Multiple button presses?

Dom2061

Hello everyone,

I'm Tetraplegic so Homey will be an essential part of my daily living. Controlling AV equipment
via infrared will be central to that so I have a couple of questions:

1) Homey appears to have a single, but powerful, infrared LED so what will the coverage be like? I'm not talking about the range, (distance), but the area, because I will have most of my equipment 'in front' of Homey and my projector will be 'behind'. Does it have 360° coverage or is the LED powerful enough so that the signal will reflect strongly off walls?

2) Some of the basic functions when using legacy AV equipment are quite tricky to do by voice control: For example navigating an EPG or changing the volume. What is needed is the ability to 'press' a virtual button a given number of times, for example, "volume down eight times", or "cursor left four times". Will Homey support actions like this, or have you come up with something more ingenious?!

Many thanks,
Domenico.

kimror

Regarding the IR, If I have understood correctly, consists of multiple powerful IR LED's, which will give you a 360 degrees coverage.

Peao

Yeah as far as I know Homey has IR LED's implemented in the LED ring.

But I've had another questinon comming to my mind when reading yours. Will Homey be able to simuntaneously send two IR-Signals because it has many IR-LED's ? So you could switch on TV and reciever at the same time, for example. 

Or concerning my own question from https://forum.athom.com/discussion/500/ir-remote-with-two-transmitter#latest you could be able to send two different signals, if this remote uses both LED.

Dom2061

Thanks for the info, kimror!

Fire69

Peao said:.

But I've had another questinon comming to my mind when reading yours. Will Homey be able to simuntaneously send two IR-Signals because it has many IR-LED's ? So you could switch on TV and reciever at the same time, for example. 

Because you want to save 1/10th of a second by sending both signals at once instead of one after the other? 
With the chance that both interfere with each other... 

Peao

Fire69 said:

Because you want to save 1/10th of a second by sending both signals at once instead of one after the other? 
With the chance that both interfere with each other... 

Yeah that would not be an huge deal, but concerning my other thread ( https://forum.athom.com/discussion/500/ir-remote-with-two-transmitter#latest ) I had the problem that the remote of my vacuum robot has two IR-LED's, which could mean, that it requires two signals sent at the same time.

Fire69

Shouldn't be that hard to test right? Block one LED with your hand, send a command to the vacuum. It works, no problem. It doesn't, you're screwed 

Peao

I did test it with an CCTV, I saw the two LED blink at the same time  

Fire69

That's not a very conclusive test.  Both could just be sending the same signal to extend the coverage...

Athomey

Sending 2 different signals at same time is not done I guess, but maybe if the IR frequencies lay far enough apart, but I suspect the bandwidth and crudeness of IR communication to be limited. I doubt there is ANY system sending multiple (different) IR signals at once.

Peao

I tested it the way you've described. It worked to start the robot, but my smartphone still wasn't able to clone the signal.

Fire69

Also, when you saw two leds blink at the same time, that would mean that they are both used for sending.
So no two way communication 

I just realized we totally hijacked @Dom2061's thread with this discussion.  Sorry about that   

Concerning the IR range, it's 360° so equipment<>beamer should not be a problem.
For the multiple key presses, I guess should be able to do this, but maybe some app would need to be created for that. Maybe @Emile can clarify that?
How are you using your AV for the moment, if I may ask?

LuukVisscher

Dom2061 said:

Hello everyone,

I'm Tetraplegic so Homey will be an essential part of my daily living. Controlling AV equipment
via infrared will be central to that so I have a couple of questions:

1) Homey appears to have a single, but powerful, infrared LED so what will the coverage be like? I'm not talking about the range, (distance), but the area, because I will have most of my equipment 'in front' of Homey and my projector will be 'behind'. Does it have 360° coverage or is the LED powerful enough so that the signal will reflect strongly off walls?

2) Some of the basic functions when using legacy AV equipment are quite tricky to do by voice control: For example navigating an EPG or changing the volume. What is needed is the ability to 'press' a virtual button a given number of times, for example, "volume down eight times", or "cursor left four times". Will Homey support actions like this, or have you come up with something more ingenious?!

Many thanks,
Domenico.

I have a similar situation (with beamer, electric projection screen, and some old and new AV equipment).
At the end of the day I can pick up my Homey. In the next few days I will test Homey with my AV equipment thoroughly.

kasteleman

@LuukVisscher : you lucky b...... 
Can we expect a review...

MarcoVanDenHout

Interesting question about the multiple presses. I'm sure homey should be able to do multiple actions in one flow. Do you need the ability to specify a different number of button presses every time or is it a one time programming action? I suppose you could also simply add multiple flows like "volume up one", "volume up two", "down four", etcetera. 

I wonder what your control setup looks like now, do you have something like a joystick and microphone?

Dom2061

Hello Fire 69, and thanks for bringing the thread back on track! For the Last few years I've been using a Hotech VoiceMe II which is entirely infrared but is also able to control X 10 modules using a special transceiver. It's also solely a learning remote so each individual command can be taught for any device. Every command can be a 10-step macro so, for example, I can train the spoken command, "volume up five", (it learns any speech phrase or sound you want to make), and then press the relevant button on the original remote five times. Of course, it's a little laborious to set up every conceivable sequence, but it is extremely adaptable. I want to move to the flexibility of Z-wave so that I can do things such as unlock a door or attach sensors, and I'd like to move to LED lightbulbs which X 10 can't handle, so Homey looks just about ideal for me. Also, the VoiceMe is no longer available so if it gets broken I will be up a well-known creek. I don't know anything about 'flows' but if they are similar to macros perhaps the answer lies there. I'd also like to reiterate a point someone made on another thread: namely that it would be extremely useful if a few commands could be stored locally on Homey, so that if the Internet goes down we would still have access to a few crucial controls. Like everyone else here I'm extremely excited about the potential of Homey, and the open architecture should mean that any post-production glitches or specific requirements like mine can hopefully be addressed in the future, 　

Peao

Yeah, sorry for hijacking  

If you look close at the video of the flow editor () you can see an "Logic" category. I guess it's working with conditions, e.g. its raining "and"  .... (like the background of the flow shows it) and also for things you would like to trigger. E.g.: Switch TV on "and" switch to HDMI.

And considering the volume:
Emile stated
"Actually the Samsung TV api is pretty terrible. You can only simulate a remote control, so you can't even access the current channel or volume. Just send 'Volume Up', and even that sometimes fails..

LG & Philips have their software a lot better. Nevertheless, we'll create a Samsung TV app eventually."

This sounds like you'll be able to access the volume with lg&philips TVs like you mentioned, and even a lot better because homey can access (read) the actual volume. And maybe with a samsung tv, too.

Thats what I understood. Correct me if I am false.

I hope you'll accept this as apologize for hijacking the thread  

Dom2061

 Hey, no problem about the hijack!  My amplifier is an ageing Sony HT-IS 100, so there is no two-way communication about its current settings.

As I mentioned, I know absolutely nothing about flows, but I'm guessing it might work in a similar way to how I described my existing setup above, so for example saying, "hey, Homey, volume down four clicks" will initiate a flow of that name which consists of, 'volume down >volume down >volume down >volume down', is that correct?

Of course, I would need a separate flow for each action: (volume down three clicks; volume down two clicks, etc), but that seems simple enough.

Peao

Yes it will work this way. But I guess, you will be able to get a variable out of your spoken text, like "Homey, volume down X clicks", so that the flow will repeat the action X times. I am pretty sure this is possible.

Dom2061

That's something of a relief because these controls will be used far more often than the home automation ones.

I just hope homey will be able to distinguish between the different numbers, because if I had to remember a unique name for each flow I think I'd have some difficulty!

Dom

MarcoVanDenHout

Should be possible, as one of the examples is "hey Homey, turn the thermostat to 20 degrees"

Dom2061

Excellent! Thank you for putting my mind at rest: this was the one slight concern I had about whether Homey would be completely suitable for my needs which are – because I can't use my hands at all – considerable.

I'm sure that Homey has a massive potential market among disabled and elderly people, where even a few modest home automation devices can make an enormous difference.

MarcoVanDenHout

I can somewhat relate to that, albeit on a smaller scale as I've been in a wheelchair for a few months which limited my reach. Tasks that are easy and natural for the average person can be hard or impossible for others. I'm sure Homey can make things easier and I'd be glad to help.

Dom2061

Thank you Marco, I do have human carers to help me, (remarkably, they respond to voice commands as well!), But they leave me on my own for four hours every afternoon and four hours each evening to give me some sense of independence, which is where Homey will come in.

I'm trying to contain my excitement, because even when Homey arrives it's going to take me a few weeks to get all the modules fitted to convert my devices to Z-wave.

Stefan

Hi @Dom2061, what a touching story! If there is anything we can do to help let us know!.

We too see a huge potential for Homey to make a difference for users like you, so we are happy to help where we can and are curious as to your findings with regards to your use cases

Appie

Hi @Stefan and @Dom2061, if you guys would like to extend Homey's abilities for home caring, check Focus Cura: https://www.focuscura.com/nl The founder was a University of Twente student as well and entered the Raad voor Volksgezondheid this year. If you would like an introduction, I can help you.

kasteleman

Wow, community kicking in! 

Dom2061

Hello Stefan and Appie,

As soon as I receive Homey and make the change to z-wave I'll let you know if I can think of any extra features which might be useful to me and other disabled users. At the moment, there are a couple of things:

1) If Homey locks up I will be totally stuck for up to 4 hours without control of lighting, heating etc until my carers arrive, (this already happens with my VoiceMe II). I am writing this using Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which also suffers from occasional lock-ups, but there is an auxiliary program called SpeechStart+ which runs in the background and can restart Dragon or even the entire computer no matter what has happened. It uses the Windows speech engine to listen for just three or four phrases. A verbal emergency reset built into Homey could be invaluable.

2) I think someone has already mentioned possibly using Homey as a speakerphone. At the moment I use a Blue Ant S4 to make and receive calls and texts, but it doesn't always work so well. It would be marvellous If Homey could add this ability to its repertoire, (I think I'm beginning to believe Homey will be able to do ANYTHING, so forgive me if I'm getting carried away). 3) Getting back to the audiovisual controls that started this thread: sometimes it can be very tedious to do by voice because you have do 'wake the device' before every step. For example:

"skybox" [what can I do for you] "program guide" "skybox" [what can I do for you] "down four" "skybox" [what can I do for you] "right three" "skybox" [what can I do for you] "enter"

It would be great if you could temporarily enter a 'mode' like this:

"Hey, Homey" [what can I do for you] "enter skybox mode"

"program guide"

"down four"

"right three"

"enter"

"exit skybox mode" (or wait for timeout).

One more thing: Marco, I assumed that whatever put you into a wheelchair was temporary. I hope it was and that you are recovering now.

novaflash

+1 for the continued listening mode of the Homey

perhaps call it "interactive mode"

MarcoVanDenHout

@Dom2061 Thanks, I had an accident but now I can walk again and my life is in many ways the same as before but I now have a little experience in how people sometimes need to adapt and how some seemingly small things can be very important to others. And how important both independence and good help is. I think Homey can be a useful tool and we should explore its possibilities.