From time to time I sent my findings to the tenant mailing list and also got introduced into the building's tenant association. It was important for us to discuss these technical details and brainstorm ideas to improve the quality of the smart apartments because the original vendor and their subcontractors pretty much left us to fend for ourselves - they would only come on a service call if something broke in a specific apartment - nobody was monitoring or tweaking the system as a whole any more.
I have been living in the building for 9 years now and things would fail:
- The tablets' batteries (always plugged-in and charging) would fail - swell up and bulge out the LCD screens, showing rainbow streaks and eventually shut down.
The simplest solution that worked was to replace the batteries - can still be done but I suspect even "new" batteries from eBay have degraded somewhat as I doubt anyone is making new ones for an 11 years old tablet nowadays. The more brave neighbors with more time dedicated to tweaking the system replaced their tablets with newer models and used my tools and documentation to pretty much do it themselves - this is where the WiFi password knowledge obtained using my app tool came in handy. - The original power supplies for the 10 or so pieces of common network equipment throughout the building would randomly fail, leaving parts of the building "in the dark" as far as IP doorbells and weather station info go.
I setup a simple cronjob to monitor their IPs and notified the resident caretaker of when to replace them - I believe we have now fixed all 10 of them with a better quality replacement power supply. - One of the IP doorbells, the one most exposed to the elements, failed a few times due to water intrusion - my cronjob monitoring caught it and we got it replaced quickly.
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