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Comment by conesus | Hacker News Reader

If you're interested, I sell a dedicated Sonos music controller (built out of wood no less). It's available at https://turntouch.com and it's entirely open source so you don't have to worry about me taking your data and selling it. Earning money based on the initial sale is all that I want out of my users. That and props.

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That's a neat and well executed product. Kudos.

Can I ask how it works to protect my data from Sonos? Don't they still get all the same data?

What you do with the remote is between you and what you control. I store anonymous metrics that I use to gauge usage levels but you can turn that off. Sonos undoubtedly takes your listening habits and profits off that data but Turn Touch does not, even though it has access to that data.

> I store anonymous metrics that I use to gauge usage levels

How valuable has that data proven to be? Is it worth collecting?

It tells me which features I should invest more time in getting right and handled edge cases and which features nobody but me uses and so it’s not worth the extra effort. I only have so much time!

Is it opt-in?

Has spying on your customers revealed any surprises?

Assumedly it can be used to inform which features are most used by customers, and thus most worth investing additional development effort in.

OK, I was wondering if you were a complete middleman between me and Sonos. I don't own one, but I would consider it if there were a way to keep their paws off my data.

Btw, this is a tough crowd, getting downvoted for a simple question like this. Sheesh.

Seems cool, and perhaps I'm missing something, but it appears to require a closed-source app from a walled-garden app store to configure it, so it could easily be made useless if the app disappears?

Check it out, 100% open source: https://github.com/samuelclay/turntouch-ios. The Mac app, the firmware, and even the CAD and CAM designs are also there. And I documented everything so you can get a peek into how it was built if you want to change the designs for yourself. http://ofbrooklyn.com/2019/01/3/building-turntouch/

Everything I build I want to last beyond myself. So beyond the source code I also write about the why for everything. That it improves sales is a nice bonus.

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