Smart Beds Helped Them Sleep on a Cloud. Then the Cloud Crashed

>“I still plan to continue to use it,” he said. “The main friction point is, really, the mattress should work even without Wi-Fi.”

I appreciate the drifting semantics of names, but Wi-Fi and AWS are really not the same thing.

The architecture of Eight Sleep is that the "Pod" – despite having a full Linux system running – is treated as nothing but a sensor and actuator. Absolutely zero decision-making happens on the device itself; it's all controlled by commands received from the mothership via an AWS service.

My cynical take has always been that this is their justification for charging a subscription fee for features that shouldn't require one (e.g. an alarm clock or the ability to change the temperature on a schedule).

There are a couple of open-source projects around jailbreaking it:

- Probably the original attempt: https://github.com/bobobo1618/ninesleep

- The much more polished and usable application built from that starting point: https://github.com/throwaway31265/free-sleep

The latter is even able to do the signal processing needed for heart rate on-device.

[dupe]

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45658056

And update: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45677351