Thus Spoke the Hub

Home automation is getting to be really busy and there is a large paradigm shift happening from web cams focused to Artificial Intelligence centered solutions. Many hubs are in Kickstarter, (Including one called Homie from India:) The last one I saw was really interesting, giving the Home a personality of its own. And why not?

Cubic is a Russian origin solution which extends Amazon Echo further to the Activity domain also.  And since its not distracted by a different motivation, its more apt to be open.

Its in the very early stages of development and a lot is to be seen. Nothing is expected till end of 2016 mainly, But I have a lot of interest in this tool. With their Watch working as the badge and some good home hub working as the cube,  Apple is well poised to thrill me the same way. Apple, are you watching?

Ninja Sphere and Automation Hub

Ninja Sphere is a home automation hub allowing you to interact with Voice and wave of hand. A learner, it is said to adapt to your needs.

That is good. I am very pleased with its cool looks,(All that I have seen in pictures alone, alas!) With the integration other Wireless devices at home, security ones and media ones, it can provide you a good amount of use case coverage.

One challenger to the throne was from Revolv which is bought and killed by Goodle now. (Why would google kill it? They will mostly club its technology with the Android TV and their automation ambitions and launch one or two products I guess)

Question that remains is, will Apple update their Apple TV to work as a hub for Home automation. And if and when they do it, will they make it really worth the wait?

The success of the implementation will depend a lot on the reliability of the system, as when people want to depend on the automated workflow, it should just work.

Taking the example of the universal remote at home, I took a lot of pain in mapping the buttons of remotes but that seemed to be a never ending process. It invariably happens that the button I need to press will be one that I am yet to map:-) And it became so complicated that end of the day I never used it. Where as the apps of each individual appliance still was usable for me with just one phone at hand. Now, Homekit is planning to do what universal remote did for individual remotes.

That being the case, I understand that all the functions of the individual appliances will not be taken over by Homekit and mostly it will unify the generic functions so that we can string them together. That is what a home automation should aim to achieve else it will become too tied to the products each has.

Apple has Siri with them already and should enable them  to execute some of the workflows with voice. Provided Siri works perfectly. I do not know about folks in the states, here in India, I have issues with the performance of Siri. It takes a bit of time to respond and many times I get a response, "I am unable to help right now"

All being done, we may not be able to do away with the remotes as there could be less tech savvy people who will feel comfortable doing things the old way. They will not want to watch the movie on the home theater but they would definitely want to listen to music or watch the TV and their daily doze of soap. This will leave couple of remotes still on the coffee table, but I do hope, for the rest of us, we can still ask Siri to start the show some time soon.

Back to where I started off from. So will I get a Ninja Sphere? Not now atleast. Will wait to see what Apple has in making. I feel comfortable in  their eco system and that has paid back well for me in  ease.

Why Amazon Echo?

No, I did not imply anything is empty at Amazon. On the contrary, I was mighty impressed by their new product Echo.

The product is more like having a Siri on Speakerphone to put it simply, for the more Apple Savvy. It does just that one job, with seemingly good hardware where as Apple has squeezed it into a phone along with other functions. That way I would expect better throughput from this device.

Product is still not available and I have impulsively clicked on the register for invitation. But I do hope this product takes off, as a virtual assistant I can keep in some place and still be able to access.

Couple of things I am not sure of are,
1. Am I to lug this along when I move from room to room or keep it at maximum volume so that I can hear it from anywhere or will I have the ability to channel its audio say using Sonos connected in each room, automatically picked as I move inside the house carrying its remote or manually by doing this part myself?
2. I read that the remote has a mic on it so I am assuming I can go any place around in house and talk to Echo.
3. Is the keyword hard wired as in case of Siri? Can I change it?

Anyway, will be a good item to look at if I land it at the Premium customer price, atleast until Apple TV springs into action as the hub doing all this I am hoping for!

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!