Lock Stock and Barrel!

Come August, I may be in a new address. And I am planning to have an August Lock at the entry.

Why? Does it's great looks got to do anything with it? Yes, but that's not all. But before going there,  let me explain what it is.

Door lock automation is an integral part of my home automation vision. I was offered a Yale lock by my automation person with a large desk phone type viewer which will allow me to speak to the person at the door and then release the lock with a button pressed on it. This will mean that the console will be kept at one place and instead of running to the door when the bell rings, I have to run to the console, talk to the person and then may be run to the door! Not my kind of automation.

Off late many companies have come up with wireless door locks which can talk to your smart phones. Goji, Kwickset are few of them. My focus initially was fully on Goji.

Thats when I came across August Lock. A well designed product. Further reading rocked me through tides of interest as people showered them with praise and gripe. There was a huge lag in the schedule and people were loosing faith. And I was not sure how soon I can get my hands on one.

Then they put it on Apple store! I am thrilled to bits to initiate a purchase on the product!

Why didn't I go for the other products? For Kwickset, the only reason was that it was a single unit against a plug in on to an existing deadbolt assembly in case of Goji and August. This meant that when I have some issue with the deadbolt, I will be in trouble being in India to get it sorted out even if the actual automated door opening part is still intact. I have seen in personal experience that  many a times in India you end up calling a carpenter/locksmith to fix a jammed door bolt. I would not want him to come and play with a geeky gadget!

Goji was focusing on a little more than lock automation. It was trying to be your door lock and your video phone. I had issues with that approach. For example, the angle and height a camera should be at according to me is different from that of a lock! Especially if I plan to keep a porch light above!

Another issue was it was costing a bit more than the August!

Anyway, will keep this updated (Not any time soon though:-( as the door where it should go is still in logs!)

iDAPT Charging station

I had been thinking of finding a way to cleanly keep my iOS devices to charge. Wires used to run all around the headboard of my bed and there used to a tussle on who gets the USB plug when! I have 2 iPhones and one Sony Xperia and one iPad always fighting it out for their charging slot in a slightly skewed round robin protocol run at home.
Rajesh, my ever considerate cousin had been telling me about a universal charger  he had left at some place for me but never could really go and pick it up. When he told me about it, what was in my mind was a wore with tentacles that you normally get to see under this name. Finally I got my hands on the package.
It was a charging station called iDAPT. With replaceable charging tips which can be popped into the unit, it came with 2 32 pin tips, 1 Lightning pin tip(!) two micro USB tip, and 1 Mini USB tip. With three slots and 1 USB port on it, the charging station just covered all that I had!

Initially I tried to balance the iPad on the second 32 pin tip I had, but soon realized it was not meant to be. the USB port will allow me to connect the cord and lay the iPad safe on the table top.

Now the table is clean, we have couple of additional USB plugs freed up and the room looks much cleaner!

Thanks Rajesh!

Apple iPhone 6 Plus Apple Watch

Apple had its event launching iPhone and Apple Watch. I had to rely on the live blog to get most of it live, as my Apple TV and iPad refused to show me anything watchable:-( But I was going to talk about the launch.

The iPhone did not have anything earth shattering as I was afraid. But  having waited with my 4S until its life's end (When Apple stops giving you the OS upgrade, its almost time for you to move on if you ask me:-) it was still something to hear about. A better battery life, they said, and that is good! My reading is, this is the lull before the storm, OS 8 going to bring you! The fun will start when people start using the iOS 8 features to integrate many things into the Apple environment. Then, the speed and performance enhancement other wise just a matter of statistics now will be interesting!

Watch did not disappoint. It did not thrill me yet either! A remote on my wrist is great to have, and that is done quite well by Apple. The covering of watch face to silence the phone and the tap gesture to guide you on a walk is a nice one, will be greatly appreciated by people with special needs and others too!

Once again, in itself, Apple Watch and iPhone 6 does not excite me the way some of the other launches did in  past. But the prospect of these with new iOS 8 is really interesting.

Lets see what the future has in store!

Update:I heard a news on HealthKit that its having some issues and the apps are pulled out the last minute due to that. I hope this will be sorted out quickly.
iOS8 seems to have brought song recognition! And it seems to be working great too. I am yet to update my OS so more on iOS 8 Later!

WD TV Live, Sonos and Music Heaven

My weekend project was to set the distributed music using Sonos and some NAS.
So I hooked my Sonos to my home network and it beautifully played music from the services available. But unfortunately the services it offered had hardly any regional music originals I would want to play. It had some radio stations which did not cater to my taste.

So I plugged in my Drobo on the Airport Extreme and renamed the hub to a single string name and made sure the disk share was fine as explained in here. The disk appeared in the Sonos Server settings and I was hopping with excitement! But that did not last too long.

The music on the Drobo never appeared in the Sonos application. Also the music streaming also became suddenly impaired. It kept on giving me timeout error(1000). I thought it must be because Sonos is busy building my index. So I waited for two days,  Nothing really happened. So I reset the Sonos and decided to start all over again.

This time after setting the Drobo share, I thought I should try the disk on the WD TV Live already connected up and available on the same network. Now the question was how do I access the disk on WD TV Live? Some writeup was talking about WDTV hub and I took a cue from it and created a share using wdtvlive as the name of server and the name shown in WD TV live as the disk name. No user name and password and it just connected up and said it will be indexing now. (This message did not appear when I connected my Drobo share.)

Sure enough, I left it running for the day and by evening all my music was available on the Sonos!
It tried to import some already created playlists but I could not find any useful ones I had. But no worries, I quickly searched up the name of artists and created the playlist for the quick start. (One point to note here, the search gives you multiple results for most of the artist searches depending if they are solo or duets etc. So you have to add each of those into your playlist if you have to have all of them under the same name.-You can do this to the other person in the artist list also so that the same set appears both places- And when you do it, you have to watch for the "more" shown on top right of the list  since by default under each category of search, Sonos displays only a limited set.)

Time well spent! My distributed music Proof of concept is in place!

An Update: Incidentally to watch the Apple event flawless, I had turned off the WD TV and without realizing that,  the next day morning I opened up Sonos player and played the song list and it started playing without a blink! Interesting. So looks like even when your WDTV is turned on by the remote, the file server functionality continue to be working for Sonos to treat it as a NAS!

Home automation integration

Picking from where I left off on HomeKit, I was reading up on smarthome hubs from different vendors including some from Belkin and Revolv and Smart things. What I was kind of drawn to was revolv as it looked more promising.

Revolv had its own game to integrate different workflows. People had reviewed it and gave it a hard time saying that the device do not integrate the applications which control each of the devices effectively. What some were expecting is that revolv will give you an all encompassing application which will allow you to access every feature of all the appliances it can interact with! That is not practical and I am happy Revolv is not trying to achieve it. Idea is to make sure the most common workflows that need to be integrated between devices are addressed and the piping is laid to connect them up. A T Joint or an LJoint is not supposed to give you a shower head:-)

I am not sure what the product gives, as I do not want to plunge using it and later  regret it. Being not in US, I have logistic issues procuring devices and later if I have to return it, it becomes a problem. There is not much information on the net to convince me for or against it.

I have plunged in  still with lesser guaranteed products and why am I holding off on this? Its because I have my eyes set on what Apple's Homekit has to offer!

Apple has all that it needs to give me this functionality by providing it all on the stack of HomeKit! Each individual appliances can come to table to shake hands on HomeKit and the workflow will work smoothly! This puts the onus on the appliances to make sure they act well on the interface than on a product like Revolv to tweak their code each time any one of the devices think different!

So I am betting my money on HomeKit. So wait, August Lock, wait, Hue lights, wait, dropcam. Till end of the year for the Homekit!

Roomba, Another pawn in the big plan!

After lot of debate and deliberation within, I have procured the Roomba 880 few days back. Some of the major concerns I have was sourcing components part of ongoing usage and practical performance of the product in Indian conditions.

When the first concern is yet to be fully addressed, my test run did not disappoint from  results perspective. My 6 year old could feel the difference, and so did my better half. Thats  a good sign.

It picked up a lot of stuff from under the cot, in a small room, it roamed around for a good 20 mins and stopped before it covered one strip beyond the foot board. I suspect that the algorithm got confused roaming around under the bed and bumping on to the foot board. A small issue, since I had to re point him to the strip which he is yet to take care of and he promptly set off to take care of it. Lesser problem than  what we have with the current maid!

So overall I am pretty happy with the splurge. I will be using it once a week. So will keep you folks posted with any new findings I do.

BTW, I liked the remote. You have to keep pressing the button to keep it moving in a direction, but, may be that's a good thing that you accidentally do not run him over wrong places.

Drobo and WD TV

Yesterday after a few days of contemplation, I decided to connect up my Drobo to the WD TV Live and check. I was shying away from the possibility of that not working together:-)

So hooked up the Drobo to the WD TV and plugged in the power and went to work in  the morning. Evening when I came back, I turned on the power and changed the channel of the TV to show up the WD Screen.

All good so far!

WD started indexing the contents almost immediately. I do not remember what format I had done to the file system on Drobo, but I have three bays of hard disks with more than 4 TB utilized. This happened at around 7:00PM

The indexing was going on when today morning I turned on the screen to WD. I could see some pictures and movies when the indexing was going on.

Hopefully,  evening when I go back home, the indexing will be done and I will have  the full browse view option for the media! Anyway, next step will be to hook up the Sonos and see how the audio from the Drobo can be played by Sonos, Wireless!

Update:7/3/2014
Yesterday evening also the indexing was continuing. But I had to restart the Drobo and the WD due to external factors. And after this, the Drobo is not being recognized! I am not sure if there is any issue with the Drobo since I could connect another USB stick and get it recognized. Now there are some pointers on the net how to tackle these kind of issues and I am hoping it will work!

Update:7/14/2014
As per the pointers I deleted the WD files and disabled Media scanning, now its recognizing the disk. So that is good news. I am yet to try playing the media from Sonos. Will have to try it.