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.