Some more questions that came to mind

Tallguy

Hi Emile,
Another question that came into mind: how do you plan to power Homey with regard to a power on/off switch? Is the switch located on Homey itself or on the power cable?

And concerning the "hey Homey" voicecontrol...I thought I read somewhere that Homey uses 2 microphones. How sensitive are those? Can I place Homey on my TV cabinet 5mtrs away for it to still function / hear my voice commands?
It would be super if there's some sort of extender possible (with a two-way mic/speaker) so one could control Homey from any room in the house. Are there any plans in that direction?

Regards
Eric

Emile

There's no on/off switch. If you don't want to use it, unplug the cable

The range is approx. 5 - 7 meters, it depends on your home. If you're out of range, you can use your smartphone, or another Homey.

RobinVanKekem

These things (i.e. use another Homey to extend voice capabilities) is why I'm so enthusiastic about this product!

Tallguy

@emile : I can't stop thinking about the possibilities Homey might bring us

So...these questions popped into my mind last night:
1. Is it possible for Homey to send audio and video feeds to an iPad or other mobile device? I'm thinking about installing some outside camera's to my house and I'd really like it if Homey is able to send streaming data to any device I'm at at the moment when the camera's detect something.

2. Can I use Homey to connect to my iCloud agenda and make appointments for me? Or for that matter: notes/brainwaves that I might like to save somewhere.

3. Would Homey be able to distinguish my mobile devices like my iPhone and my iPad and know which device to send info to if needed? (e.g. push notifications)

4. Can I ask questions to Homey like 'hey Homey, are all my doors closed?' when I have some sort of magnetic contact switches attached to my doors (I don't know if those 2-way switches exist, since KaKu only seems to produce 1-way communication devices)

5. With regard to my question #3...is Homey able to send me push notifications at all? Like...I get a message from Homey when it detects movement in my house...or a door is being opened.

I'm sure many more questions will arise, but this is it for now ;-)

Hope to hear from you.

Tallguy

???

Tallguy

@emile maybe you missed this one? My posting of june 14th

Emile

1. Not iCloud (it's not that open, but hey, you're free to create an app). You can set reminders though!
2. A device is linked to a user, so they will all receive the notifications meant for you.
3. Yup
4. Yup

RobinVanKekem

@Tallguy, Z-wave uses 2 way communication.
Homey supports the new Z-Wave+ standard (which includes enhanced security, lower energy usage on battery) btw

Niels

As homey has bluetooth - you could also use a bluetooth mic (like the ones included with Singstar for Playstation, or even a cheap headset using the Headset profile) to extend the voice control. Depends on the bluetooth class of the microphone if it's useful, though - class 2 only has 10M range... and either class 1 or 3 had even less, while the other has up to 100M range. If you find a microphone like that, I reckon it could function as a voice-extender that's a bit more practical to carrying your smartphone from room to room and cheaper than getting a second homey.

There are also baby monitors that work on 863MHz, over WiFi, over 2.4GHz using FHSS... I suppose these could function as relatively cheap-to-get (both used as in stores) microphone extenders too.

Of course, having a whole house filled with microphones and attached to a device connected to the internet might not be something Homey wants to promote given the focus on privacy these last years - but at least it would be able to double as a sound-based alarm system just by changing the if/then conditions within the app, as long as the mic device used has a properly tuned VOX function (which could also be done by software, I suppose... with some effort.) - but for that to work properly push notifications would be needed.

In my experience push-notifications on Apple are a big hassle (Android too, actually - especially since so many phones have the default setting to go into a low energy mode on standby - so all data and WiFi is off at that time), so I can understand it wouldn't be implemented on day 1. Good to see they will be supported, though.

Edit: P.s. - for the cameras, there are several IP-cams in the market that connect directly over the internet using WiFi - usually using a server and a unique identifier (usually by QR-code) to bypass the router and initiate a peer-to-peer connection. I've seen several manufacturers from China on CEbit that integrated this video-feed inside a security app.

So the camera connect to the internet directly, while the sensors (motion sensor and magnetic sensors) connect with a gateway, usually by Zigbee or 868MHz.
I reckon it's possible to write a script to show the external feed inside of the homey app in the same way, bypassing any tricky programming needed for the homey to handle the video stream. Showing a predefined video feed if one of the sensors connected to homey is triggered would certainly be possible and would not even require the camera to be connected to homey itself - just set-up and appointed to one or multiple sensors in the app.