because testing that is hard/expensive, but for smoke it works just fine.

They don't have to be connected to a network in order to work. The will even happily do self-check without network access - something I realized when I wanted to mute a self-check only to find out that I had done some network changes. Had to use a schtick, like in the old days.

Given that these devices are battery powered and meant to last for years on a single charge you can imagine how often they actually connect to the wireless network. And how much traffic they send.

And again, they work perfectly fine without Internet access. Or network access for that matter. I love them, and as someone with an irrational fear of being in a fire they have helped a lot. They're much more sensitive (without being an issue, due to pre-alarm) than the alternatives.

>Had to use a schtick, like in the old days.

What is that? Google's not helping.

Stick, written weirdly.

No, it's Yiddish parlance for an act, gimmick or commonly employed routine.

I read it as "stick" as well. Like how people would use a broom stick to press the 'test' button on classic smoke detectors.

(Admittedly, I have no idea if the Nest version has a similar test)

That makes no sense in this context. Typo or dictation error (stick -> schtick) makes far more sense.

usually people use that word when they are suggesting "that's someones schtick" which is like their habit or what they are known for.

Like trump's schtick is getting people riled up

Uhh that’s clearly not what it means here though which is why I asked.

The sound check takes literally a couple of seconds. How did you even have time to try to silence it?

It tells you in advance and you get a push to your phone if you're on the same network.

"This is a test. The alarm will sounds. The alarm is loud."

(or something like that)

I assumed you didn't get the push notification since your alarms weren't connected to the network properly.

Do you have a 1st gen? I wonder if they're louder. Mine (2nd gen) test pretty quietly. It's not the full-on alarm shriek. It a a medium-volume beeping and only happens for a couple of seconds.

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