Show HN: ThingsTwin – 3D House Plan Based UI for Smart Home
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Re: Show HN: ThingsTwin – 3D House Plan Based UI for Smart Home
#2Systems like HomeAssistant or Apple’s Home app seem to become much more usable when home devices are properly organized or automated—but doing so is extremely tedious or difficult. When long device lists are not organized by function or room, it is prohibitively difficult to explain how to use these systems to guests, or less technical users.
There’s a floor plan add-on[1] for HomeAssistant, but creating a floor plan or rendering for your home is a lot of work with difficult tools.
I’m excited about this project because it makes creating high-quality floor plans more trivial and closely linked to the device organization and setup phase.
Re: Show HN: ThingsTwin – 3D House Plan Based UI for Smart Home
#3That title makes no sense.
Re: Show HN: ThingsTwin – 3D House Plan Based UI for Smart Home
#4Systems like HomeAssistant or Apple’s Home app seem to become much more usable when home devices are properly organized or automated—but doing so is extremely tedious or difficult. When long device lists are not organized by function or room, it is prohibitively difficult to explain how to use these systems to guests, or less technical users. There’s a floor plan add-on[1] for HomeAssistant, but creating a floor plan…
Open source floorplan based home automation seems to be in it's infancy.
As far as I'm aware, even if you have scans of interior floor plans there's no straightforward way to drop and place 2D indicators or icons for devices in respective rooms that can be saved into an openly used format.
I wonder if 3D models in game engines will be the approach that's adopted. Maybe with a top down isomorphic minimap being generated, but otherwise using presence detection to track a person model through a house, starting automation much like game events are triggered by players passing invisible barriers
Re: Show HN: ThingsTwin – 3D House Plan Based UI for Smart Home
#5As someone who works in the professional smart home business and in a comapny with close to 15 years of experience, using "3D" based house plans are usually a waste of resources. In most cases, this leads to the following problems:
- Having to create a 3D house plan from scratch
- Having to add textures, objects to it, as otherwise it would look bland
We only use black/white 2D house plans, which bring all the positive aspects of a house plan without the negative one from 3D, as a flat 2D plan does not need any objects in it to look good.
Here is an example screenshot of my apartment https://i.imgur.com/99qos7l.png
Re: Show HN: ThingsTwin – 3D House Plan Based UI for Smart Home
#6Systems like HomeAssistant or Apple’s Home app seem to become much more usable when home devices are properly organized or automated—but doing so is extremely tedious or difficult. When long device lists are not organized by function or room, it is prohibitively difficult to explain how to use these systems to guests, or less technical users. There’s a floor plan add-on[1] for HomeAssistant, but creating a floor plan…
I haven't used that add-on specifically, but the tooling for making a floor plan is very good these days. SweetHome3D is absolutely brilliant and with only a 5 minute video tutorial to guide them, I'm sure any computer-literate person could grab a tape measure and make a great floor plan of their apartment in less than an hour.
Re: Show HN: ThingsTwin – 3D House Plan Based UI for Smart Home
#7As someone who works in the professional smart home business and in a comapny with close to 15 years of experience, using "3D" based house plans are usually a waste of resources. In most cases, this leads to the following problems: - Having to create a 3D house plan from scratch - Having to add textures, objects to it, as otherwise it would look bland We only use black/white 2D house plans, which bring all the positi…
That screenshot looks on the one hand very useful and on the other hand somewhat user-hostile since you have to build your own mental mapping from the architectural-style floor plan to the rooms in your house without any hints - I can imagine it being much easier to get used to or share with guests if there were sufficient icons or furniture shown in each room to make it obvious which room it is and which direction it's facing without having to consider the measurements and position relative to the other rooms.
Re: Show HN: ThingsTwin – 3D House Plan Based UI for Smart Home
#8As someone who works in the professional smart home business and in a comapny with close to 15 years of experience, using "3D" based house plans are usually a waste of resources. In most cases, this leads to the following problems: - Having to create a 3D house plan from scratch - Having to add textures, objects to it, as otherwise it would look bland We only use black/white 2D house plans, which bring all the positi…
That screenshot looks on the one hand very useful and on the other hand somewhat user-hostile since you have to build your own mental mapping from the architectural-style floor plan to the rooms in your house without any hints - I can imagine it being much easier to get used to or share with guests if there were sufficient icons or furniture shown in each room to make it obvious which room it is and which direction i…
If I were to use the 2d floor plan I’d look at it for a moment, and then I’d flip a couple of lights so that I could tell which room is which. It’s not complicated imo.
Re: Show HN: ThingsTwin – 3D House Plan Based UI for Smart Home
#9As someone who works in the professional smart home business and in a comapny with close to 15 years of experience, using "3D" based house plans are usually a waste of resources. In most cases, this leads to the following problems: - Having to create a 3D house plan from scratch - Having to add textures, objects to it, as otherwise it would look bland We only use black/white 2D house plans, which bring all the positi…
Your floorplan example has very little in the form of indications or metrics, seemingly nothing beyond switch on off status and maybe light intensity level.
I feel like the next frontier for home automation is going to be sensors and monitoring. Early forms of this data gathering being proximity or motion detection for triggering actions such as lights or displays, including thermostats, which also monitor temperatures indoors and from local weather stations. While outlets with power monitoring are available, wall switches don't seem common yet, which is odd as they'd have the awesome application of detecting bulb burnouts. Individually customized replacement bulbs delivered automatically as a service
Air handling seems also like an easy area for improvement, humidity based switching exists, but coordinating bathroom fans exhausting with an intake running can efficiently recycle hot summer air with cool night air. If the fans were somehow reversible, bathrooms could intakes and exhaust on opposite sides of a building, while also monitoring air temps and humidity to detect with thermostats when they've sufficiently cycled through outside air.
Plumbing especially needs innovation, it would be nice if there was accurate flow metering, something ubiquitous you could put on a compression valve supply line that could measure usage, detecting drip leaks and left on taps, ideally with a valve inside for regulating flow. Can we get a power line over plumbing (PLoP) standard?
While not necessarily hard to display in 2D, certain aspects, like building airflow, might require 3D stimulation. It seems like 2D floorplan or walkthrough video to 3D model would be an ideal automation workflow, with generic textures and object models sufficing.
Re: Show HN: ThingsTwin – 3D House Plan Based UI for Smart Home
#10Would be great if this could sit on top of home assistant which is pretty awesome.