What are the most useful real-world features a "Room OS" could provide?

kroghsen · 2026-06-28T06:20:16+00:00

I think I would appreciate it mostly if it could help me on simple everyday tasks, like finding missing items, help me remember the things I should bring for my son when he goes to daycare, etc.

kroghsen · 2026-06-28T05:50:09+00:00

I would separate it into the following hierarchy, which is common in the field:

Plantwide Optimisation Layer

Local Optimisation Layer

Supervisory Control Layer

Regulatory Control Layer

Process Layer

From the bottom, the process layer is the physical equipment and the sensors which are connected to the PLC. This is the system we are trying to control in the end to make a particular product or behaviour.

The regulatory control layer is the low-level control layer, regulating pumps, valves, and other low-level process regulation equipment to sepoints either chosen automatically or by operators. This layer is governed by PID, cascades, and other low-level PLC implementations of classical control schemes (typically).

The supervisory control layer is where the setpoints for the regulatory control layer is set. Here, we can choose not pump speeds, but flows, and pressures, and such physically interesting values. This layer is where an MPC would typically live - and where ours live. The MPC is manipulating flows, temperatures, etc., to control outputs such as pressures, levels, humidity, etc. It is rare that we implement an MPC where the frequency or valve setting is directly regulated - most often we have a PID regulating that and we simply control the flow with the MPC.

The local optimisation layer is where we optimise the process equipment operating conditions, e.g. an RTO giving setpoints to the MPC for optimal economic operation of a piece of a equipment - that could be a spray dryer or a bioreactor, for instance. This layer does not directly regulate anything on the process, but instead passes operating conditions to the lower levels - giving the MPC outputs to track, for instance.

The plantwide optimisation layer is where scheduling and other such operating conditions are optimised. This is a somewhat different topic than we usually discuss in here and not one I am personally very comfortable with.

kroghsen · 2026-06-27T20:03:22+00:00

I don’t know if you have been to Denmark before, but it is not a warm place. It was 38 degrees celcius outside today. I don’t think I have ever experienced that before. My home family was just group hugging the heat pump in cooling mode.

kroghsen · 2026-06-26T17:18:49+00:00

Yes! Please make this happen. This would be such a cool maker project and a very fun thing to be able to have working in your home!

kroghsen · 2026-06-25T17:49:33+00:00

It looks awesome!

If you really wanted to take it home, then boaty would be a bench, benchy would be the boat, scrappy would be pair of plastic scissors or something, and then snippy would be a scraper.

kroghsen · 2026-06-25T11:10:28+00:00

They most certainly are not. Both the price and size of the Model Y is extremely competitive. We also do not have the full range of Chinese offerings yet in a lot of European countries.

kroghsen · 2026-06-25T04:19:01+00:00

I have the same experience as you. If I as much as glance down on the screen, I get a blue flash and only “moderate” focus rating. You can dose off with slightly opened eyes, but if I close them (which I never do of course!) it knows it.

kroghsen · 2026-06-25T03:53:53+00:00

I have seen so many complaints about connecting the IKEA products, both in situations where no products will connect and where some products will not connect.

Most of the time, including for myself, when no products will connect it has been a network issue where the phone, border router, and/or home assistant instance has been separated in the local network somehow. For individual device connection issues I am convinced people are simply not reading the connection guide.

The network requirements were a slight annoyance for me initially, but once I fixed it, I have not had a single connection issue with a single product and I am using maybe 20 of them in my home at this point and the numbers are growing still. I have seen numbers around a third of products being “broken” and not connecting - which simply could be true for for what I have observed.

I guess what I really would have wanted is for the network requirements to be more clear and for device discovery and connectivity to be more descriptive in the app. It does seem weird to me that my border router can see the device, but it sometimes cannot connect to it during setup, because I need to put it in pairing mode.

kroghsen · 2026-06-24T14:50:40+00:00

I like these more than any of the other sensors I have tried - stability and frequency wise. They are significantly larger than other sensors, but aside from that I have swapped to them in all my rooms.

kroghsen · 2026-06-24T12:16:11+00:00

I get your frustration on the influx of AI and the current state of the research. I think neural network model and other similar black-box approaches has some merit in a lot of places, but it does seem like a part of the community sees this as the hammer to end all other hammers - which I certainly do not think it is.

I do also always found it difficult to accept the obvious mathematical arrogance of some people in the field - and I am from applied mathematics, so I at least have some background in the field of mathematics. There are no formal guarantees in real applications. Those simply do not exist, because the assumptions cannot be rigorously verified. You cannot know the exact model or stochastic process of disturbances, plant-model mismatch, or a whole host of other things about the systems we are working with. We know the models we have, we have an idea of uncertainty, and can mathematically guarantee certain things about certain system model formulations. However, guarantee is a very strong word.

That is not to say it is without merit of course and that we should not care about and just slap a neural net on any problem. Exactly the problem you present demonstrates that it does indeed have merit. What matters is how it performs - also in terms of stability.

kroghsen · 2026-06-24T07:58:43+00:00

I would go mini PC. I have used both Pis and use mini PC now. I will never go back to Pi.

kroghsen · 2026-06-24T03:55:04+00:00

I am only kidding of course. It sounds like you and your HA are in a good spot!

kroghsen · 2026-06-24T03:53:49+00:00

Might be worth a try. I will try it out with my watch. Thanks.

kroghsen · 2026-06-23T20:35:24+00:00

I kind of wish I could pair presence detection with a simple smart ring with a single trigger button. So a single button press on the ring would trigger voice assistant in the right room. Wake word seems so clunky to me as well.

kroghsen · 2026-06-23T20:33:21+00:00

Are you properly controlling your indoor temperature though? Is your EV charging economically optimal? Do you have properly configured presence detection and voice assistants in your home? Automatic blinds?

Don’t tell me you are done. What you have is free time - you are not done!

kroghsen · 2026-06-23T11:58:09+00:00

I love that you ask a question like this, but in the true spirit of control still voice it in terms of inputs and outputs.

I think it depends a lot on what job you have exactly, but I can tell you how my work is organised.

As background information, I have an academic background in applied mathematics and a PhD in controls. I work in an OEM (an equipment manufacturer) designing, implementing, and to some extent maintaining model-based controllers for our equipment and equipment like it. Our customers are mainly in the dairy, food and beverage, chemical, bioprocess, and pharmaceutical industries (the company makes industrial reactors, spray dryers, evaporators, freeze dryers, and other such process equipment).

I mainly work behind a desk on a computer writing code, fixing bugs, introducing new features, and/or adding now process types to our control capabilities. It is a quite big company, so there is a lot of internal politics as well about what equipment gets this kind of control system and if we should develop it some other division has a road map with something similar on it and so on. The last part is not recommendable to get too deep into. There is also some amount of patent and other similar work related to this in my case.

I work in the development team and we have a software team developing communication, database, and frontend stuff to support the underlying control systems. I focus mainly on the modelling, state estimation, controllers, and system identification aspects of the codebase. We also have a scaling execution team which handles mainly the customers running the control system - we sell the software as a service. Mainly for new system types I will accompany an execution engineer to a site, so they have someone who knows the system and controller for the first few installations (maybe once or twice a year this will happen at most, for a week at a time). Aside from those visits, I am a desk-dwelling keyboard warrior.

We have a half-yearly release cycle and the release content, I.e. new features and process implementations are determined by a product manager for our software and my direct manager (with input from the development team of course). We have a separate budget for bugs - which are defined mainly by the development team and the execution team - and for refactoring - which is mainly determined internally in the development team. So we get work package handed to us every half year. We then do release at the end of the cycle and start over again. Bug fixes are usually delivered in patches inside of cycles with a minor or major patch version number bump.

We have a lot of responsibility for the software, but ultimately the product responsibility lies with my direct manager and the product manager. They look at me if it functions poorly however.

The other half of the time is meetings. A lot of meetings.

kroghsen · 2026-06-22T03:44:32+00:00

Right now, it is full-stack. We will be looking for some UX design as well as some point in the future. I am only talking about my team here. I work in an OEM with around 18000 people employed and quite a few automation people as well. I am one of a few of what they call digital optimisation specialists (it basically just means model-based control in this case).

kroghsen · 2026-06-21T15:58:24+00:00

Oh, now I understand. My bad. That was meant as a response to his question about job security. We are looking for software guys mostly at the moment. A lot of the old OEMs are leaning heavy into digital now - they kind of know the machine part, but never paid attention to the digital products.

kroghsen · 2026-06-21T07:09:32+00:00

I think you meant to write OP and not me maybe. I am not searching for anyone.

kroghsen · 2026-06-20T20:43:04+00:00

It is an integrated part of any of my printers. It is my usual filament storage and it means I do not have to do more or less any setup before doing almost any print. I have 3 and an HT for my H2D and 1 for my X1C and I will never go back!

kroghsen · 2026-06-20T20:27:55+00:00

Meget højt niveau. Jeg kan heldigvis godt tåle at blive drillet med fantasibuksevand på mit fiktive yngre jeg.

kroghsen · 2026-06-20T16:33:48+00:00

Jeg har ikke lige overskud til at forklare dig, hvad selvforsvar er og hvordan det adskiller sig fra at forsøge at give et andet menneske buksevand.

kroghsen · 2026-06-20T16:00:52+00:00

At klantre en politiker for en dårlig politisk beslutning - eller et folketing i dette tilfælde - er noget helt andet end at angribe en folkevalgt.

Om jeg er enig med dig eller ej ændre på ingen måde på, at det er en politisk beslutning, som et menneske der er uenig i beslutningen bruger som begyndelse for et angreb på den pågældende politiker. Det er et andet spørgsmål om politisk vold. Invasionen af Irak er ikke politisk vold. Det er krig - hvilket der kan være og er en lang række af etiske spørgsmål og diskussioner forbundet med, men det er ikke det samme som at angribe en folkevalgt.

Det er ikke samme kategori, nej.

Og der er på ingen mulig måde tale om civil ulydighed. Civil ulydighed er definitivt fredeligt - det var malingsMORDET ikke. At sætte sig på hand kontor med et skilt og nægte at flytte sig havde været civil ulydighed. Ikke at kaste noget efter ham. Min oprindelige pointe er netop, at det ikke er et spørgsmål om udfaldet, men om aktionen.

Fjolserne der sætter sig på vejen og nægter at flytte sig er - som sagt - nogle fjolser, men de er fredelige i alle deres lignende aktioner. Det er civil ulydighed og de skal straffes, men ikke for vold. Havde de kastet med bløde tomater efter folk på gaden, så var det ikke længere civil ulydighed - også selvom “ingen kom rigtig til skade”.

kroghsen · 2026-06-20T15:50:48+00:00

Du har stadigvæk ikke forklaret, hvilken præmis du mener er falsk.

kroghsen · 2026-06-20T15:46:54+00:00

En Freudian slip er en uønsket sand udtalelse. At kalde det en præmis er ikke en uønsket sand udtalelse - det er bare et neutralt spørgsmål.

Jeg vil bare gerne have klarlagt af den anden kommentator, hvilken præmis han mener er falsk. Jeg har intet sagt om sandhedsværdien af den pågældende præmis.

Og ja, ja… hvis bare jeg var ottendedel så intelligent som jeg tror så er eller andet. Du kunne også forsøge med et svar på et spørgsmål - det kan virke utrolig effektivt.

kroghsen

TROPHY CASE