I think all power lines should have a communications protocol. Not every device has to use them, and they’d be lower bandwidth than data-only lines, but I think the era of data-communicating appliances is here to stay, and it’d be better they go over the wires we have rather than clogging up the wireless spectrum.
Within a single building for sure, but even neighborhood lines could carry some data I bet. I wonder if and how that would work. Gonna have to learn some more about electricity and grid infrastructure.
The cybersecurity specialist in me really doesn’t like the idea of having enough wire in public spaces that it’s essentially impossible to monitor, sending infrastructure related data.
But then again, a weekend playing around with a flipper zero and a walk through town is enough to realize that it probably doesn’t matter.
Yeah I imagine for lines outside the home, or in public places, it would be best to assume that the channel is untrustworthy and the data is public. Essential comms would need to have redundancy of course. But for an oven reporting its at temp, or a thermostat reporting its room’s temperature to a central HVAC controller, I think it would be nicer than running everything over wifi.
You could even have a signal smoother at the main so nothing inside the house can get out. The way I’m imagining it, all the household power would come from the home battery, which would be fed by a combination of solar panels and grid power. If the battery’s full and the sun is shining, power feeds back into the main. If the battery’s low, power is drawn from the panels, and if that doesn’t meet demand, power is drawn from the grid. But the whole house is buffered (electrically and informationally) by the battery.
Yeah. I know it’s possible to have a backward-compatible network over regular residential wiring, I have a pair of those ethernet ports that plug into standard outlets, but there would need to be a broadly accepted networking standard for devices that have that feature built in.
Maybe a starting point would be an open hardware, open software server device that connects to the electrical grid and the regular ethernet (via cable or wireless) that manages all the active devices on the power network. If a device implements a protocol the hub recognizes, it registers the device and makes it available for management via a web interface. I think I’d want some kind of manual confirmation before new devices start communicating with the ethernet anyway, as well as a way to grant and revoke internet privileges for devices on the fly, e.g. I might want to upgrade the firmware on one appliance to fix a bug, then close it off again until the next update. There could be switches / dimmers etc. that implement the standard and act as passthroughs for legacy devices to give them a bit of centralized control too.
If it gets good enough for hobbyist / diy electronics makers to start baking the standard into their devices, it could become a defacto open standard. I think it would be cool to have networked devices that won’t brick once the manufacturer goes bust / decides to shut down the servers that make the hardware work. I think that should be the bare minimum we demand from hardware manufacturers: that they don’t build implicit or explicit killswitches into the devices the sell. But that’s a separate ramble and I feel I’ve gone on long enough here 🙃
They already do. There’s ripple signaling for electrical infrastructure and power company disconnect boxes. If you’ve ever seen those power company boxes hooked up to HVAC equipment that’s what those are for. They let the power company use ripple control to selectively disable high power draw equipment during peak load times.
I think all power lines should have a communications protocol. Not every device has to use them, and they’d be lower bandwidth than data-only lines, but I think the era of data-communicating appliances is here to stay, and it’d be better they go over the wires we have rather than clogging up the wireless spectrum.
Within a single building for sure, but even neighborhood lines could carry some data I bet. I wonder if and how that would work. Gonna have to learn some more about electricity and grid infrastructure.
The cybersecurity specialist in me really doesn’t like the idea of having enough wire in public spaces that it’s essentially impossible to monitor, sending infrastructure related data.
But then again, a weekend playing around with a flipper zero and a walk through town is enough to realize that it probably doesn’t matter.
Yeah I imagine for lines outside the home, or in public places, it would be best to assume that the channel is untrustworthy and the data is public. Essential comms would need to have redundancy of course. But for an oven reporting its at temp, or a thermostat reporting its room’s temperature to a central HVAC controller, I think it would be nicer than running everything over wifi.
You could even have a signal smoother at the main so nothing inside the house can get out. The way I’m imagining it, all the household power would come from the home battery, which would be fed by a combination of solar panels and grid power. If the battery’s full and the sun is shining, power feeds back into the main. If the battery’s low, power is drawn from the panels, and if that doesn’t meet demand, power is drawn from the grid. But the whole house is buffered (electrically and informationally) by the battery.
Think some intelligent opsec is needed when acquiring a flipper?
In these grand United States, that is
I don’t think so. Ultimately, it’s a low power computer with a software defined radio in it. Nothing inherently nefarious.
I am Canadian however, so jury’s out about the US
We have several good standards for power-line networking.
All of them fail for the usual problems, like all companies making sure every connector you can buy is proprietary and incompatible with each other’s.
Yeah. I know it’s possible to have a backward-compatible network over regular residential wiring, I have a pair of those ethernet ports that plug into standard outlets, but there would need to be a broadly accepted networking standard for devices that have that feature built in.
Maybe a starting point would be an open hardware, open software server device that connects to the electrical grid and the regular ethernet (via cable or wireless) that manages all the active devices on the power network. If a device implements a protocol the hub recognizes, it registers the device and makes it available for management via a web interface. I think I’d want some kind of manual confirmation before new devices start communicating with the ethernet anyway, as well as a way to grant and revoke internet privileges for devices on the fly, e.g. I might want to upgrade the firmware on one appliance to fix a bug, then close it off again until the next update. There could be switches / dimmers etc. that implement the standard and act as passthroughs for legacy devices to give them a bit of centralized control too.
If it gets good enough for hobbyist / diy electronics makers to start baking the standard into their devices, it could become a defacto open standard. I think it would be cool to have networked devices that won’t brick once the manufacturer goes bust / decides to shut down the servers that make the hardware work. I think that should be the bare minimum we demand from hardware manufacturers: that they don’t build implicit or explicit killswitches into the devices the sell. But that’s a separate ramble and I feel I’ve gone on long enough here 🙃
They already do. There’s ripple signaling for electrical infrastructure and power company disconnect boxes. If you’ve ever seen those power company boxes hooked up to HVAC equipment that’s what those are for. They let the power company use ripple control to selectively disable high power draw equipment during peak load times.