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.

Sonos and WD TV

Monday I got my shipment of Sonos and WD TV. 6 Sonos Play 1 speakers and one WD TV box. Thanks to my cousins bought it, carried it back here from states via Bangalore! It was really heavy and a hassle to carry when you are travelling. Kudos!

I opened the same day and started the setup. That is when surprisingly my Airport Extreme refused to accept connections, may be because the internet connection  was down(?!) and the Sonos needed a WiFi Connection  to try. I took just one speaker and the WD box and a pile of wires (Each Sonos Speaker came with a Network cable and a power cable) and moved to Sister's house next doors where I could try  the connection.

Plugged in the Sonos both to the power and the internet and used the downloaded Sonos app, and the Radio was playing right away! Nice clarity, very low Bass. (My nephew put on their Boss speakers next to it and played one of his Yanni collection and the drums were very subdued on the Sonos! Means, I did not impress him much!- Bummer!)

Then I moved to the WD setup. The WD also got connected to the WiFi easily,  the app was simple and useful, once again,  cool start. Went around on  some Picassa old pictures(Nice recall!) But some video I guess hung up the WD. May be it was trying to download the video and play as Apple TV does, but there was no indication of what was going on. May be the net was slow or unreliable too. Anyway, it did not allow me to exit or break off from the wait. I had to physically unplug! Not a very good thing! Hope it does not happen all the time!

Then wanted to play some more songs on Sonos and realized Airplay does not work out of the box. I have to connect my Airport Express to enable that! But I can always play the music provided I have Sonos app on the device. Audio streaming from any app will not work though.

The remote quickly disconnected when I moved away from the speakers. The WiFi did not help it to hold on. I hope with multi room Speaker setup, I will have a better experience with different Sonos holding on to the connection.

Another concern I had was how do I play all my music collection lying on an external HDD via Sonos? Will I have to have the Computer on to do this? From the reading I did, it looks like WD and Sonos combination will be the answer to it. WD exposes a connected HDD as a NAS drive. And Sonos can be configured to play from the NAS. Have I tried it yet? Nope. That will be the project for the week. If that works, I will have my distributed music project complete.

What is the backup plan? I will have to get a Sonos Bridge and connect up the WD directly to it and then use that to stream the music.

Continuity matters

Before I got my first Mac, I had noticed a feature in Mac OS where I can take the call from Mac instead of the phone, provided I have the bluetooth connection. But then iPhone happened and this feature disappeared from the OS. By the time I got my Mac, it was no where to be seen.

Then couple of vendors came with this as a tool and it did not quite work well for me. I ended up buying one of them and soon the guy closed shop! And it always been a thorn in the flesh for me.

The reason behind it was because I wanted to keep my phone some place and still be able to take my calls on any other device which ever is accessible to me.

It was very nice to know  that the feature is back and with a bang! Its called Continuity now. I am really looking forward to this.

The phone calls may finally end up in my Apple TV also if I choose to, provided I can route the calls as airplay/hand off into AppleTV and continue using my iOS device Mic. This will work well when you want to use the home theater as a big hand free call. A simple integration to Apple TV to popup caller ID on screen will be big plus!

Continuity does not stop at handing off calls. When you work on something on one device, and you move your location and context and you want to shift to another device, Continuity promise to make it a cake walk!

Even though not called in under the continuity umbrella, I feel that one other feature worth mentioning is the ability to airplay without connecting the Apple TV to the network! This makes a lot of sense since now I can play from any network I am in into Apple TV without switching to just be in the same network as Apple TV!

You can get the full feature details Here. I like the way Apple is letting you move between applications and devices quickly by bringing them closer. (Notification Center, Apps to share data)

Homekit and Healthkit

In yesterday's WWDC, Apple launched two major things, Homekit and Healthkit. There had been a lot of time spent on other items like Yosemite and Hand off and other features, but I felt that the most disruptive of the announcements yesterday was these two. Why do I feel so?

There had been solutions for measuring your BP, for measuring heart beat, for measuring movements and activity and the like. (Nike Plus and Fuel band etc). And similarly there had been applications for controlling a lot of your appliances in using smart phone.

But all that remained in silos and never talked to each other. Having an opportunity to have all of these synchronized into one place and to orchestrate these into useful workflows is a major leap in iOS eco system.

The home automation and personal health are seemingly disparate areas but have some common touch points. When some one elderly wakes up in night and have to grope for switch, if the lights can come on, and when someone who needs attention wakes up and you are intimated about that immediately, it can result in a lot of useful usecases.

I am sure, someone will come up with, if not Apple in its Watch, a technology to measure your Vitals and identify your mood, and say sensing your are panicking may call some SOS contact you have on your phone or message them with your location, without you lifting a single finger!

Or you walk into the home tired, your home senses that, also remembers what you did last time when you were down, (Like drink a cup of coffee and slump into the couch to watch the TV) and reacts to the situation accordingly. The home can really come alive around you!

HDMI:A Home theatre perspective

I am not technically competent to comment about the quality of HDMI vs some other technology. But HDMI combines the audio and video connection into one, which takes away a lot of clutter behind the Entertainment center, especially with so many devices occuping the rack these days, Blue ray player, Media player, Some game center, Apple TV/ Roku/Amazon Fire to name a few.

The real challenge though, comes when you want to conceal wiring. The HDMI connectors are big and a conduit to pass these later, will have to be equally big, mostly to a level of being prohibiting. Unlike many other connectors, you cannot crimp/end the HDMI on your own according to experts. Another limitation is HDMI does not work well for beyond 25-50 Feet.

A lot of google later, I found that there are few alternatives available.
1. You can have a Mini HDMI to HDMI conversion connectors at both the ends and the cable concealed can have a Mini HDMI both the ends.I haven't found the challenges in this yet, but something tells me, this is not a good solution
2. There are Faceplate pairs available with HDMI female ports exposed to the front and back. The HDMI female port behind the plate, you can connect using a cable laid inside the conduit. This will work if the conduit size is not a concern for you as you are required to still pass the fat end of HDMI to be passed through the conduit first. Just that the external connection part does not have to bother you.
3. You can have a conversion between HDMI and Cat6 or Cat5 cable and use that as the middle tier. There are converter face plates as well as devices which does this for you. They are called "Balun". There are Baluns with or without power supply.

When you evaluate all these options, one thing you have to keep in mind is what kind of digital content are you planning to transmit. Is it 3D, Full HD or just 1080i? The HDMI connectivity is not just the same across. There is something called Highspeed HDMI which is required to transmit the 3D content or Full BlueRay content. Else there will be a degradation of quality across. Again, I am not sure if the 3D will stop working all together if you use a lower spec HDMI or it will just loose the impact, but one should know there is such a difference before plunging in to buy one of these solutions. Somewhere its said that its better to buy a powered balun since this will ensure reduced loss in transmission and better quality.

So I am off now to educate my Automation consultant on these because, I think he has not considered the connection between the Media center and TV as his head ache or he is planning to have some channel disguised as something else to be there as an eye sour to take care of this!