Two peas of the same Pod

 Its been quite a while I had written anything here. I have added few more things into my collection and have few more things to talk about from the last time. The major change had been in my media room. So let me start with that. The rest can wait for another post.

I had a rather large setup for my media room with two tower speakers, two surround speakers, one front speaker and a subwoofer all from mordaunt short. There was a Yamaha Receiver with Dolby Atmos. There was an Xbox Kinect one with camera. Apple TV 4K. A Harmony Hub. A projector from EPSON. All these console items were shelved in a rather bulky shelf custom made. 

I bought an LG TV sometime back with 4K OLED and that made me stop using the projector all together. But, The media components continue to stay where it was rarely used, but still there.

Apple introduced their HomePod and later the HomePod mini. I was not paying attention until one day a friend of mine had some challenges connecting back him HomePod mini back to his network. He wanted me to check it at home. I brought the apple sized speaker and it could connect to my network. But the punch it packed in the small size impressed me.

Some time later, HomePod was taken off from the shelves and recently it was re introduced as HomePod 2. Though not convinced to use it as a media speaker, I scouted many review sites and saw the kind of reviews it was getting.

Finally, buckled to the temptation, I got a pair of white and black HomePod 2. Paired them up and connected to the Apple TV and it rather impressed me with the sound!

I got rid of all the media room clutter finally and replaced it with these two tiny speakers and they are filling the room.

Note: One small glitch is that the hand off do not seem to work yet. I will update when I find out why.

Roaming eye

Arlo was a product I had looked at and dropped as a security option. It came back to my radar recently as my neighbur got one. I too got one, thanks to him for getting it from his US trip.

The beauty of the product is that its a set of wireless cameras which you can mount on a magnetic mount, which means you can move it around as you need it. The alert system worked great and the experience was thrilling.

Soon came a point when the batteries ran out of juice and I had to recharge. Thats when the netgear did not add up to my expectation. The batteries never charged properly. One refused to charge and the other ran out of power much faster than the initial cycle.

I had kept it for charging for more than 8 hours to make sure it charges fully, but the status quo continues. I am left with two unreliable cameras which otherwise showed great promise!

I am really disappoijted at this point!

Bringing in Harmony

Recently gave in to the temptation to get Harmony Remote Hub. I had burned my hand on OneRemote as an early adapter, a battery devouring Bluetooth Universal remote with a pathetic Mobile Application. I hardly ever could use it effectively. And that had been back of my mind when ever I thought of universal remotes.

What harmony reviews told me is once the Harmony is setup, it just works like a charm. And I learned that it has integration with other pieces I have in Home automation arena and an integration with IFTTT and Smart Things was the major motivation to finally leave the deck.

And the reviews also forewarned me about the nightmare of setting up the device. I conveniently ignored that and ordered it on Amazon. Few days later the Hockey puck was sitting on my table and I was staring at it!

True to the advice from reviewers on net, setting up the device was a nightmare in a way I did not expect. My TV and Receiver got set up in matter of minutes as the make and model number was available. But then the trouble started.

It said that it supports Airtel DTH Box, the drop down to select the device had Airtel, but there was no clue what I had to enter as the specific Model number. The Airtel Box comes with no Model number none what so ever. So back to google looking for some clue. People told me there are no easy way around, I have to enter each key one after the other! But the continued research paid off. I found that I should enter HD DVR! Thanks Dhillon!

Then it was easy. I could also add the channel logos also for the workflows so that when I choose the icon, the channel is selected.

The icing on the cake was there was an IFTTT integration with Harmony which I could use so that when I tell Alexa (Amazon Echo) "Alexa, trigger Asianet", My TV and Settop box and Receiver align to play Asianet!

I am yet to do a full set up as I have postponed it until I move to my new abode, I will some day update about that, hopefully soon!

Echoing Amazon

I landed my Amazon Echo a couple of weeks back. Not an item which was in my automation landscape. I had couple of other items which were to take its place. But then Alexa started talking to my smartthings and what not!

So long story short, I got my Alexa. And What I loved about it is the way it could understand me and do things quickly. Being hands free, its a very useful assistant!
I could load 250 songs from my collection and Alexa could play any of them without much issue. She understands Mohammed Rafi and Yesudas! I can get a lot of songs from iHeartRadio. And who knows I might even buy the Music subscription and load up all my songs there. Time consuming it is, I might still do it.

I could also listen to Regional news from Manorama online thanks to the skills she has.

My main challenge had been that I cannot set the Location or time zone to India. So I cannot easily set an alarm to wake me up (What?) and I cannot listen to local weather unless I be more specific. I cannot add an activity to my calendar unless I do some math and adjust the time either. I am not sure why these skills cannot be enabled world wide by Alexa team because they must be pretty easy to do. This will help US Customers also to travel with their Alexa! Even if we have uber here in India I am OK not to ask for that until Alexa is available world wide!

I have already packed and kept My smart things until I move into the new house so the Smart things integration is yet to be checked. But I am sure it will work like a charm!

I am eagerly looking for Smappee skills to come up on Alexa! It would be fun to ask Alexa what today's power consumption is or who was the largest consumer of power today etc.

Being Synological

I have a drobo 4 bay Raid storage for some time. Recently I came across a NAS solution called Synology. What attracted me to it is the fact that it can host an array of servers on it including apache tomcat.

After some deliberation, I decided to take the plunge. I ordered a DS 416j (did not want to go for a + for the cost and also the fact that mostly the technology will change by the time I run out of the capability of the 416j anyway)

I had been setting this guy up for some time now. I had decided to reuse the disks I had in drobo and it meant I had to pull out disks off Drobo and  add it here. Before that I had to copy some data off the drobo so that I will have enough space to safely pull out a disk. I did it finally. And to Drobo's credit, after a full night of flashing orange lights, it moved back to greens! Phew!

Copying had been a bit slow, but no complains. I had the Drobo connected to the Synology and I kicked off the copying. After two days of continuous copying and shifting of the disks, I have the data mostly copied to the NAS.

The indexing is a long and slow process, and its still going on. But who is in a hurry? With all that heavy lifting happening at the background, I am still able to stream video over WiFi into my iPad2 and play!

The SONOS which was sometimes stuttering when music was being played from Drobo is just playing  without no hiccups. And the Audio Player of Synology is able to play the music to SONOS or an airplay device without any issues.

Another plus point of the Synology is that it can be accessed from internet using the QuickConnect. I do not have to worry about the port forwarding and stuffs like that anymore! I have setup some cloud and installed the clients on the iOS devices. Now I guess I can easily copy files around!

There are couple of things I am to try is configuring the asterisk server (Yes, they have that also available on the NAS!) and Node.JS server so that I can control SONOS using the Node.JS Scripts I had located some time back. That will be a boost to the Automation plan I have overall!

Anyway, as it stands, my decision is vindicated!

Notes:
After using Synology for a week plus now, I have just couple of notes. Put this guy on UPS. You do not want him to shut down during a power failure. There are UPSs which are compatible with the Synology that Synology can safely shutdown when your UPS is low. Why I am saying this is because when you have RAID setup, each time a power shut down happens like this, the system will have to check for consistency across the RAID and this is a time consuming process and can reduce the system performance. I could still play video on iPad when this was happening, though.

One of my HDD crashed after shifting to Synology and could not recover still. I will be trying to format it some place outside once and will try to mount once again. Looks like there are quite a few bad sectors on it. Else I will have to replace it with a higher capacity volume.

I haven't setup the Asterisk on the machine yet as most of the terminology on it went right above my head. If someone can point me to some place where I can effectively set this up as a in house extension to start with, it will be great. I would also like to have the mobiles hooked on Bluetooth to Synology so that I can call out and receive.

Surveillance station had challenges in setting up as the Samsung Securecam HD Pro did not connect by default. The camera is listed in the compatible ones but it did not work. So I had to set it up as an OTHER camera and then it worked. But the two way audio is not working here. I am mainly using it to record events.

Media playback is working great. Now since its available all across the devices, it has increased the usability of the media.

Over all still a happy camper!


NB: Recently upgraded to DSM 6.x and noticed that Asterisk is on its way out.  Synology note says as the support from open community for askterisk is withdrawn, its no longer being provided in Synology from 6.x or something to that effect. Point being, if you are planning to move beyond 6, plan not having Askterisk.

Smappee and Happee!

I had plunged and got the Smppee power meter device (Described in another post) and had been using it for some time now.

Let me start with what I was not quite happy about:-) The device when shipped to India got slapped with a hefty customs duty and that spiked up the price much! Secondly the IFTTT integration is not working in a snappee:-) That, probably covers all the negatives!

The device could quickly connect to the WiFi and started reporting current usage right away. It also kept telling how much more or less power I am using each time I turned on or off any device. I had some fun walking around house switching on and off devices!

No devices got recognized immediately. Even when there were large chunk of power drawn by the geyser and microwave it did not immediately report it as a device detected. I communicated that concern to the support team (BTW, I had been bothering them constantly and they had been patiently responding to every comment I had raised. Hats off to them!) and they told me that is expected and it will take some time for the device to identify it as a DNA and isolate devices. And so it did!

Couple of days down the line, it identified my microwave and one by one it found few more. As I am not  keen in mapping all the devices right now as this is a temporary address for me, I have left it after 4 or 5 devices were identified.

I also tried my hand creating a IFTTT workflow for it. When the power shoots up beyond 1KW, I wanted my Hue bulb to light up and it did light up. Unfortunately the latency was too much, like 2-5 minutes or more at times! Is this a workflow that should have immediate response, may be not. But my Hue bulb lit up after the Geyser was turned off instead of when it was turned on!

Overall, its still a wealth of information in its charts, and in its local alerts which keeps popping up on the app. Also even on 3G, it kept reporting the current power usage kind of real time. That was cool!

Today, I have a net outage at home and had to come to office to do my work. I have the Smappee app on to see if it started reporting the real time power usage to know if my network is back! Now that is the kind of trust I have on the device on the reporting!

A week into Automatic

Automatic is a small device that connects to the OBD port of the computer and reads in data from the automobile. I managed to get one from US and was planning to use it in India.

Package arrived safe in my hand and then things started falling apart a bit. The first problem was that the app was only available in US App Store for iOS. I had to create an account there and then get the app downloaded.

Then I connected the device and started setting it up, and when I reached a point where it reads the comp on board of my car, it popped up a message, VIN could not be decoded. Manual option of entering the VIN also did not move it any further, The Setup was stuck at that point and I could make any progress further. I came to a sad realization at that point that the device was meant to US only:-(

Plunging into the User groups, I came across a suggestion from their support head that I can request to bypass this! I immediately shot a mail to the id and got a response back in a day that yes, its possible, but some of the features won't work in India, Like the emergency response and Fuel pricing and Units like Kilometer and Liter instead of the US standard of Miles and Gallons

I was OK with that. So she took some basic info from me in the vehicle and set up my VIN in their system and next time, I tried the setup, all went well!

So now I have it setup and using the Apple Maps, it reports the route I drove, the mileage I got, also rates me on the kind of driving I did, as in any sudden breaks or any sudden acceleration.

Its really cool ride as of now! I have couple of additional features I had in mind, like if it can report if my A/C is on  or not, and for how long, because that gives another aspect to what the load on  the system due to the A/C. And I understand the device probably have a Gyroscope in it, else the Phone definitely has one, and some qualifier on the kind of bumpy ride if I have one, also will be an added data that will be of interest.

When the Phone is not in the car, linked to the system, the Geo positioning goes for a toss a bit, I have my maps offset from the real trip I took for the initial few days when the connectivity was at fault. May be because it could not effectively locate the current position as well as the Phone can.

Also I am not sure how to add more tags to the trip if I choose to, may be to group all my trips organized well.

The kind lady at support also told me that there is a Beta program going to come up later and if I am interested, I can be invited! I hope that will have some of these things considered along with the regional change of units.

I am very happy about the device as of now, it just goes into the background and does all the reading for me and puts in a simple chart in the phone for me to look at. I hope new features will get added to make it more useful by the time the novelty wears off:-)

Thanks team and thanks for the prompt support!

Just to add couple of points,
I have now set up the IFTTT link and is getting all my trip details loaded into an evernote note! Thats cool!

I miss the information about the Fuel level in the app. I believe it is retrievable? If it is, it will definitely a value add.
As mentioned above, an ability to tag the trip as some specific one, will be of great use. And then when I complete a trip in the same route, if it can prompt me with the same name, it will be awesome!
I noticed that the Automatic Dashboard was not working for me in Chrome and IE. It worked well on Firefox though.
Ability to define the local fuel price, and local units, I believe will be there in the Asian version?
And Geo location is also a bit off at times, though I do not hold it too much against the team. It may be a good idea though then to give an option to drag the map around a bit:)