pod bay door management with ZigBee

It's a few years since I attended a conference in Westminster about energy management, smart metering and the like. The sessions included a selection of technology suppliers as well as a few politicians but relatively few 'end users' of what was then still an emerging technology.

The discussions included the catchily-named IEEE 802.15.4, which is a kind of wi-fi for homes, operating at very low power levels.

Nowadays there is a kind of Betamax/VHS war going on with various suppliers each wanting to use their preferred technologies in order to become king of the home castle.

Z-wave, ZigBee, Bluetooth 4, ye olde X10 are a few examples. Google, Apple, Samsung and a slew of currently less well-known companies are pitching to get control of the home hub.

Imagine Siri, Cortana and 'OK Google' on the wall...

"Open the pod bay doors, Hal"


It is still a bit fiddly to connect everything together and not everyone has a home 24-way gigabit ethernet switch to hook up the multitude of mini-hubs.

If I count my own example of the little extra pack-of-playing-card sized hubs requiring connection into the network, there's the one for the recently installed thermostat (Google Nest), one for the smart meter analytics (Efergy Engage), one for the lighting (Phillips Hue) one for the HDMI switching and upscaling to the telly (Denon) and one for a domestic remote control (Logitech Harmony).

Oh yes, the bathroom scales use Wi-Fi and my bikes still use ANT+ via Bluetooth 4. Come to think of it the loudspeakers using Airplay are quite passé in this mix.

Surprisingly, it all works and the various units generally commune with one another endearingly well. For me, it's all something of an experiment, so if one piece or another temporarily breaks there's always another more manual way to make whatever it is work.

An obvious question is whether we need all this stuff, but in the way of the march of smartphones, the automated home is increasingly a marketing target.

...first sighting of the golf umbrellas of 2015 election campaigning

It's started already. The door-to-door campaigning for the next General Election.

A strident knock at the door at 10:45 this morning.

10:45 on a Saturday?? What!

A very friendly gentleman in a Beaufort Barbour, a tweed duckbill flat cap and carrying a large golfing umbrella.

"Hello, sir", he waves a leaflet around. A short standard patter.

"...and can I count on your support?"

My pause.

"No."

"..and which issues are troubling you?"

"Many. Thank you for calling and your time. Goodbye."

Eight months to go, but I can't help thinking that there's no good answers this time around.

switched

The big seasonal switch has flicked to autumnal.

Last weekend we were in Cheltenham, which was already golden and yellow. By the end of this week, the colours have moved south and our grass is getting its first scattering of leaves.

There's still sunshine and yesterday on the M3 I could see a flock of Canada geese gathering and following the route. I don't think they actually migrate to anywhere else, but they still exhibit the V formation flying, whilst they conduct a seasonal stocktake.

clicks per second

witching season for replacement light bulbs

I can't complain that the excellent September weather has meant trialling the replacement smart thermostat for the heating may take longer. So far the thermostat has only switched on when I've been testing.

Curiously, our house's annual September peak in light-bulb pops has continued, with five bulbs pinging over around a three week period. Maybe the Phoebus conspiracy lives on?

I've taken this seasonal opportunity to rejig the lighting. We've got one of those little energy metering gadgets which tells me stuff that should really be common sense(!)
I can easily see the quiescent load of the house. To my pleasant surprise, this base load is quite low, even with the range of technology we have around the place.

It emphasises when something bigger kicks in like the electric kettle, dishwasher, washing machine and even the vacuum cleaner.

A much more surprising load is the effect of conventional lighting, which can easily double or triple the base loading. I'm not sure if I should admit to this, but I've walked around with the handheld gadget and flicked lights on in different areas, witnessing the sudden boost in energy used. I know common sense could do the same thing, but the left-brained readouts reinforce the impression. Particularly when the gadget shows the £ and pence running costs.

So for this year's light bulb season it's been a no-brainer to spend more on the replacement bulbs. There's a few higher usage areas: the office, the kitchen, the living room.

Quite a few halogen spotlights amongst that selection too. My quick calculation indicates moving to LED-based lights for these areas could save maybe £150 per year. They can be just as bright and with warm low 2700 Kelvin colour temperature they even look like tungsten.

...Okay, so I might not have been able to resist the temptation to get some internet-addressable light-bulbs too.

a generational pointer from Billy Elliot

Along to see the dynamic special performance of Billy Elliot on Sunday, introduced by the producer Stephen Daldry.

Harder-edged than the movie, it features the stark political climate of 1984-1985 during Thatcher's closure of mining villages.

Set in Easington, there's the theme of the lad inspired to dance, played alongside the prolonged miners' strike, with police from the south sent to control the protests in County Durham.

A superb and energetic cast, driving a spirited musical - the story of nurturing creativity in adverse conditions - with music in this stage version by Elton John.

The writer, Lee Hall, expressed a sentiment scarce from this September's political conferences:

"We owe it to the next generation to create a world where it is possible for the Billy Elliots...to have a chance to succeed and flourish rather than be fed to the machine which grinds us into identical pieces only fit for consumption..."

It may be thirty years since the original story, but it does seem to be another speech point that today's politicians have forgotten.

adding heat to If This Then That

Like many, for quite a while I've used Hazel to keep my Mac systems tidy.

It's "automation for the rest of us", with a rules engine to do things like tidy the desktop and file things away without having to do anything.

I regard it as a sort of magic nowadays and occasionally have to remember to switch it off when I deliberately want to make a mess.

The cloud equivalent of Hazel type rules, which doesn't yet get much coverage, but which can become a twitter-like phenomenon, is IFTTT.

"If This Then That" can be used for all kinds of event triggering.

Although it has the makings of a 'Rise of the Machines' scenario, I'm kinda relying on Asimov's first law (A robot may not injure a human being etc...) as protection through my experiments. This is mainly through the application of 'Keep it Simple' with the IFTTT recipes I've added. And yes, I'm familiar with HAL 9000.

Although hardly Jedi mind tricks my basic examples of automation include a "probably a rainy day" notification first thing in the morning (to pop up on the iPhone). I know, I could look at the sky or listen to the radio, but a small notification to the iPhone seems a reasonable test.

The wheely bins don't have RFID, so the best I can do is to have an automated reminder on a Tuesday evening. I've just hooked up the home thermostat to send occasional alerts. Currently there's no Garmin or Strava channel, although I've noticed they can both be set up as RSS channels.

Because it can work with many types of channel triggers (things like location sensitivity) and also with many applications, there's also potential to trigger an event such as reminders based upon location (e.g. office/supermarket/train station).

The 'approaching home in the car' scenario is one that I'll want to explore further, as will be the obvious applicability of short notifications to smart watch technologies.

For me it will be mainly 'silent running' because I'm unwilling to let IFTTT have access to broadcasters like twitter in case of the potential for unexpected side-effects.

Nonetheless it is already providing some intriguing potential.

unbendium as the next unobtanium?

One of my favourite marketing examples is the use of Unobtanium in the construction of Oakley sunglasses.

For ages they emphasised the straight side bits and nose grips featuring a 'three point grip system'. If I see modern Oakleys with ear-shaped or wiggly side bits, then I automatically think they are sub-standard, under-utilitising or even omitting the Unobtanium.

Which brings me to the gambit pileup facing Apple. Will the iPhone 6s need to feature a new material? Unbendium. The gambit is because they can't solve a problem they won't want to admit to in the first place. A real case of the 'I Know You Know I Know', but needing to be handled with just eye gestures (maybe iGestures?). Okay, and maybe some stress test pictures with really big weights.

The handwaving of the announcement worked. Only later did the media have a collective refrigerator moment, thinking, "Wait a minute, it's big and thin, and made of pliable metal..."

It wouldn't take long to find a few twits tweeting about how quickly they've wrecked their new phone. By sitting on it or using it as a hammer.

I've briefly examined my iClone for the alleged fault, but even with this non-Apple engineering it'd take a serious amount of force to recreate what I've seen on the telly.

It reminds me of those groovy California 1 wooden postcards I bought in Santa Monica last year. I put them in my back jeans pocket, then later sat down and, yep, only one survived. Come to think of it, they weren't made of tempered aluminium with titanium inserts.

feed them on your dreams, the one they fix, the one you'll know by

My bicycle is still blogging away quietly most times I ride it, and since I started using tapiriik, it copies similar information to a couple of other health analysis sites as well.

Now that there's a renewed interest in health applications we can expect an armful of smart watches to wind up in the stores by year end. At present I'm pretty comfortable with the (invisible) fitbit, which is a useful daily tracker but without needing to light up one's wrist.

As well as this Personal Area Network stuff, I've been turning attention to the Internet of Things, and the related Innernet of Things, which are the basis to link ever increasing amounts of home systems together. My recent experiments have been with a mainly unnoticed device - the home thermostat.

We've replaced the old clicky unit with one of the nest devices, somewhat jazzing-up a relatively mundane task.

The nest replaces the room-style thermostat with a combined thermostat and day-to-day programmer, which uses heuristics and sensors to dynamically determine the settings. As well as a wi-fi link to the home network, it has a separate and persistent Zigbee wireless protocol between the thermostat and a small unit connected to the boiler/pump system.

The end result provides a remarkable range of capabilities. As well as the normal temperature up/down control, it learns the rate of heat exchange in the environment and also monitors whether anyone is at home, potentially dropping to an economy setting when everyone is out.

Our smoke detectors also have motion sensors, which the nest wirelessly hooks into to improve motion coverage. It uses the postcode to collect weather information. We've also set it to send its telemetry to the cloud, so that the temperature and home heating use can be analysed and adjusted remotely from a phone or browser.

A catalyst for this was a recently quick energy audit as part of the annual gas and electricity service provider review. In our case I am certain that the improved intelligence in the new device will save a decent chunk of cash. For us, probably at least the cost of the unit in the first year, compared with the previous 'set to stun' heat setting that has been routinely deployed.

Some might say this technology is giving away ever more information to the world of corporate Big Data, with naysayers predicting the thermostat will start running adverts on its display. Okay, it may also have a bit of a HAL vibe, but I'm finding that this all presents interesting ideas for the connected home.

Enjoying The Bone Clocks, but now a dilemma...

I've been reading the polyphonic adventure of David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks, but still have a way to go.

I've just noticed that it is being serialised starting Monday night on Radio 4, which presents me with a kind of dilemma.

Should I listen to the radio adaptation, which has the potential to overtake my reading speed? Or should I ignore it until I've finished the book?

I'm enjoying the multi-perspective and multi-timed story telling, which began in 1984 and has been jumping forward in roughly ten year increments, from different narrative points of view. It's compellingly written with sudden moments where everything pivots onto another plane, as well as various clues being dropped into the storyline ahead of later reveals.

David Mitchell also wrote 'The Cloud Atlas', which I haven't read, and to be honest I gave up when watching the movie. My guess is that the prior book started out with similar multiple point of views but somehow the movie struggled.

Mitchell has created very accessible characterisations. The initially 15 year old heroine of Holly gets a somewhat Roald Dahl styled start (No spoiler to say that Dahl would say 'Kill the parents' as a quick way to give young protagonists free will). By the first 10% (Kindle-speak) the story is jagging off unexpectedly.

The thinking explores connections and arcs much broader than the grounded start. From very early in the book there's hints of strange and paranormal topics, which I'm expecting to clarify over the last third of the book.

"she’s sort of sketched onto the corner where nobody’ll spot her"

Weirdly, in just looking for a cover art image to head this blog post, I notice the alternative U.S. cover actually has a series of arcs. Like those strange enamel black and white labyrinth signs in tube stations, the book is messing with my mind in a good way.

I'm trying not to give too much away. Suffice to say we get straightforward human interest, mysticism, academe, conflict, humour, economic catastrophe and metaphysics. And I've still got a decent chunk left to read.

A thoroughly enjoyable page turner, with (so far?) a positive heart.

goofing around with an iClone 6

Aside from the rather early Xmas displays, I also passed by an Apple store yesterday. There was a long patient looking line of people standing outside waiting to pick up their new pre-ordered (pre-ordained?) iPhones*.

The 6 appears to be winning over the 6 Plus, but that could be a supply thing.

I should explain that I've had an iPhone 6 shaped device for some time.

When I'm in New York I like to visit Canal Street to see what kinds of special offers are available. It usually comprises sunglasses or similar which bear the name of a famous brand, the packaging of a famous brand, but for some reason are on sale for, oh, 'ten dollar'. Maybe 'two for 18 dollar'.

My iPhone shaped device has similar cloned origins. It's from a Chinese company that produced their iPhone 6 clone back in July. It's quad processor, 13 Megapixel camera, dual SIM and runs on Android 4.4.2 (KitKat), with an iOS shell. There were two USB lightning cables and a charger (they'd be £45 from Apple) and some awful-looking headphones in the box.

To my surprise it is genuinely quite usable. All the standard smartphone capabilities work. It downloads Apps from Google Play store and they install and work correctly. The 'OK, Google' speech recognition works. The iOS style display can be toggled back and forth, so the phone can look like it's running both Android and Apple operating systems.

It won't replace my regular phone, but as a way to continue to use an old pay as you go SIM, it cost less than a burner from Tesco. It's only borderline pocketable though.

* The line I saw was quite a lot shorter than on launch day outside the Regents Street store. There's a video of it here, which is like a mini tour of Regents Street, Hanover Street, Hanover Square and Brook Street.

too early for Santa sightings?

I know it's a bit of a messy photograph, but I snapped it hurriedly as I walked past the front of a shop today. Notice anything abnormal?

It's September.

There's reindeer and fir trees in the display.

Oh, and a little Santa Claus popping out of the chimney.

It seems a bit early to be checking xmasclock.com