For some reason, my alarm clock requires that I install an app on my phone. And the app required me to create an account.
I’m going to repeat that: In order to set my alarm clock, I had to create an account with the clock manufacturer.
Anyway, I went through the setup process up back when I bought the alarm clock, and promptly forgot about it.
Most of the United States went from Daylight Saving Time to Standard Time this past weekend, which means that my Sunday morning consisted of walking around the house adjusting the times on the clocks in the house. This is normally a chore that takes just a few minutes.
Until I got to the alarm clock.
I had uninstalled the “Set the time on the alarm clock” app because, c’mon, it’s not like I change the time on the alarm clock every day. I set it once and forget it.
Okay, so I have to go back and re-download the app. And then I try to connect to the clock.
The clock doesn’t respond.
Okay, go download the manual, figure out how to do a factory reset. The clock now reads 12:00AM, like all clocks do when they are reset.
Go through the clock set-up again. The app’s UI is confusing. I can’t figure out how to re-connect to an existing clock or delete an existing clock so I can re-add it. There is a hamburger button ☰ next to the clock, but tapping it has no effect. I eventually figure out that you are supposed to swipe on the hamburger button, not tap it. That exposes the garbage can icon 🗑 for deleting the clock from the app.
Okay, so I’ve deleted my clock. Going through factory reset process. But when I enter my Wi-Fi password, the app just hangs with a spinning circle. It appears to be unable to connect to the clock.
I spent an hour resetting the clock, going through the configuration process again, trying different Wi-Fi networks, resetting my phone, resetting my router, resetting my reset button, nothing worked.
So now I was left with a clock that reads “12:00AM January 1, 2018”. We have progressed so much as a society in the past fifty years.
They say that a broken clock is correct twice a day. This one can’t even manage that.
I unplugged the clock and put it in the closet. Maybe I’ll try again tomorrow.
Bonus chatter: I’m thinking maybe of plugging the clock in at exactly midnight. The date will be wrong, but at least the time will be correct.
Epilogue: I think the problem is that the clock’s Wi-Fi chip is broken. It successfully adjusted from standard time to daylight time back in the springtime. But it failed to adjust automatically for the fall changeover. The clock said “No Wi-Fi”.
Epilogue 2: In the instructions, after “Step 2: Set up with the app”, there is a “Step 3 (optional)” that talks about making adjustments. It is not obvious, but step 3 is not dependent upon step 2, and you can use it to set the time without an Internet connection. I never made it past step 2 and therefore never noticed step 3.
The Wi-Fi connectivity is nice when it’s working (like it was during the springtime) since it means never having to adjust the time after a power outage or time zone change. There are other features unlocked by Wi-Fi, but we never used them.
But it’s all moot now because I returned the clock.
It’s not obvious from the box that you need an app to set up the clock. The person who bought the clock did so for the “project the time on the ceiling” feature, which is a pretty awesome feature. Highly recommended. But maybe not with this clock.
Sounds like an Internet-connected toaster. I know! Let's put a computer in the toaster, instead of dumb controls. That way, there are more points of failure!
I wish ALL clocks had a button that adds one hour, and a button that removes one hour. Or a plus-one-hour/minus-one-hour two-position slide switch. A few clocks do, but most do not. Sure, that won't help when your DST time shifts by 30 minutes,...
Or an IoT fridge. I recall looking at the refrigerators at the local big-box home-improvement store and saw a fridge with a tablet built into the door. They had it display the local time, weather forecast, ews, etc. As though I don't have a TV for the morning news, or a tablet, or a laptop, or a phone... And you had a ~1500 USD premium for that "privilege". Just to have...
Talking about IOT-toaster, I'm curious if there is automatic toast maker instead.
In here, lots of people are having their breakfast in cafe where they use online App to take orders already. It'll be kind of WOW-factor if we can see a machine that while I make the order, it cuts a slice of bread, run the bread through the heating wires with conveyor belt to make it a toast, then drop butter/peanut butter/jam/nutella or whatever...
Sounds like overengineered BS. I bought atomic clocks – manual that runs on 1 AA and digital clocks that change date and time over the air via NIST (Colorado, CO). They cost me anywhere from $15 to $20 on Amazon. I replaced clocks in our conference rooms but use a wall adapter so batteries never need to be replaced. The time will adjust automatically whenever day light savings start or ends.
One of my friends has an atomic clock. His problem is that the signal is poor in the room, so whenever the time changes, he has to unplug the clock, go to another room, plug it in, let it sync the time, and then move back to the original room.
My wife’s alarm clock has a built in calendar and knows when daylight savings changes, except, it was made before they moved it back a week to accommodate Halloween. So now it always changes itself one week earlier than it should.
Have you tried setting your wifi router / AP to only broadcast 2.4 Ghz? Some of these automated wifi things get tripped up when the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz radios have the same SSID. I had this problem when connecting my new fancy Philips wifi lightbulbs that took a whole hour to configure.
Here's the info from the WiZ FAQ page that pointed me in the right direction (https://taolight.helpshift.com/a/wiz/?s=getting-started&f=pairing-troubleshooting&l=en):
2 - Check that your phone is connected...
Long before the craze for WiFi and IoT… Radio Controlled Clocks! 🙂
I have three! (Well, one’s a watch.) I should really go and reset the time on my legacy clocks at some point.
Your alarm clock likely uses something like ESP-Touch or Airkiss for provisioning. The way it works is, the SSID/password are encoded in packet lengths, then the device sniffs the encrypted packets to decode the enrollment data. This only works well if (a) your phone is using 2.4GHz band, because most of those Internet-of-Shit crap doesn't support 5GHz and (b) your phone has the strongest signal nearby, because that's how automatic channel detection works in the...
This is my guess as well.
Almost the same thing happened to me today: I tried to download Windows Admin Center 1910, but I was taken to Microsoft Evaluation Center of all places and told to create an account and fill a form.
I didn’t download Windows Admin Center 1910. It is as broken as your clock.
That’s why not everything should be IOT-ed.
In fact I don’t want most of the things that I used be IOT-ed.
If your system clock is too far behind, SSL certificates will fail validation. I suspect during QA the certificates were valid for the reset date, but the current certificate is not.
Just the other day I got a thermometer (the medical kind) that needs an app to take a measurement. Grudgingly, I installed an app, and of course the first thing it asked was to log into an account. So I signed up as “John Doe” with the “fuckyou@gmail.com” email address. Lo and behold, somebody else had already used that email address.
I’m going back to my 20-year old dumb thermometer from Walgreens.