Home automation and voice control

denverpilot

denverpilot

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DenverPilot
So who’s into this?

I picked up stuff on Prime Day to distract myself from not going to OSH this year. Ha.

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Knowing I wasn’t going to make Oshkosh 2018, I ordered up a large distraction on Prime Day.

We had a couple of FireTV sticks already and they worked well other than the usual problems of cruddy rural bandwidth. No way can we stream two non variable bitrate video streams at the same time. Just crushes the poor internet out here. But one is usually fine.

The Echo Dots control FireTV sticks pretty well once paired the right Echo with the FireTV stick in that room in the app.

There are apps in FireTV that don’t have the control API built into them yet, like changing channels on DirecTV NOW doesn’t work yet. Still need the remote for that. Apparently PlayStation Vue does it so DirecTV NOW had better hurry up. I know how to switch and there’s no contract, month to month. AT&T better get on it. Don’t know about that new thing Philo but will have to check. It’s 1/3 the price of DirecTV NOW with a free week trial. Will mess with that when I have time.

Netflix added FireTV controls and even the ability for the core FireTV code to search available stuff on it or “tune” a particular movie. That works very well. As do a number of other specific channel apps.

Pretty cool. Quickly changing tech.

I hear the Plex app also works for the most part for someone with a local Plex server but you have to turn on the remote access in Plex to the Internet for Amazon’s thing to come query it apparently. Haven’t messed with that yet.

Honestly even with all of that TV “stuff” I’m more happy about whole house music that’s synchronized properly than anything.

That’s working great with Amazon Music and apparently works also with Spotify Premium which I’m going to be forced over to as Amazon finishes killing the personal upload library later this year.

That’s a huge mistake on their part. They have a much smaller catalog of music and also don’t have the features Spotify and Google Play Music have, so they’re cutting off their own nose on that one. We get some of their catalog because we have Prime anyway, but I wouldn’t pay for their premium music without the ability to upload.

For the moment “Alexa shuffle my library to everywhere” is nice. Stupid of them to kill that.

The coolest thing I found that I didn’t know worked, was the FireTV sticks can Bluetooth their audio to the Echo without timing or lip sync issues. Then the Echo can be fed into my old stereos that are just on all the time on a fixed input. No audio switching needed.
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Echo stuff including whole house music with an everywhere group comes out the big speakers as do responses from the Echos, making it easy to hear everything. Then the TV audio being fed to the Echo means we have voice control of the TV volume by just telling the Echo to turn up and down. Nice. And unexpected.

The only weirdness of the Bluetooth feed setup is the Dots have to disconnect Bluetooth completely when “Drop In” is done between them or the phone app, so they do and then they announce they’ve reconnected to the FireTV after the call.

The disconnect is really meant to force a Bluetooth speaker offline for timing reasons, not to drop an audio feed INTO the Dot, but I see why they coded it to just drop everything. Probably they could leave the Bluetooth inbound connection up and just mute it in the inbound direction though.

Already had the home thermostat hooked to the Alexa skill on the FireTV so that was already done.

Nifty to tell the house to set the thermostat to Away mode on the way out. The integration with the scheduler on the Bryant system is a little weird so I may (as we add other automation) disable the thermostat’s scheduler and “drive” it from code.

Will play with this for a while then start thinking about lighting controls and perhaps the garage door openers. Or whatever other interesting ideas come up.

I also need one more Dot for tunes in the garage! I forgot!

Oh yeah one other minor annoyance that’ll maybe be fixed in software. FireTV controls aren’t available in Routines (yet?). That’s a miss on Amazon’s part.
 
True house control includes all the appliances ( of course with IoT these days, no problem) as well as all the lights, window coverings, doors, etc.
 
murphey said:
True house control includes all the appliances ( of course with IoT these days, no problem) as well as all the lights, window coverings, doors, etc.
Click to expand...

One step at a time. Rome wasn’t built in a day. :)

And I’m not spending that much money a quarter, a year, or whatever on it. That would make it “not as fun”. :) I bought all this Amazon junk at half price on Prime Day because if I really hated it, it could have been sold easily for that anytime the usual Amazon sales weren’t on.

Until I realized the Bluetooth audio thing would work, I’d already laid out a couple of schematics for a multiple audio line level mixer with an op amp to make up the gain, since y-cabling the TV output and the Echo Dot output into each other would have been drivers pushing drivers and a hellacious impedance mismatch.

There were passive mixers (no audio quality op amp, but no power needed either, but levels would be lowered and noise increased) that were nothing more than a box with four stereo 10K logarithmic pots and some resistor followers for over $40, but that’s dumb if you own a soldering iron and a couple of brain cells to rub together real hard. :)

But turns out I don’t need a stereo mixer after all, so now I hunt for lighting ideas. Wall switches or direct controlled bulbs. Haven’t decided yet, but have had four failures of these “lifetime” LED bulbs already, so $10-$12 a bulb for smart bulbs is looking pretty stupid...

Unless I get a massive warranty and then add two years to it with the Citi card...

Such cheap Chinese electronics junk this stuff is under the hood...

The bulbs will either need to be WiFi only with an Alexa skill or I’ll have to get a smart hub to do some other automation... sadly it looks like the only one that really embraces adding to it via open source easily is Samsung.

Or just control the wall switches. Hmmm. Haven’t decided. Probably a combo of both.

Still need to look into IFTTT stuff for this, too. Quite a bit of useful code stuff going on there.

First lighting thing will be the garage... have some unswitched overhead lights out there that I’ve been too lazy to climb up in the rafters and hook to the other lighting circuit with romex for a couple of years now. I’ll get those switched and the others out there in a group so the whole garage can be flipped on and off. Nice for winter to have it lit up when you go out in the morning.

Then the entryway. Will add a motion sensor in there to trigger the overhead that is way up high and super treacherous to get to even on a big ladder. Voice/scene commands for that will be handy but the main automation in there will be a motion sensor. Always carrying crap in from the garage and hands full in the dark. That group will include the top and bottom of the stairs lights too, so it’ll light the whole path whether you go up or down once you come into the mud room.

In the big TV room, it needs some lighting help with one three bulb ceiling fan and a single bulb overhead. Some LED strips behind the TV and behind the ceiling boxes for the duct work would liven that up a bit and make TV watching nicer.
 
It's kind of strange... For as long as I've been farting around with electronics and computers, I have no interest in home automation beyond motion sensors for exterior lights. I don't even have a timed thermostat much less a networked one. I just never had any interest in it.

I do occasionally use the timer on my coffeemaker, but only on those rare occasions when I have to get up at a specific time. Usually I just wake up whenever I wake up.

Rich
 
I have an echo dot for news and weather, a smart tv with a Roku box for Directv Now, Netflix, etc and that’s it.

Managed for umpteen years without home automation except a garage door opener and don’t see that changing.

Cheers
 
I have just recently started easing into some home automation stuff. I put smart switches on the front and back porch lights as well as the entry light. We have a Ring Pro doorbell (meh) and an Ecobee thermostat (very nice). I have added a Smart Things hub so I can set up some automations. I got a couple of "smart" LED bulbs basically for free when I ordered the hub. So, for example, if the Ring detects motion at night, it will turn on the outside lights and do some other stuff to make it look like someone is home and up even if no one is. Little stuff.

There's more I'd like to do, but I'm just not willing to plow a bunch of money into things like window and register vent controls. Even with the stuff I have already bought, I'm sure in 3-5 years half of it will be broken and most will be unsupported by the then-current generation of software. I'm treating it as a hobby expense at this point.

I also do not AT ALL like this stuff's dependence on so-called "cloud" services. For example - I love our new thermostat, but it lacks any provision for an outside temperature sensor, even though one is absolutely required for the heat pump (and there's one already there). Instead it does web queries to some service (they don't say which) to get the "official" outside temp. So, at some point I'll need to reverse engineer that and "fix" it myself with a web proxy or something. Ditto the Ring doorbell. The phone app is useless for real time use, because nothing talks directly to anything -- it's all going through their servers. If Ring goes TU or decides to drop support, you're screwed. As it is, we get notifications on our phones when someone is at the door -- but we can't see or hear who it is, we still have to go answer the door or wait until after they're gone to see the stored video.

For the most part this stuff is "early adopter" quality crap for tinkerers willing to accept the "cool" functions as secondary and completely unreliable. And as with most of the crap today, it seems to be an exercise in providing just enough functionality to hook people into allowing the vendor to collect and sell data and advertising. It's offensive to see electrons abused this way, to be honest.
 
In regards to the “cloud”, I find it interesting that the most popular hub, the Samsung, literally can’t talk to your phone on the local LAN, and the control app won’t work at all during an internet outage. Your local LAN can be fine but if it can’t talk to the mother ship, you can’t control it.

That right there for a rural dweller with crappy internet tells me that they’re not too serious about this thing being truly “primary control” for anything and never thought it through for outages of internet, power, etc.

Like someone else said, I consider whatever I spend on this tinkering around, hobby money.
 
denverpilot said:
In regards to the “cloud”, I find it interesting that the most popular hub, the Samsung, literally can’t talk to your phone on the local LAN, and the control app won’t work at all during an internet outage. Your local LAN can be fine but if it can’t talk to the mother ship, you can’t control it.

That right there for a rural dweller with crappy internet tells me that they’re not too serious about this thing being truly “primary control” for anything and never thought it through for outages of internet, power, etc.

Like someone else said, I consider whatever I spend on this tinkering around, hobby money.
Click to expand...
I simply have not had the time to even start looking into it, but eventually I really want to explore the possibility of moving completely off of the SmartThings hub. I'd much rather build a Linux box (or a Pi) with Z-wave and do it all myself with a local web interface. I have no idea if there are open source alternatives, haven't had the time to even look.
 
denverpilot said:
We had a couple of FireTV sticks already and they worked well other than the usual problems of cruddy rural bandwidth. No way can we stream two non variable bitrate video streams at the same time. Just crushes the poor internet out here. But one is usually fine.
Click to expand...

I don't know how you stand it. I have to have fast internet.

Besides that, I'm wary of having a device in my house that's recording every word I say or other sounds I might make. Maybe that's too tin foil hat-y but I just have a bad feeling about it. Cell phone companies record all our texts and look where we ended up with that. On the other hand, I believe it's important to keep up with technology or we'll be left behind when we're old, unable to communicate with our grandchildren.

I think I'll download the Tor browser, start buying everything with cryptocurrency and be done with it. I don't even like Netflix tracking which shows I watch.
 
denverpilot said:
Like someone else said, I consider whatever I spend on this tinkering around, hobby money.
Click to expand...

Bingo. I bought a six pack of remote controllable outlets (plug them into existing outlets, control via Echo Dot or smart phone) and I still haven't figured out what I'm going to do with them. One of these days...
 
Ghery said:
Bingo. I bought a six pack of remote controllable outlets (plug them into existing outlets, control via Echo Dot or smart phone) and I still haven't figured out what I'm going to do with them. One of these days...
Click to expand...

Randomly turn off the lights in the bathroom while your wife is primping. Should go over well. :)
 
All the radio waves in his house.....the DOT may soon start transmitting to my brain. That would scare me when his voice commands get my brain to do something I can't make it do!!!!
 
So since you're going way beyond anything I'm interested in, perhaps your research has already covered the 1 basic home automation function (and I use that term VERY loosely) that I want. I just want a simple remote indicator somewhere in the house (or phone) on the open/closed status of my garage door. Which will then probably lead to remote operation of said door ... you know the old "If you give a mouse a cookie" syndrome.
 
denverpilot said:
One step at a time. Rome wasn’t built in a day. :)



But turns out I don’t need a stereo mixer after all, so now I hunt for lighting ideas. Wall switches or direct controlled bulbs. Haven’t decided yet, but have had four failures of these “lifetime” LED bulbs already, so $10-$12 a bulb for smart bulbs is looking pretty stupid...

Unless I get a massive warranty and then add two years to it with the Citi card...

Such cheap Chinese electronics junk this stuff is under the hood...

The bulbs will either need to be WiFi only with an Alexa skill or I’ll have to get a smart hub to do some other automation... sadly it looks like the only one that really embraces adding to it via open source easily is Samsung.
Click to expand...

I know they're expensive, but I have been VERY happy with Hue bulbs. Have 4 of them in my bedroom (both nightstands, a torch lamp, and a wall wash in a dead niche behind the dresser). I control them with Alexa, an app on my phone, and a motion sensor in the bedroom. Other than that, sengled makes some decent zigbee bulbs that can be acquired for about 9 bucks on amazon that work well with most home automation systems, as well as i believe their hub can be alexa controlled. Home automation has allowed me to turn into my father, and automagically turn off lights that constantly get left on (read - Kids). Room sensor detects no motion for 15 minutes, lights turn off.
 
GLMS_NC said:
All the radio waves in his house.....the DOT may soon start transmitting to my brain. That would scare me when his voice commands get my brain to do something I can't make it do!!!!
Click to expand...

Skynet will then be active. :)

I came home tonight to Karen having set up multiple alarms and reminders for herself (Little Miss OCD likes that already) and listening to classic jazz.

She’s obviously already adjusted to her new toys. Ha.

But before that I tried out the drop in feature from the iPhone app while driving home and it worked quite well. It’s not exactly a Polycom mic array in the Dot, but it hears across a large space pretty well.

Downside of drop in, is you can’t drop in to a group or the whole house, so if you’re doing it from the car you have to guess which room the person is in. Ha. I started in the basement and then tried the main room upstairs.

Virtually wandering the house seeing if anyone is in the room is dumb. Should just be able to drop in on a group or the whole house. :)

But I suppose if they did that they’d have to deal with echo from units near each other.

@gkainz I have been looking into the garage thing. It looks like the best way is to integrate a tilt sensor on the top panel of the door.

Will let you know what I find. The stuff from the garage door makers is pretty wimpy.
 
Annnnnd hit a big bug. Annoying too.

https://www.amazonforum.com/forums/devices/echo-alexa/2292-post-drop-in-issues?page=5#c83

Been happening since last year and Amazon marked it “resolved”.

I believe I’ve found the first reason to ever use a “report” on a forum though. Ha. I “reported” the Amazon employee for “incorrect information”. LOL.

I figure that’ll break their brains and they won’t know what to do with that report. Haha.

Sooooooo, since the TVs send their audio to the Dots via Bluetooth to play the audio on the stereos, about one in two times we do a “drop in” and it appears more if you drop in from the Internet app, the Dot will stop responding completely to voice commands and has to be unplugged to recover it.
 
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More fun.

If you have to change your WiFi that you’re connected to (which requires putting the dots in setup mode) they delete all alarms and reminders.

(Forgot to move the dots over to the 5GHz network and they were fighting a little interference on 2.4 GHz...)

That’s just dumb with a capital D.

I know they store the alarms and reminders in the units themselves in case of Internet loss...

But ... they need to store the stupid things on their server also, and push them back to an echo that has been in setup mode or hard reset/replaced and named the name of the original one.

This stuff has some significant bugs in it. Dumb bugs that should be squashed by now.
 
murphey said:
True house control includes all the appliances ( of course with IoT these days, no problem) as well as all the lights, window coverings, doors, etc.
Click to expand...
Don't forget the machine gun turrets.
 
zaitcev said:
Don't forget the machine gun turrets.
Click to expand...

The turrets chew up too much ammo and are only used for close in. The robotic rifle is better for single intruders and doesn’t bother the neighbors as much. :)
 
I have been doing the Alex / Smarthome thing for quite a while. I like the GE switches (I have tried some others). I have the Kwikset front door lock (works great). The Chamberlain MyQ will work with most garage door openers (I have had one for about 3 years now with no issues). I have a Honeywell thermostat, because I don't like the heuristics in the Nest units. Look at the Logitech Harmony Hub to complete the TV / A/V automation (IR control). I have a Wink hub and it works well (their support is excellent, too).
 
All my 'automation' involves normal looking switches and a hub that doesn't need to be on-line(or even powered on). The biggest user is the 5 way switch in the garage controlling ceiling outlets so all 8 overhead lights don't go on all the time and the timed(+remote) switch in the bathroom for the heater. I did buy one of the smart hubs that advertised being usable offline, but the one thing I wanted, power monitoring, wasn't available offline, so I sent it back and went back to using my home half-baked solution.

I figure if I ever sell then it should at least look like a semi-normal house and not one you have to talk to, and I don't want to talk to the house anyway.
 
gkainz said:
So since you're going way beyond anything I'm interested in, perhaps your research has already covered the 1 basic home automation function (and I use that term VERY loosely) that I want. I just want a simple remote indicator somewhere in the house (or phone) on the open/closed status of my garage door. Which will then probably lead to remote operation of said door ... you know the old "If you give a mouse a cookie" syndrome.
Click to expand...
Image 2018-07-24_12-47-57-206.png
 
I use a Smart Hub and a Harmony Hub along with an Echo and three Echo Dots. I have three light bulbs and two wall switches in use currently as well as switches to turn the low voltage lights on and off.
 
EppyGA - I like it (and I "liked" it) but ... what is it? App from LiftMaster?
 
gkainz said:
So since you're going way beyond anything I'm interested in, perhaps your research has already covered the 1 basic home automation function (and I use that term VERY loosely) that I want. I just want a simple remote indicator somewhere in the house (or phone) on the open/closed status of my garage door. Which will then probably lead to remote operation of said door ... you know the old "If you give a mouse a cookie" syndrome.
Click to expand...
My parents had a similar wish. In order for them to check the garage doors, they would have to trek down the stairs to the basement and all the way to the other end. The master BR was directly above the garage, but of course they had no way of knowing if the doors were open or not.

This was the late 80s or early 90s. No fancy stuff back then. I wired up a Radio Shack box with two LEDs and two momentary pushbutton switches. I put a microswitch on each door that actuated when the door was all the way closed. Wiring was a length of Ethernet cable through the garage ceiling/bedroom floor. The box was mounted on the wall under a window. If the door was not closed, the red LED in the bedroom was on... you could then push the button to close it, or open it if that's what you wanted. Power came from the opener itself. It was simple, effective, dirt cheap, and it was still there and working when Mom moved out of the house in '06 or so.
 
With the Chamberlain MyQ, you program it to your opener, so it works with just about any opener over Wifi. With the Wink hub, you can then set up a bot to send you a notification, if the garage door has been open more than 15 minutes (this has been very useful for me). For security, Alexa will not open garage doors or unlock front doors. She can tell you if they are open or locked and she can lock them, but not the other way. There is also a Chamberlain app for opening and closing the garage door. The Kwikset lock with Wink will let you set up many codes for the front door. You can even setup temporary codes for maintenance people and such. It is great not having to rekey if you get a new housekeeper or handyman.
 
One fallibility I’ve been seeing in the garage door automation is the system assumes the door is up or down on a number of systems that don’t have a door sensor.

Just fair warning. If there’s no sensor you can probably get it out of sync with what the software thinks it is. Like go pull the emergency disconnect and shove the door up.

If it still thinks the door is down, it isn’t engineered right. :)

Also many municipalities (apparently, or so I’ve been reading) now want an audible alert if the door is going to move without humans watching it. Soooooo...

Anything the manufacturers implement now is likely to have a beeper.

Of course your small spawn will ignore the beeper and still crash into the garage door or be crushed by it, so make sure those overload sensors are working. :)

And we loop back around to, the overload sensor or the doorway crossing sensor tripped... does the thing really know the new status of the door? :)

Automation Engineering. Ain’t it grand? ;)

That last one can bite you if the system says it closed your door you forgot to close and you’re away from home, when the door really bounced and is back up... :) :) :)
 
denverpilot said:
One fallibility I’ve been seeing in the garage door automation is the system assumes the door is up or down on a number of systems that don’t have a door sensor.

Just fair warning. If there’s no sensor you can probably get it out of sync with what the software thinks it is. Like go pull the emergency disconnect and shove the door up.

If it still thinks the door is down, it isn’t engineered right. :)

Also many municipalities (apparently, or so I’ve been reading) now want an audible alert if the door is going to move without humans watching it. Soooooo...

Anything the manufacturers implement now is likely to have a beeper.

Of course your small spawn will ignore the beeper and still crash into the garage door or be crushed by it, so make sure those overload sensors are working. :)

And we loop back around to, the overload sensor or the doorway crossing sensor tripped... does the thing really know the new status of the door? :)

Automation Engineering. Ain’t it grand? ;)

That last one can bite you if the system says it closed your door you forgot to close and you’re away from home, when the door really bounced and is back up... :) :) :)
Click to expand...
The Chamberlain MyQ has the audible alert for closing and also has a sensor on the door. The app looks identical to Eppy GA's, so I assume it is the same. I have had to replace the sensor batter once in three years, so it lasts a while.
 
denverpilot said:
And we loop back around to, the overload sensor or the doorway crossing sensor tripped... does the thing really know the new status of the door? :)

Automation Engineering. Ain’t it grand? ;)

That last one can bite you if the system says it closed your door you forgot to close and you’re away from home, when the door really bounced and is back up... :) :) :)
Click to expand...
That's why we have tilt sensors (or if you're a hardware Luddite like me, a microswitch) to detect the actual state or position of the door in at least one known condition.
 
denverpilot said:
@gkainz I have been looking into the garage thing. It looks like the best way is to integrate a tilt sensor on the top panel of the door.

Will let you know what I find. The stuff from the garage door makers is pretty wimpy.
Click to expand...


If you're looking for open/close indication,as well as close a left open door, check out garadget. Have one, and love it. It uses a laser and reflective tape to sense the position of the door, and ties over to the push button to trigger open/close
 
sferguson524 said:
If you're looking for open/close indication,as well as close a left open door, check out garadget. Have one, and love it. It uses a laser and reflective tape to sense the position of the door, and ties over to the push button to trigger open/close
Click to expand...

Had a hectic evening, but just looked at that one, looks interesting!
 
Plus, who can resist gems like this one?

“Alexa, tell me a joke about pilots.”

“When do pilots make great salespeople? When they’re controlling the elevator pitch.”
 
sferguson524 said:
If you're looking for open/close indication,as well as close a left open door, check out garadget. Have one, and love it. It uses a laser and reflective tape to sense the position of the door, and ties over to the push button to trigger open/close
Click to expand...

denverpilot said:
Had a hectic evening, but just looked at that one, looks interesting!
Click to expand...
besides that - it's (somewhat) local ... although Grand Junction is not exactly a Silicon Valley kind of tech bed ...
 
denverpilot said:
That one looked great until I read that Chamberlain locked down their integrations to monthly subscribers when they used to be open.

If they’ve gone back and opened their API again I couldn’t find it.
Click to expand...
I saw that (you have to pay extra), but it integrates with Wink and I set up my bots in Wink, which doesn’t charge.
 
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