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Smartphone ≠ smart home

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Re: Smartphone ≠ smart home

#51

Post by noonespecial »

dangrossman wrote: post #36

Instead of a $99 custom button, what about a sub-$99 Android tablet? You can put them anywhere you'd put the button, and leave your home control app running with the screen set to never turn off. Turning on/off a light with a touch will then be no more effort than flicking a light switch -- there's nothing to take out of your pocket, no waiting for an app to open. This is how my home works. I built the app that runs…

I've had the same thing going for about a year now with some 7" andriod tablets I got from Aliexpress for $45 each. This is absolutely the way to go for smart-home stuff.

I found some fat picture frames at Walmart that attach them to the wall perfectly. Mine have front facing cameras so I used motion sensing to fade them in as you approach them. Its creepy-cool in a good way. Sadly, they don't fade smoothly all the way in from black like an iPad. I'm hoping to upgrade later to jailbroken ipads.

Re: Smartphone ≠ smart home

#52

Post by [deleted] »

coldtea wrote: post #35

> Smart homes are not a thing of the future anymore. Right now, 100 “things” per second are connecting to the internet. By 2020, more than 250 things will connect each second. Probably unpopular in a programming forum, but, aside for people with physical difficulties, did anyone (e.g. more than a few outliers, not literally anyone as in > 0) ever asked for a "smart home"? And before someone replies with the quote abo…

[deleted]

Re: Smartphone ≠ smart home

#53

Post by minthd »

bbcbasic wrote: post #22
compumike wrote: post #13

The connected lightbulb example is great. That's IoT as a novelty; it adds few/trivial new capabilities, and it adds a lot of inconvenience. The flipside of this is IoT as a superpower: finding applications where you can truly use technology to give people a new ability that they didn't have before. From the personal side, this IoT novelty versus superpower discrepancy is something we thought a lot about as we brough…

IoT idea that I would buy: I have solar panels. I need to regulate energy use to be as much during the day as possible (on sunny days) but keep the total load below 3kw at any time (otherwise I need to go to the grid for extra power). Make me a system that can turn on the dishwasher, washing machine, pool pump etc at the right time to minimize my electricity bill. Bonus cred for checking the weather in my exact locat…

It's probably something that needs to be built inside appliances.It's called "demand response"(with relation to coal power, but the same tech should apply for solar power), and there's a big push behind it , including bills.

Re: Smartphone ≠ smart home

#54

Post by seltzered_ »

erohead wrote: post #17
twald wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right. I'm going to talk about them in particular in a follow up post. I wear a pebble as well and I used to use it to control volume. I see smartwatches taking a big place in smart homes. Our issues were that they were not a shared control, you still had to use vision as your primary sensor input, battery life, screen size and problems with connectivity. But I'm confident some of these issues will be resolved…

I like the idea of all of these things working together (phone, Pebble, Flow) to enable people to control their devices with whatever is available.

Yep. I'm really seeing a near-term future of using a touchpad or kinect-like device for control, but more importantly paired with the smartwatch for vibration feedback / engaging into a gesture mode. There's no hard rule that a watch has to only connect to a smartphone.

And if you look at the Apple's acquisition of Primesense (kinect-sensor folks) and upcoming introduction of 'Taptics' into the Apple Watch, my guess is that these things will work together.

I've been trying to prototype this as an experimental addon to my touch plugin thimbleup.com (and sure, I'd love to eventually make it work with Senic Flow too). Testers have noted making continuous gestures/controls need a bit of 'stickiness' to it -- something that makes the gesture feel that if you use it enough, you don't have to rely solely on your eyes. A smartwatch takes care of that if it can manage the battery-life of being a low-latency bluetooth mode to get feedback data quickly,

Re: Smartphone ≠ smart home

#56

Post by dllthomas »

tmuir wrote: post #45
coldtea wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Smartphone controlled anything never feels great to me. If I have to type in code to unlock my keypad, then wait for an app to launch, just to change the temperature on the thermostat, it's already over. For one, newer smartphones will mostly come with fingerprint sensors. So no code typing there. Second, apps launch almost instantly in any recent iOS or Android phone. It's not like you'll wait 1 minute for he app…

Some of the first world problems of HN users using technology are beyond the pale. I was arguing mouse vs remote/phone for playing media on a media server, and someone's retort was that a mouse would require them to have a surface upon which to use the mouse at their couch. I've spent way too much time envisioning this mythical surfaceless couch and person.

I regularly struggle with an optical mouse on my couch or knee, when I need to poke netflix. It's manageable, but it's also annoying.

Re: Smartphone ≠ smart home

#58

Post by VLM »

lucaspiller wrote: post #49
dicroce wrote: post #29

It's 2014 (almost 2015). It's time my house knows to turn the hallway light on FOR me because it's night time and I'm walking in that direction.

Using a system like Z-Wave you can already do this. The problem is that as you need a lighting controller, multiple motion sensors and a base station it's not cheap - mainly due to licensing fees.

"mainly due to licensing fees."

I did that a bit more than decade ago with misterhouse using linux on my basement fileserver and X10 devices. Now I'd use insteon because its transport protocol is more reliable. AFAIK there are no license fees.

The expense is in labor. Set up and aiming IR sensors takes more time than writing the "program" for misterhouse. The inevitable labor expense of troubleshooting and fine tuning is huge. This is the main limiter for my own home automation. In the long run controlling my tropical fish tank and the security sensor lights that light the walk from my garage to the house pays off. My hallway to the bathroom doesn't pay off for labor. I hooked up the basement door sensor and got it to work and still haven't hooked up or automated the basement stairs light yet. Its a labor cost thing.

There are also severe depreciation/lifespan issues... a lot of non-automated hardware is designed, built, installed and paid for on the assumption of a 20-30 year working life. Most of the "new wave" of home automation is built to last till the runway runs out or the aquihire, maybe a year lets say. In the long run that is not going to help the entire market.

Re: Smartphone ≠ smart home

#59

Post by VLM »

twald wrote: post #6
jsnk wrote: post #2

"We believe that the future of smart homes will not be found in a centralized device but in an integrated combination of screens, speech recognition, sensors, dedicated devices and smart surfaces." I think the latter part of the sentence unintentionally describes smartphones. I would say that today's smartphones are integrated combination of screens, speech recognition, sensors, dedicated devices and smart surfaces.…

Hey, one of the founders here. When we talk about integrated, we're talking about sensors integrated in the materials like tables and walls around us. It does not mean that all of these components should be integrated in one device. I did not phrase this well enough. Thanks! I agree that we want a centralized intelligence. I personally don't want to carry my smartphone around all the time though. We can't we use what…

"I personally don't want to carry my smartphone around all the time though"

There is an interesting cultural phenomena where a significant fraction of the population agrees with us, and another significant fraction thinks we're completely crazy, and the two groups do not believe the opposite party exists.

Re: Smartphone ≠ smart home

#60

Post by uptown »

bbcbasic wrote: post #23
twald wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't be possibly talking about a light switch, right? :) That's exactly what I'm talking about. I want something as simple as a light switch to control the colors of my lifx, Hue or control my sonos speakers.

You need a light bulb that listens to you. "LIFX BLUE PLEASE!!" you yell, and so it is.

I prefer: "Aziz! Light!"
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