Smart, Natural, Google Home

Let the Games Begin!

The last two weeks have seen some announcements in the home automation voice assistant space.  The big news is that Google bowed their 'Google Home' product, an answer to Amazon's Echo.  Apple also is rumored to be working on a home version of Siri with maybe a camera.  And, just for kicks, Amazon released an in-browser version of Alexa more to explore the concept than anything really earth shattering.

For the sake of brevity (a first for me), I'm going to ignore Apple's home assistant for now.  They haven't made any official announcements and the camera thing... well, even the rumors are a little unsure how real that is.  It would be nice for context on who is issuing commands so that I can over ride the MSD's requests, but the privacy issues may be too much for most of us to bear.  Enough on that.  On to Google Home.

Moby Schmoid

Book Review Time

I want to depart from the basic tech commentary for a week and discuss a different aspect of technology and that's art of making a living in the tech space.

I was recently sent this NYT review by my mother (thanks, Mom.  I think).  From that, I bought Disrupted and read it over the course of a month.  It should not have taken me that long because it is not a long book or a difficult read, but I had to put it down a few times.  I'm not really going to review the book as a piece of literature (or not much), but I do want to talk about how HARD IT HIT ME.

Applied Appliances

Big and Manual

Those big home appliances: the washer, the dryer, the refrigerator, the range and the dishwasher.  They seem such natural devices to connect to a home network and then out to the internet.  After all, they are big and stationary and plugged in and perform tasks that take significant time.  Would it not be great if, when connected, they did... what?

And that's the challenge: the use case.  There is not one that is truly compelling for any of these.  The manual nature of the tasks that these appliances help perform force us to be present at them, using them, monitoring them.  There is no robotic arm that will move the laundry from the washer to the drier and then fold your clothes and put them away for you.  The dishes still need to be loaded and then unloaded.  The same with the food in the refrigerator.  All of these things require us to be there and be doing.  The result is that it is just as easy (easier?) to press the buttons on the appliance as it is to reach into a pocket, open an app, wait for it to load and then do exactly. the. same. thing.

Wearable Reality

One Too Many Hands

This week, instead of bagging on the state of home automation technology, I thought I'd step out into the realm of speculation.  Specifically, the future intersection of wearables and augmented reality.

That these two technologies, one emerged and the other emerging, have anything in common may seem either really obvious or not.  On the one hand, augmented reality will require a headset or glasses or contacts or something worn over the eyes (at least in the near future).  And that something will need to be connected, defining it as a 'wearable'.

On the other hand, the end goal of augmented reality is to create a seamless bridge between actual reality and the augmentations.  The headset/glasses/contacts need to disappear from the user's perceptions as much as possible allowing them to get lost in the experience.  The augmented reality that people at Microsoft and elsewhere are talking about is that experience, not the hardware.  Think of it like a Hollywood movie: we are excited for the story, not the projector.  The same holds true with AR: end users need to be focusing on the new capabilities and not how they are created (unless the creation tool limits those capabilities).

But what I really want to discuss is a third way (hand?) of looking at AR which may make it the ultimate wearable.  If we are using AR to define our reality and to share this redefinition with others who are also augmenting theirs, why not define our clothing, our look, our style through AR?

Walking the Open Path

Not an Apology

The a couple of weeks ago I wrote a post bagging on SmartThings.  While I stand by what I wrote there, I want to clear up any misconceptions that I might have created.

I am a SmartThings fan.  It is as a fan that I feel compelled to point out issues when I see them in the hopes that I can remain a fan.  Stability issues and developer complaints are not fun and no one on any side of the community (corporate, developer, end-user) wants them.  On the other hand, these issues are the result of one of the core reasons that I am a fan of SmartThings: openness.

AR 'and' VR

Not 'or'

I've seen a lot of writing that compares Virtual Reality to Augmented Reality.  They treat these two technologies as if they are in competition.  That one will win out over the other in some weird Techno Thunderdome of marketing and consumer choice.

(with various exploits, brute force and denial of services attacks instead of halberds and chainsaws, with the invisible hand of laissez faire economics bouncing the two competitors around: Two techs enter, One tech leaves!)

In reality (without Thunderdomes... so sad.), these two technologies serve different use cases with only a little overlap.  Both can exist side-by-side and most people will ultimately adopt both.

How Smart Are Things?

Oof, My Backend Hurts

Two items came to my attention this week regarding SmartThings:

• Some of the developer community picked up their toys and went home.  This appears to be in response to an increasing level of stability issues since Samsung took over SmartThings nearly two years ago.  I tweeted about this and got a nearly immediate response from the SmartThings twitter account.  Here's some more context.
• SmartThings published an apology/here's-what-we're-doing letter to their customer base, followed a few days later by another one.

I use SmartThings.  I've been a fan of their product since just before Samsung took them on and have visited with them at CES2015.  I think that, as a whole, the company's direction is the right way to go.  This stems from two things:

1. They are committed (still, maybe despite Samsung) to including as many other smarthome products into their ecosystem as will agree to work with them.
2. They have fostered a rich developer community that was (and, despite some vocal few, still is) working to expand their products' capabilities well beyond anything originally intended.

Some history

I started into the smarthome space because of NewEgg.  They had a deal on some WeMo wall switches and I bought a bunch.  I have enough electrical knowledge to install these without too much trouble.  And they worked great... for turning my lights on and off from my phone.  And that's where I ran into issues.  Like most smarthome enthusiasts, as soon as I started connecting things, I wanted them to do things on their own, to respond to changes in my home and not wait for me to tell them what to do.  Belkin's WeMo app has some of this: scheduling lights on and off, responding to motion sensors, etc.  

But there are limits to the official Belkin app's capabilities: no geofencing, no ability to respond to multiple conditions (if this AND this, then that), no ability to use one switch to control multiple lights in through the virtual realm.  Finally, despite the switches being full 802.11g devices, connected to the same router that my phone is connected to, the system still required that all commands go out to and then back from the Belkin cloud.  Security issues aside, this also significantly decreased their response time. (And no 3-way switch solution.  I'm slowly replacing the Wemo switches with Z-Wave as my paychecks allow).

One work around for all of this is the Android app WemoManager by MPP that sets up a local server on your phone or tablet that replaces the Belkin cloud.  It also adds all of the capabilities that I was looking for.  So, problem solved... until I started looking beyond the light.

I added a Nest thermostat.  Great.  Then some web cams.  Easy, peasy.  Then the garage door with a cobbled together Raspberry Pi relay system.  More complex, but fun to get into the guts a bit.

Installing all of this was great.  Using it was not.  I had separate apps, web pages and widgets to control it all.  I knew how to control it all, but it was a bit of a mess.  This point was brought home when I tried to install it all on the Middle School Daughter's phone (received at age 11 and then taken away anytime she pays more attention to it than to me or her homework).  She looked at all of the bits and pieces and gave me a "What-evs, Dad."

Enter SmartThings

Then, as if some God of User Interface heard my daughter's cry (maybe the spilled seed of Hephaestus?), SmartThings appears with their talk of inclusion for both manufacturers and hobbyists but geared towards the more casual user.  It sounded perfect.  I bought hub v1.  Then hub v2 a year later.

And it does work.  Mostly.  The Belkin Wemo switches don't adhere to the SmartThings "Smart Lighting" SmartApp consistently, but I am willing to believe that more of that rested on Belkin's shoulders than on SmartThings because the Z-Wave switches I've since installed are flawless.  The whole system will go down at odd hours, usually late at night, and then come back up ten minutes later, buzzing my phone both times.  Finally, there is still a cloud component that concerns me, especially as I've removed the Raspberry Pi garage door system and replaced it with a Z-Wave relay that works through SmartThings.

What's an Early-ish Adopter to do?

SmartThings remains the best all around, all "things", family friendly solution available on the market.  I just wish that was saying more.  The bar has not been set very high by any other single hub ecosystem currently available.  Many of the less inclusive products like the Philips Hue work more consistently, but they are also more limited in their applications.

So, for now, I'm sticking with SmartThings.  But I'm also keeping my eye out for something with better support, a better community and a better interface.  It may not be far off.