A simple command and control dashboard

I'm still plugging away on my very simple dashboard for the house.  This is the current state.

It's a fork of a project created by Florian using Shopify's Dashing project, displaying the status of some of the things in the house, plus interactive buttons to control a few of them.  It's a doddle to add new things to, and at some point I'd like it to look a bit nicer (it's very "designed by an engineer" looking right now). I host it on Heroku.

The nice thing about having a screen like this is it's a convenient way to give guests access to the smart features without having them download an app or create an account. It has a manifest, so it can be added to a home screen and opened as a tab-less web page directly, like an app but without the installing. Giving guest access to smart home features seems like a missing piece in a lot of the setups today - they really assume a finite, familiar set of users who all have direct access to the systems and give very little consideration to house guests who stay for more than a few hours or at your home alone.

The dashboard lives on an old Android tablet I have set up on the kitchen counter for the most part. The tablet screen comes on with a motion sensor as you walk in front of it, giving you immediate access to all those buttons and switches. A pretty simple but decent start, I think.

My house calls me

It's a small thing, but my house sometimes calls me.

Our apartment block uses the type of intercom that you can answer and speak to people on, as well as buzz them into the building, but it only works over a phone line with a local area code . Not having a landline, it's inconvenient for us to have the intercom only connect to one of our personal phones to let people into the building, and my cell phone has an area code for an entirely different state anyway, so we needed a way to have the intercom ping either of us at any time.

To get around the issue, we use a shared Google Voice number. Google Voice lets you pretty much pick your phone number, so it's trivial to get a local area code.  You can then forward calls to the new number to multiple other phones, or pick up the calls via the browser.  It's a surprisingly seamless fix.

I could have not added this number to my contacts - but giving the number a name denoting who it belongs to (it's Wodehouse's number) and a way to talk to us is part of the theory I have around making the house seem smarter.

I don't say there's "someone at the door" anymore, I say "Wodehouse is telling me someone is here".

Figuring out a theft with Dropcam

When we first moved into our apartment block, our neighbours reported that they'd had bicycles stolen from inside the building (usually from the garage) and they weren't really sure how folks were doing it.  At least one time it had been because the old garage door had been wrenched open, but this more recent time it seemed to be more of a mystery - no sign of damage or forced entry.  They discussed wanting to install a camera to record what was going on with the garage, so we offered to sort something out for them (given that we're the gadget nerds of the building and had an idea of how to do it on the cheap).

Main problem: we had to figure out how to get wifi down to the garage.  First we tried extending our wifi network down there, but that proved super flakey (concrete is not a great connectivity vehicle).  Eventually, we worked out that the garage was able to pick up our network over powerline, so we set up an airport down there to connect to that and feed a connection to a mounted Dropcam (they annoying only work on wifi).

We've had the camera in there for about a year now, and we've caught a few incidents - neighbours breaking the garage door, that sort of simple thing, but then finally we caught the "stealing a bike from a locked garage" trick:

So, in short. Make sure your garage door always closes behind you.

The basic setup

Let's run over the setup in the house so far, on a basic "what's plugged in and actually working and connected" level.

Nest Thermostat

The Nest thermostat was the first bit I picked up. It wasn't available to me until I moved Stateside and the slick-looking design had me.  It arrived on a week Husband was away and I was dubious about setting it up myself, having never opened up the wiring for a thermostat before, but it turned out to be a piece of cake. 

Unboxing the nest

The Nest works decently. Living in San Francisco in a relatively new apartment, we don't have a lot of issues with heating (we don't have central air for cooling, either) , so it mostly just gets to do nothing except report the temperature hovering at roughly the same value all the time. It had a bunch of issues staying on the WiFi but recent firmware updates seem to have cleared that up. So, it's cute, but I feel bad that we don't live somewhere more interesting for it to do its thing.

Nest (now owned by Google) also now owns DropCam, which we've got a couple of.  We're only using the one in the garage right now, but it's very reliable.

SmartThings Hub

Basically, all these "smart home" setups require some sort of controlling hub device.  There's a few on the market, and I ended up getting a SmartThings hub last year (so it's the first gen one).  I went with this one because at the time it seemed to leave the most doors open to me - not only did it connect with its own devices, it also connected to Belkin, Philips, Sonos and a few others, plus it had IFTTT integration.  I'm pretty sure most of the hubs on the market these days do similar door-propping-open exercises, but I haven't bothered to check.  The main downside is it'll lock you into that hub's API and apps for the most part, and SmartThings is hardly the best app - it's slow and finicky to setup - but their API is handy and I'll explain why another day.  A bunch of our lights and dimmers and such are controlled via SmartThings, notably:

• My desk electronics (except my laptop charger) are plugged into a power strip connected to a smart switch. A movement sensor triggers that switch on and off depending on whether I'm at my desk or not, so the lights are only on when I'm actually using them. 
• I have a remote in the bedroom that lets me control the lights - I can toggle on and off the bedside lights (both connected to their own switches) and the ceiling lights.  I can also use the remote to trigger the "Good Morning" action in Smarthings, which brings on the lights and has the Bedroom Sonos play the days weather forecast.  
• We've replaced the dimmers in the bedroom, living room, dining area and kitchen with the smart dimmers - so they're all controllable from the app.  They are all configured to turn off when we leave the house (both of us - our presence is set by our phones location within the house geofence), and have automatic lighting sequences configured for vacation time.
• The kitchen has a motion sensor to detect activity in there, and toggles the dimmers on and off appropriately.
• Likewise, the living room lights come on at dusk and toggle on and off based on our activity via a motion sensor.
• All the downstairs lights turn off when activity ceases, and all the lights in the house turn off when I trigger the "Good night" action on Smartthings.
• The hall light turns on when the front door opens (this is one of my favourite interactions - subtle, but very effective).
• We have open/close sensors on the office window (so I know when Husband has forgotten to close it when we go out - it's the only easily people-accessible window) and the external doors.

So, that's the basics. Back soon to cover some of the more custom parts.