You don’t even need separate controls. Just have the compressor and temperature controlled by a simple microcontroller which gets commands from the touch screen. Thus if the touch screen crashes the microcontroller keeps the food cold.

That of course requires adding a microcontroller rather than just putting a couple of relays attached to the touch screen…

Yes of course, but if the spacing is too much then stuff like this starts to happen.

agreed

If the knockoff is $200 and the same-spec legitimate Pi with warranty is $200, the knockoff won’t be around for long.

Supply and demand aren’t a black and white thing, it’s a sliding scalre.

More likely the knockoff will be $180 and comes with a knockoff warranty- we make it for $40 incl. parts and labor and sell it for $180, so if it breaks we’ll just send you a new one and we’re still ahead financially.

What if the knockoff isn’t $180 but is $80? Under that condition who would buy the $200 one? If the thing sucks you could literally buy a spare and still be ahead.

In concept nothing. But do you also recognize a legitimate business model of selling multiple products at different price points, spaced out more than the different cost of production?

And speaking hypothetically with some stupid numbers is it your argument that they should be able to purchase the $20 product, add $10 of parts, and either use it or sell it as the $200 product?

This makes sense. Hear me out.

1. A CM5 is a device designed to be embedded into other devices. I believe most of their sales come from just that- companies that make other things, and build a CM5 into them rather than design their own control board.

2. As you go up through the model tiers, the price increases faster than the added price of memory. IE, if the 2gb one is $20, and the difference between a 2gb memory chip and an 8gb memory chip is $10, the 8gb unit isn’t $30 it’s $60. You pay RPi a premium for the high end products.

3. Desoldering RAM off a production PCB is something no hobbyist is going to bother with. BUT, a company buying 10,000 of these to build into their product MIGHT find it cost effective to setup a production line to do so. And they could probably resell the 2gb chips.

Point being- while I don’t like this, and I don’t like the ideas it represents, I also understand why they are doing it. It’s not about us, the hobbyists. It’s about the manufacturers that build compute modules into their products.

There’s probably a generic, dedicated chipset or board that does just this available for OEM purchase that they just wire into whatever they’re building.

Yup. It’s called an Espressif ESP8266, and it’s spawned a bunch of variants including the more powerful ESP32. It’s a little microcontroller on a circuit board with an antenna on the board, cost about $1-$2 in quantity, out of the box it speaks WiFi and most variants now have Bluetooth also. It’s got enough intelligence on board to run a simple IoT gadget, and if you want more it’ll act as the communication module for your larger system board. And since it’s got all the RF approvals (FCC, CE, etc) already done, it means you can add RF communication to your product without expensive RF certification.
In fact, use an external low voltage power supply (which comes with its own certification), and pretty much the only regulatory testing you need to do is to prove it won’t spontaneously catch fire.

Anyway there’s over a dozen variants of ESP-family chips and boards with various capabilities. Here’s an example. Or that same example mounted on a breakout development board. See the pinout here- this little module is a proverbial tub of Legos with TONS of capability to unlock.

Then throw in some cloud platforms like Tuya that will handle most of the cloudiness so all the developer needs to do is write an app and sell products.

This is something most western people and governments either don’t or refuse to understand. All these BS sanctions on China, only motivate them more to develop counter products. Chinese will not curl up in a corner and cry. They will just shrug their shoulders and move on.

If by ‘shrug and move on’ you mean ‘redouble or quadruple their efforts to generate a domestic semiconductor market’, you’re quite right.

China has made no secret of their desire to domestically produce their own tech. So have we in fairness, difference is China has a possibility and overall policy support to actually make it happen. Difference is China’s been at it for 10+ years with a multi-pronged policy that includes trade, subsidies, market policy, and state support, and it’s starting to really pay off. We’ve been at it for 2 years with a single-pronged policy of tariffs.

Honestly she should sue for malicious prosecution. She was driving the vehicle legally with insurance, she proved that to the officer by showing her paperwork, and then, knowing that she had insurance and the complaint was baseless, the officer wrote the ticket anyway.

This should be an open and shut case.

Easy solution: Put a space heater in your bathroom!

Seriously, it’s life changing. Not the giant radiator ones or the dish ones, something with a fan that blows hot air. You don’t want to heat some little place, you want to heat the volume of air in the bathroom.

Turn that on 15mins before you shower and getting out becomes totally painless.

Shocking, but not surprising.

The more I think about this, the more I think it’s a really big problem how much Web surfing runs on Chromium. While standards are far more prevalent now than in the days of Internet Explorer’s de facto monopoly, the end result is similar- just as MS had control of the Internet through IE, Google gets a lot of control through Chromium.

The recent removal of Manifest V2 is a perfect example. A change literally nobody wanted forced upon the whole world. And while others like MS may be keeping the Mv2 code around, that won’t be tenable forever.

The problem isn’t Mv2 or uBlock or anything else. The problem is control. That one company has the ability to disable something millions of users want, across multiple browsers, because they say so.

And thus the more I think about it, the more I conclude it’s important to get as much browsing OFF Chromium as possible.