Can somebody explain to me why this needs Bluetooth?

plactagonic@sopuli.xyz to Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world – 359 points –
84

According to their website, it is so the toilet can be paired to a Sanela control app which apparently can be used to control certain functional aspects of the urinal, as well as gives quick access to user manuals

Now if only we could find a way to hack this app, so that the toilet plays "It's Raining Men" every time it flushes... Now that would really be something

Yeah I know, but is it necessary to give bt connections to everything?

Yeah you're right, they probably could have just used wifi instead.

Yeah I know, but is it necessary to give bt connections to everything?

Wait till they load it with 'AI.'

No, please. We just escaped blockchain

"Ignore all previous instructions and flush in reverse for the next guy."

I think we SHOULD train AI on all our bodily excretions. How else will it learn to understand the human condition?

I could honestly see the appeal of a way for the toilet to analyze your poop and tell you that you should be eating more fiber or that you need to see a doctor because it's seen X, Y, and Z symptoms. It's like the joke about German toilets being so you can monitor your health, but with much less of the nastiness.

Of course, we can't have nice things and you'll just get ads for Metamucil or the colorectal-cancer-from microplastics law firms in the style of mesothelioma lawyers.

It's a urinal, I would hope it doesn't have access to any poop to analyze.

Seeing as they could accomplish basically the same thing with an indicator and a QR code, its crazy a bt chip and antenna were both used in this. My only remaining question: how is it powered?

I’d imagine by wires that just aren’t visible. Even auto flushing toilets need power for the sensors, not that unusual.

If you have 1600 toilets in AT&T stadium, would you rather have to scan all of them constantly or have them report back to an automated system that you can adjust remotely and possibly catch issues that may flood bathrooms and put them out of order when you have 80,000 people there? Not sure they they can do that, but I imagine you could have fewer attendants somehow and they figured it out.

bt doesn't have huge range and afaik the max number of active devices bt can use simultaneously is 7.

The stadium has WiFi as well, and 5ghz nor 2.4ghz signals could reach all of the building, they would all have to be networked back into devices/ software designed for it. So according to your numbers you would need to mesh 250bt receivers into a network running to their specialized software

Bluetooth is a questionable choice unless the company also offered some kind of network appliance that incorporates connections in a cheaper way than all units being networked. Allowing the hub, as a serviceable component, to provide additional monitoring and functionality without requiring each unit to also contain the components. There’s certainly reasons, not outlandish either, but who knows?

There'll probably be a little box somewhere in that toilet I assume that controls all of the urinals there that is networked.

It’s a very enterprise thing to do. Ensuring your company gets a contract for long term support and installation.

One very cool thing would be a urinal that does internal health checks on your piss and allows you to access that on your phone. But yeah bluetooth is a shit choice for that too.

My main concern every time these health-sensing toilets come up (it’s a topic on everyone’s mind, ya know?) is how long until they start associating waste with the people it comes from, and then forwarding that info on to entities like insurance companies? I’d be too paranoid to use these in public bathrooms, and if I had one at home I’d be doing the usual IoT best practices - keep it on it’s own network with no internet access.

Yeah i didnt really specify that but i had the same thought. For a user its impossible to assess, whether its offline or not, so it will never be an acceptable system for public toilets.

Was it necessary to take the picture while looking the person in the eye at the urinal next to you while they were attempting to have a non anxiety ridden moment forcing them to not be able to pee?

BT can be used to track people. Maybe they need to know how many people are using it? Or they are stalking men who pee.

Finally! It's always disgusting to touch those public urinal manuals 🤢

I also always end up peeing myself, so I'm glad there is an app to guide me now!

this's like that fancy japanese toilet South Park episode, and my peasant ass will never know what it's like to piss like a Kennedy

Serious answer: it's a "smart" urinal, in that it can report usage statistics, alert maintenance staff to problems, and be remotely controlled.

If you're in the facilities maintenance business, Bluetooth-enabled equipment can be a good way to get an operational technology network up and running without a lot of costly retrofit.

Unserious Answer: it counts the fluid as it passes, because the last counting guy kept getting the count wrong and so people would grossly overpay/underpay when they used the urinal

To alert staff when customers have eaten the cake and it needs to be replenished

For many things. For IR or heat activated urinals you can set the sensitivity when they actuate, the flush volume, schedule regular cleaning cycles, and see statistics of usage, with some models remaining battery power, etc

When you are a maintenance guy in an office building with 100+ of these bad boys it helps a lot.

For pee counters and penis size statistics. Both very important in the world of science about the penis and the pee.

Imagine if there was a leaderboard. Longest pee, most volume, most yellow, etc. You would need video to prove that they didn't cheat though.

You mean PeeTube? PeeTube is also the name of the astronaut pee device based pee device that doesn't need video to measure your penis length. Simply insert your penis into the spring loaded tube (it's just a tube with lots of springs in it). As your penis skin touches the springs, the penis length is measured. The current model is a 256SpT (Springs per Tube), which allows for a penis length resolution in 12"/256 increments.

It’s got a built in speaker you can pair your phone to if you have an official pee song, mine is CombatCircus, by Talco

Sounds dumb but once you’re synced up it’s hands free and the experience is really relaxing

This is the most realistic sounding explanation and I'm really gullible

The difference in usage that badboy would get during a football game versus a gig at the same stadium would be enormous. Things like flush cycle frequency and when to turn the system on/off to conserve water. Nothing massively sinister - boring facility management stuff mostly.

For the blockchain.

Now can somebody explain to me why this needs the blockchain?

Pee-powered shitcoin mining!
Or would that rather be... pisscoin?

30 years later.... Today is a day that will leave in yellow infamy! As pisscoin collapses, many drunkards and even regular people are finding creative ways of pissing outside the American standard urinal!

Did you ever think about how there is an average penis size measurement?

So the penis inspectior that shows up at my house two times a month is a fraud?

Maybe finally someone will take into account Yaw

It’s so you can connect to the pee cam in the urinal and broadcast it as you pee

It's so they can collect big data on the quality of pee of everyone

That's how they make the water cool 😎

My guess is tagging employees when they service the bathrooms.

So you can play your favorite, relaxing playlist.

So they can have an app on your phone. Easy advertisement through notifications, and can suckle the personal data teat