On Tue, Jan 5, 2021 at 2:50 PM <bzs@theworld.com> wrote:
Could we make the battery just a little more powerful? How much power would a bit of circuitry waiting for a "turn on! there's a new message coming in!" need? [....]
If your network connectivity, or web browser, or cellular reception stops working; people realize very quickly that they aren't getting messages, and that something is wrong. Well, maybe, sometimes people break PMTU Discovery by firewalling off ICMP for "security", but even more often: People already ignore testing their smoke detectors. Emergency radios in smoke detectors would be too hard to test, so basically, people would not test them every week, or they would be annoyed by the weekly test, and defeat them - then when an actual emergency happens, 30% of the detectors, don't pick up a thing, because their local environment and signal propagation changed, they're in a signal dead zone, or the nearest NOAA transmitter was 100 miles away, and there was too much local interference to get a decodable message, anyways. Emergency receivers are subject to signal, reception, and coverage issues, even if you can put one in every smoke detector. They are a neat add-on, but do not displace the motivation to distribute true emergency messages over 100% of available services from 3rd party communication providers, including the internet, cellular networks, broadcast streaming, all services, etc. Devices used to access streaming services, and web content have a huge Advantage - End users receive ordinary content and communications on these devices every day, and there is a service provider to continually monitor services, so it makes sense to levy the responsibility upon those distribution providers and network operators - that will make a more reliable result, since end users don't require extra work to verify these are actually working, etc. For Smoke Detector + Emergency receiver.. Probably need to add external power. Might as well use a separate power supply and a separate unit. A smoke detector is microwatts, and a radio receiver with logic for decoding and processing the analog waveform is more than a hundred milliwatts. "Not turning on" - is a sure way to not receive a signal - RFI and EM are abundant, and active logic is required to discriminate a true message.
etc. -- -JH