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Multiple button presses?
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.
Comments
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.
Thanks for the info, kimror!
With the chance that both interfere with each other...
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?
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.
Can we expect a review...
I wonder what your control setup looks like now, do you have something like a joystick and microphone?
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
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.
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
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.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.
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
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.
perhaps call it "interactive mode"