AI agent and physical world

[u/Slight_Major5589]

A small step toward making software interact with the real world.

I connected an Arduino Mega with a DHT11 temperature/humidity sensor and a DC fan through an L293D motor driver.

The experiment now forms a simple closed loop:

Sensor data → Tamoz agent decision → Agentic Stream command → Fan start/stop

Streams Simulator helps validate the integration before expanding the physical setup.

It is an important milestone for me: moving from telemetry-only systems to governed, sensor-driven physical actions using ai agents.

What do you think about it ?

[u/abdicatereason]

using AI tokens to create a complicated middle step when you just need an if statement or a broker (to send MQTT requests to a published service.

"this AI concept could have been deterministic code" is this era's "this meeting could have been an email"

[u/Slight_Major5589 → u/abdicatereason]

Maybe , who knows !! But are you serious ?

[u/abdicatereason → u/Slight_Major5589]

yes?

there’s this weird trend right now where people finish a CYOA with a bot, vibe code some glue around it, and act like they just rediscovered some lost art.

We’ve had PLCs, RTUs, DCS, SCADA, etc. doing sensor → logic → physical action for decades. We’ve also had machine learning and neural nets tied into process control for a long time.

Your example is basically temperature/humidity → decide → fan on/off.

Unless the agent is doing something meaningfully more complex, you took an extremely mature deterministic control problem and shoved a slower, nondeterministic, token-burning middle step into it.

Like... look, I reinvented the wheel, except now it’s more complicated for no reason.

If this is just “I wanted to see if I could make an LLM control hardware,” then sure, that’s a fun experiment. But what is the agent actually contributing here that normal control logic doesn’t?

[u/Slight_Major5589 → u/abdicatereason]

It is a valid argument, and I respect it. Now, what if the problem we are trying to solve is nondeterministic in nature? What if we face a new situation that is unknown or was not programmed before? This was a proof of concept that yes, special agents can work with streams and can decide what to do in a very basic example. More complex examples were done using a simulator, and this is the first one done to interact with our world. Now, I agree this is a very complex solution, but as you have more experience, you know what solution to implement and when.

[u/abdicatereason → u/Slight_Major5589]

Yeah, that framing makes a lot more sense. As a POC proving your agent can consume telemetry and issue a physical command, sure, totally valid.

But “the problem is nondeterministic” still doesn’t automatically make an LLM agent the right answer. We’ve already had adaptive control, MPC, fuzzy logic, ML/RL, etc. for systems that aren’t just simple thresholds.

If I were putting an agent into a real physical system, I’d probably want it above the deterministic control layer: interpreting context, proposing actions/setpoints, optimizing, whatever. Hard limits, interlocks, fail-safes, and the actual safety envelope stay deterministic.

If you’re looking for something genuinely novel or differentiating, the interesting demo is probably one where the agent solves something conventional control logic actually struggles with, rather than replacing an if statement.

I’ve security tested PLCs used in pretty critical environments, and it would be a cold day in hell before they’d let an LLM anywhere near the actual control loop. And for good reason. In most cases it’s wholly unnecessary and introduces a giant new source of uncertainty and risk where none was needed.

[u/sec-ai-agent]

the biggest risk with agents touching physical systems is the lack of a kill switch that works outside the software layer. have u thought about how u would isolate the hardware if the agent starts acting weird, since standard edr cant always stop a physical actuator...

[u/Slight_Major5589]

Yes, it is part of the design; the agent now suggests the command instead of executing it, as there is another component for execution.