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Netflix Switch – dim lights, turn on the TV, order food, and silence your phone

makeit.netflix.com

61–70 of 91 posts

Re: Netflix Switch – dim lights, turn on the TV, order food, and silence your phone

#61
post #33
post #2

It's really great to see a company's engineers given the time and resources to do some fun tech project like this. Sometimes it seems like unless a project is about directly increasing revenue, its incredibly difficult to get buy-in from management. These projects are great for culture.

Netflix seems like a great company to work for. Recommend reading Reed Hasting's presentation on their culture: http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664

sounds like a bunch of platitudes with a lot of HR speak (a lot of which I REALLY disagree with)

And for having the "top talent" they have little to show for it on the technical side

Re: Netflix Switch – dim lights, turn on the TV, order food, and silence your phone

#64

We're in the golden age of DIY home automation. Wifi-enabled microcontrollers like the particle photon are a game changer; it's never been easier to make a connected device yourself. Using the Photon I've built a device that connects to my doorbell and sends a push notification to my mobile when someone rings. (Might be useful when you're in the back yard and don't want to miss the delivery guy) Yes, most of the stuf…

I agree and disagree with you at the same time. IoT, especially with things like the Photon and ESP8266 are major game changers. However, the idea of a baked-in WiFi stack with little/no way to update protocol bugs is rather scary proposition. And I'm also against giving IoT devices a directly routable IP address, even if they are behind a NAT.

I'm looking more at things like the nRF24L01+ board combined with MySensors, which seems to be rather mature. It is a self-healing mesh network with encryption and signing support. And I can get all the data from the net mesh with a serial gateway (inputs/outputs via USB serial). I can connect that gateway to a Linux machine running Node-red and use the MySensors encoder/decoder.

Hook up a relay and you can toggle electronics on and off, or you can make a manual high voltage switch using a servo and 4 contact switches. I'm also using PIR for occupancy along with temp sensors for zone acquisition. I'm looking at developing my own thermostat as well to see if I have the chops..

Re: Netflix Switch – dim lights, turn on the TV, order food, and silence your phone

#65
post #56

This can already be achieved with Flic: http://flic.io Flic is a Bluetooth button which uses your smartphone to communicate with smart electronics. If you have Philips Hue or LIFX smart lights and a Logitech Harmony Hub (for IR), this would work straight out of the box! (Disclaimer: I am associated with Flic)

Does that require a phone nearby at all times?

Re: Netflix Switch – dim lights, turn on the TV, order food, and silence your phone

#66

This is great and I love it but If the Raspberry Pi had a netflix client this would be amazing.

You can still do the same thing with OSMC and piratebay.

The only, I repeat, ONLY reason why RasPi doesn't "support" netflix is because of DRM. The media files would easily play. So instead of downloading the file each time you want to watch it (netflix), download it our your HD and watch it from there. It's the comparison between O(n*constant) and O(constant).

When you get OSMC up and running, you can add in hooks for node-red. The flowchart for button->actions should be simple to set up.

Re: Netflix Switch – dim lights, turn on the TV, order food, and silence your phone

#67
post #56

This can already be achieved with Flic: http://flic.io Flic is a Bluetooth button which uses your smartphone to communicate with smart electronics. If you have Philips Hue or LIFX smart lights and a Logitech Harmony Hub (for IR), this would work straight out of the box! (Disclaimer: I am associated with Flic)

Does that require a phone nearby at all times?

I'd also be interested in this. Would love such a button that could connect via WiFi or generic BT on a Raspberry Pi or something like that, rather than a smartphone with a specific app.

Re: Netflix Switch – dim lights, turn on the TV, order food, and silence your phone

#68
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix seems like a great company to work for. Recommend reading Reed Hasting's presentation on their culture: http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664

sounds like a bunch of platitudes with a lot of HR speak (a lot of which I REALLY disagree with) And for having the "top talent" they have little to show for it on the technical side

Little to show for it? What percentage of total Internet traffic would you estimate that Netflix handles at 9PM eastern on a Friday night?

Re: Netflix Switch – dim lights, turn on the TV, order food, and silence your phone

#69
post #52
post #50

Speaking of which, do food APIs exist? I've often been tempted to make a generic pizza API that — by limiting options — will deliver a pizza to almost any address via Just-Eat or whatever is local to you.

Haven't really seen any food api's. It would be cool if it did exist though.. But I don't think Just-Eat like services will bite since you'll be driving traffic away from their website..

Away? I would probably use them via screen-scraping. However whilst they would be getting the order, they wouldn't be gaining the end-customer as I would be proxying that.

Re: Netflix Switch – dim lights, turn on the TV, order food, and silence your phone

#70
post #52
post #50

Speaking of which, do food APIs exist? I've often been tempted to make a generic pizza API that — by limiting options — will deliver a pizza to almost any address via Just-Eat or whatever is local to you.

Haven't really seen any food api's. It would be cool if it did exist though.. But I don't think Just-Eat like services will bite since you'll be driving traffic away from their website..

I think Seamless offers an API: http://www.seamless.com/business-development/
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