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Robot home can anticipate and cater to your needs
Ashutosh Saxena, the founder of a startup called Brain of Things, believes an automated home might make more sense than automated cars in the long run. We spend more time inside our houses, after all. That's the reason his company is building "robot homes" in three locations in California. They don't exactly come with a Rosie that can vacuum your carpet or a Pepper that can entertain your guests, but they're loaded with sensors and automated appliances that can learn your habits. "The house knows the context, whether [its occupants] were watching a movie or sleeping or whatever," Saxena told MIT's Technology Review.
Nest can now talk to Pebble and other home automation products
Nest's thermostat and smoke detector now works with more third-party home automation products, the first fruits of the developer program that the Google-owned company launched in June. First in the list is something you're likely familiar with: Pebble smartwatches, which you can now use to control and check the temperature in your home. Next? A voice-controlled home manager called ivee, which lets you know when a peak energy event starts and ends, as well as lets you use spoken commands to adjust the temperature for you. Then there's Life360, an app that monitors where family members or friends are on a map (with their consent), which automatically adjusts the temp when the last resident in the house leaves or when the first one comes home.
DIY hack uses Google Calendar to automate home heating system (video)
Sure, Google Calendar is helpful, but ultimately it's on you to get yourself to that meeting. Wouldn't it be nice if the utility could handle some of the to-do list itself? Hack A Day scoped out an example of it doing just that, after a home owner named Shane posted a video of his DIY system that uses Calendar to control his heater. First, he connected a USB-powered mbed microcontroller with an ARM Cortex M3 processor to the internet via an Ethernet cable. As it happens, the mbed also has a temperature controller and solid state relay for turning the heater on and off. On the software side, he took advantage of a feature in the Google API that let him sync the mbed's network time, with the mbed able to "see" in advance what temp changes are scheduled on the calendar. In other words, if turning on the heater is on the schedule, the mbed system knows it and makes it happen. In a brilliant act of disaster prevention, Shane also tweaked the on-board temperature controller to not go above a certain number of degrees. For more technical details, check out the video below and the photos at the source link.
Control4, Sub-Zero get in on the home automation game
While brands like LG, Samsung, and Kenmore all showed off their own special brand of Jetsonian appliances at CES this year, Sub-Zero was close by touting a stable of 30 automation-ready products and a partnership with Control4 that could make them a contender for home automation domination. Sub-Zero's ZigBee-based system uses preexisting serial ports (initially installed for diagnostic purposes) to connect users to appliances via touchscreens, smart phones, and other enabled devices. The system lacks full control of potentially dangerous appliances like the oven, instead acting as an alert system when, say, your turkey is done roasting, but it does grant complete access to things like your refrigerator or freezer. Other systems might sport increased functionality, like LG's Thinq, which allows users to set oven temperatures remotely, and Samsung's fridge, which lets you tweet from a built-in touchscreen, but Sub-Zero is hoping a second-quarter release will put them at the head of the pack. We'll see if a head start makes a difference in the glacial appliance market, when Samsung rolls out its smart refrigerator this May and Kenmore's system comes to fruition in 2012.
