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I have some idea's
Spawnreaper
Member
I spoke to you guys in short and pitched an idea during the bright day event.
Well maybe my pitch was a bit short and i did not have time to explain the possibilities.
My idea is like this.
Entering and exiting a house is a useful thing for homey to know. But besides that, knowing who else is entering, maybe even more interesting to know.
A fast network lookup for newly connected wifi clients can not only tell homey that you are home by identifying my phones mac address but also your friends phone if you allow them on your network.
It would probably freak your friends out if homey greets them by name.
if you are in a home with more people you could even leave them individual messages on arrival.
Also someone entering your home could send you a notification so you can check your cams if its a break in.
To set this up, you would add a friend to your wifi by giving him the password. After the person is on it, tell homey to add a friend. Homey does the mac address lookup and will find the newly connected mac address.
Homey replies, “who is your friend?” Say the name and create a record linking the name to the mac address on there phone.
I watched a lot of youtube video’s of the homey and something in one of the demo’s bugged me a bit.
You give the example that if you leave the house then homey can check if its raining. Homey can then tell you to bring an umbrella.
Well, the geofencing is a nice concept but I noticed that apps that use it, drain you battery because its constantly checking your location using GPS. Besides that, its also very inaccurate and slow. To use your example, if homey would tell me I need a umbrella because it is raining it would probably tell me after the geofence is triggered. In order for that to happen I would be outside…. in the rain….with the door closed.
A bit late.
Combining a front door motion sensor that would know if your coming or going would tell you to get the umbrella right at the moment you are about to head outside of the door.
If you would combine it with edition information of your calendar appointments would make homey even more intuitive on when the information would be useful.
The idea was dismissed a bit, arguing that bluetooth would be better for this idea.
Blue tooth is, in my humble opinion not the best option due to range limitation and the fact that a lot of people turn it off to save battery life. Also bluetooth is notorious for disconnecting a lot. Everyone has wifi turned on, all the time.
- By using a mac address lookup with a filter that is triggered by a sensor or voice command you don’t have a lot of network traffic going on.
- The front door trigger would be a better option then geofencing due to GPS battery drain.
- no dependency on Bluetooth pairing, stability, range or availability.
the only obstacle I can see is a sensor that can tell if you are coming or going.
Anyway, i hope you guys wanna talk about this idea. When talking to you guys at brightday I actually assumed that the homey was already available. I do love the idea of your product, and can’t wait for some hands on experience and your feedback.
Comments
My Homey won't be in the hallway but in the living room. How will he know when I'm near enough to him to start talking? Another sensor? Or just add a delay?
When I enter the front door and I go directly upstairs, what will Homey do?
These are all nice ideas for a promo video but a bit unrealistic in real life I think...
Also, using Bluetooth will probably disconnect too soon (going upstairs or in the garden...) , and with wifi too soon or too late (halfway down the road... )
About your umbrella-idea, why wouldn't it be a combination of travel-time (you have an appointment in your calendar for 10:00, travel-time is, according to low-res GPS 1h, it's now between 8:40 and 9:00), and a motionsensor in the hall (if you are within the time range and motion is detected in the hall, and it rains, remind people to bring an umbrella).
Why not use iBeacons? They're made for this purpose...
I'm gonna check that out. Do they work with homey?
Wat about the network mac pool check idea... what do you guys think?
Active Wifi connections use a lot more energy than bluetooth which doesn't need to pair to detect, and Wifi gives access to resources (even outside my house since the wifi signal doesn't end at walls)
If I'm on holliday, my neighbours are watching after the house (plants, fishes etc).
Now I do want to know if they open the door without making connection with my WIFI network (since they don't need additional access to my network), so bluetooth is sufficient (especially with ibeacons when homey is going to support them (it will not be the highest priority at this moment) ).
So AFAIK you don't need a bluetooth connection, only sending out a bluetooth signal which can be detected.
This technique doesn't apply to wifi since wifi mac addresses are randomized during scanning .
So you ony have to detect a friends bluetooth mac (and adminstrate this) to make a personal greeting possible.
If homey already supports this, I don't know but we'll see when it ships.
Now to make the rainy flow possible, you can make a flow where you tell homey you are leaving (no geofencing needed), homey checks all kind of things (such as the weatherforecast, if all windows are closed, and turn down the temperature etc) and respondes with all information (the window in room x is still opened, it's about to rain and I've lowered the temperature to x degrees).
A flow with speech should work better then bluetooth/wifi since it's activated by you, and you don't have any false positives by walking to your car and back to the house (you don't need to lower the temperature etc, and bluetooth cannot see the difference between walking to the care and going to work...
And.. it's more personal to say homey goodbye when you leaving rather then try to programm this with bluetooth/wifi and ignore homey ;-)
Make homey your personal PA, be kind to homey and it will be kind to you ;-)
Maybe one day it recordnize your voice between others.
Try to keep it simple and you why use technique when you can use your voice ;-)
just my 2 cents..
Blusser, I understand your point however more people have wifi on the bluetooth. Also true that wifi range extends outside of the walls. I would rather have a little more range then walking to the bathroom and bluetooth disconnecting and homey thinking I left.
also get the point you make on the neighbours entering the house to take care of your plants. Correct me if I am wrong but a "randomising mac adres?" To my knowledge a mac adres is static and an IP can be random if you are using DHCP. I though a mac adres would be a nice unique identifier.
more interaction with homey would be a good alternative then making homey too overactive in trying to anticipate the users needs. We would need a more AI approach to get that going on.
It is nice to discuss these things.
I have a couple of el cheapo iBeacons lying around to do some fiddling with.
If homey would support it, the only way to do that is in their phone app. The beacon transmits a signal which the app can detect and act on, fi pass the signal to homey which can then start a flow.
If iBeacon support isn't added soon after the release of homey, I'll create my own (Android) app to support this because I want to use it to detect if my family enters or leaves the house.
The nice thing about iBeacons is that using these, the distance of a device can also be determined. You can use multiple iBeacons to triangulate a position so it can be made pretty precise. Not sure how you could achieve that using WiFi.
Besides that, iBeacons use BLE which is less power consuming than WiFi.
Spawnreaper,
please note that IOS 9 (I cannot speak for Android but I presume it's the same) disables/disconnect wifi when you have poor connection see https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205296 ) to optimize network performance.
Also keep in mind that Bluetooth also uses 2,4 GHz like wifi. But wifi also can use 5Ghz (ac version) which has far less coverage.
Bluetooth has up to 10m coverage.
Now I hope Homey will support ibeacons which will extend Bluetooth coverage and also make triangolate position possible.
But why use Technology when you can talk to homey which can also be used when you have young kids.
Other possible solution can be using rfid tags to check-in/out.
Randomizing mac adresses is a technique which is used to keep privacy in stores who use wifi tracking to track customers.
You are right about a connection.
When you connect to a network, your mac address doesn't change.
The pro about Bluetooth is that homey can detect and act on Bluetooth signals.
For wifi you have to have a continues connection with (all) Accesspoints which will probably a high performance penalty on homey.
So personally I would prefer to talk to homey which I find more easy, user friendly, easier to program and this way it will probably have less bugs :-)
But feel free to do it your own way ;-)
Not quite sure where the 10m range comes from for Bluetooth but these days the theoretical range is up to 100m. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_low_energy#Radio_interface
As far as I am aware Homey is fitted with the latest ble 4.0 version so range should not be an issue in the most houses.
Homey is an ibeacon as well, so it knows when you're at home.
Including an indication of distance?
iBeacon seems to be the simplest and one of the most cost effective solution for "home-away" sensing.
Are beacons supported by Homey by default or it will need specific app(s)? In case of the first scenario will this feature be available at the launch?
Guy`s can you recommend cheap and good keyring beacons like Tile?
It's the other way around. You don't carry the iBeacons, but the receiver (iPhone). This device senses in which room you are according to the iBeacon in the room and should be able to forward this to eg. Homey. So the Homey iOS app should support positioning through iBeacons. This would (imho) be the best solution to detect where you are in your home.
Thanks Michael. I did not know that. Ughh. I was hoping to have a Tile like solution. Phone might be empty or in airplane mode also the above solution needs a constant WIFI/3G connection » battery drain.
Is there any way that homey can be the receiver? That is on all the time. If a key is home than someone must be home if not than everybody must be away. With phone might get false results both ways.
1., I go running and leave my phone at home would create a false status.
2., At home but phone is empty, on airplane mode or data turned off would create a false status again.
If you are looking for a tile like solution, there are z-wave Rfid tagreaders:
http://www.robbshop.nl/benext-tag-reader
http://www.robbshop.nl/rfid-tag-voor-benext-tagreader
Manely used for activating and deactivating alarm systems, but perfect for letting homey know who is home and who is not.
It has a very limited range it is more like the NFC. Needs manual interaction each time.
If I may give my two cents... Not that long ago I received my CarAware, which is an iBeacon with a very simple iOS app. Basically, if I get in my car, I get a notification (shortcut) to launch music or Waze, and when I get out of the car, it remembers where I've parked (in the app). It's great, it really is, but it's buggy. And I have to have the app installed. And it gives false readings. And the app has to run in the background. My point is, I think iBeacons are great, but not really reliable?
When I'm at home, I don't really turn off my WiFi or BT, but I often close all open apps on my iPhone. The reason I really like @Spawnreaper's idea with the mac address identification is because of two reasons; I agree that most people turn off their bluetooth (I think many 'average' people don't ever use it). The other reason is,
In this situation, an iBeacon would be great. Buy a beacon for $5, put it in the drawer in the entrance hallway, and you're set. Every time you enter (get close), your phone will know you're there. The problem though is if you maybe have a friend who comes over once a month, he probably won't have the Homey app installed on his phone, and even if he did, probably wouldn't be logged into YOUR Homey. So the iBeacon connects to the phone, but the phone couldn't let homey know he's there. I think that WiFi is a better solution here, because everyone wants free WiFi. I personally don't have guests over very often, but I still have the WiFi password written on the wall close to the entrance. Even if someone comes once a year, they still want WiFi. If, as Spawnreaper suggests, Homey could filter these mac addresses periodically, and finds a new device, I think if would be amazing if Homey could ask for their name, add it in there, and then maybe even use that person as a variable in some flow. Apart from the greeting (if someone enters home, say "Welcome home, (name)!"). This could of course be paired with a door sensor or hallway motion sensor for even better accuracy. But even better, then you could customize alerts or actions for certain people. Sure, I'm not saying that everyone will always have their WiFi on, but I think that it's a better solution. If you'd have Homey in the other side of your apartment/house, and your child got home from school... You'd want to get a notification, right? But using an iBeacon, or geofencing, all those solutions would require your child to have the Homey app on their phone... And I think that even more ridiculous would be to use a tracker.. We all have phones, and carry them with us 99% of the time... Is there really need for one more piece of hardware just so we could get welcomed home?
Of course, It's not fool proof. Leaving your phone behind, or having it run out of juice, or simply being in airplane mode would all make this useless. I think that the best best way would be to implement something like WiFi mac address recognition + geofence (with Homey app) + maybe even a DIY bluetooth beacon that can then transmit connections/distances to Homey via some other protocol (just like a small digital lighthouse at your front door). It just seems like a great idea. Obviously, also, every one's home is different. @rob_houweling will try to make an iBeacon app for Homey, so that we can get a cheap iBeacon and place it close to the front door. There'd probably be a delay to allow for us to get inside the house. @Fire69 will have Homey far away from the front door, so he would want to announce arrival through another speaker in the hallway, or add the delay. Someone like me will probably have Homey close to the front door, so Homeys own iBeacon function would suffice, but this wouldn't work for guests... And maybe someone else would have a mansion and it would take two minutes to get from the front door to the first pair of Homey-enabled speakers.
TL;DR I guess it's about flexibility, everyone has it a bit differently, and the best method is to allow flexibility and implement several ways of Homey knowing when you're home, who is home, and when you're about to leave.
@tommyjay. Altough i dont like to be the dissapointing person, I think you are thinking way to complicated. Homey is designed as a home automation controller and the added value are the extensive communication possibilities. It is not ,and will not be, a butler. For recognizing people entering your house I suggest the Netatmo Welcome camera, this is designed for this purpose, and if there is an api mayby someone wants to build a plug-in since that is the other nice feature
Well, someone allready started on support for other Netatmon stuff, so... Who knows!
https://apps.athom.com/app/com.netatmo
Thanks for bringing my attention to Netatmo, although a bit out of my price range (at least for what it can do).
But don't worry, it's not too disappointing. At the moment, Homey can do a two dozen amazing things, and those will just multiply in the future, both in retrospect and to accommodate new devices. I only expanded on what @Spawnreaper posted with what I thought would be cool. Realistically, I do realize that what I said is a bit of an overhaul. I don't think it's unrealistic, I just think that if someone would put the time into doing it all, it would be a lot of time and probably not too many people would utilize the full potential. On the other hand, I have zero point zero coding skills, so I couldn't be too surprised if someone, as Emile put it, coded the whole application while sitting on the toilet.
Undoubtfully skilled programmers are able to build exiting software. However I am always aware of an old saying, the Swiss army knife can do everything but is good at nothing. I am exited of the possibilities of Homey but do hope and expect from Emile and his crew to deliver their envisioned product and don't be distracted by all the exotic and in my view unrealistic requests in the various posts in this forum. I hope they also take into account and avoid the damage poor coded plug in's by third parties might cause on the stability of the Homey. As far as I'm concerned Homey will the spider in a web of specialised hardware and connecting it for our convenience.
By the way, did anyone receive a Homey? Only a view more day's in 2015
Very nice saying. Guess you're right, then again, a device with capabilities such as Homey... You never know. Still think this topic is a pretty cool idea! And I still think that Homey being aware of who's around, and thus being able to make context (human) specific flows would be nice. I'm not saying that I think of Homey as my butler, but if you look at it that way I think it's a pretty blurry line between home automation hub and butler; you can ask Homey to dim the lights and turn on the TV, why not say hello when you come home and turn on the iKettle? Oh wait, that's already kind of possible!
I think Emile will let us know when the first batch gets sent out in the New Shipping Date for Homey topic.
Look at iron man's "Jarvis" who of you watched that and did not want to move into tiny Starks office right away. Homey may not be Jarvis jet, but maybe one day it will be. Let's try and help it along.