A smart home vs an automated home

[gohan]

In the latest video of Andreas Spiess he is talking about presence detection with an esp32 by sniffing the wifi traffic. There are a number of commercial products that 2 or more can be installed to triangulate signals from smartphones wifi and Bluetooth (I had to install 3 of those in a Mercedes dealership, they were from Netgear if I remember well): basically there is a Master one and they talk to each other on their own separate wifi network; I think it is kind of a mesh network, because they can relay data of distant nodes to the Master device. Of course once installed they need to be calibrated by me standing in a known position with my smartphone in my hands and turning around 90° each time I was told to.
I would have liked too to have the home automation system to be aware of people in the house by the means of BT devices, but it is still in the to do list. As said before the data analysis is going to be tricky but it going to be the main subject of the following years, as more and more AI and machine learning cloud services are popping up (I did a quick peek on the IBM site and I got scared by the amount of services that are available and I will never be able to use, as my programming skills are not really the best)

[matt shepherd]

@dbemowsk
I use mine with Openhab as they have a skill, and im waiting for the new ‘Routines’ to be released, I think Amazon are raising their game and along with the new Routines https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/27/16375050/alexa-routines-echo-amazon-2017 and now that it can recognise different voices https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/10/11/16460120/amazon-echo-multi-user-voice-new-feature it could help my house turn from Automated to Smart very soon.

[dbemowsk]

@matt-shepherd If they can then get multi tiered location setup down, that would be awesome. By multi tiered location setup I mean being able to define say 2 houses, maybe a main home and a vacation home, and then have devices that have a defined parent, such as main home or vacation home. That would allow for say having two devices named living room light.

My only thought on that for occupancy sensing would be, what if you walked into the room and didn't say anything? None the less, it gets back to what I said about data, the more you have, the more informed your scripting decisions can be. One other thing, if you used multiple echos or dots, you would have to make sure that more than one device doesn't hear the command.

[NeverDie]

The question may turn out to be whether people are willing to accept less than perfect performance in exchange for occasionally more capability (when it works). I think Z-wave and x-10 were good examples (of unreliability) showing that's not what people want. People seem to prefer less capability, but have it work 100% of the time the way it's supposed to. At the very least, WAF is low on unreliable things.

[wallyllama]

http://people.csail.mit.edu/fadel/wivi/

Ok this is the one I was looking for

http://witrack.csail.mit.edu/witrack2-paper.pdf

[dbemowsk]

@wallyllama interesting.

[dbemowsk]

This sounds like a very do-able basic solution to counting the number of people in a room.
http://cocoontech.com/forums/topic/18483-room-occupancy-counters-need-help/
As the guy asks, how do you make it look nice. Would there be another way of doing the two beams? Small laser pointer modules perhaps?

If you put these on every doorway in your house, you could get the logic down to where it would know a fairly exact count of how many people are in a room at any given time.

[wallyllama]

@dbemowsk search "see through walls with wifi". I suspect it could be mounted to the wall and covered with art or something transparent at 10ghz, or with loss of sensitivity in the wall itself.

[dbemowsk]

@wallyllama Though I see future potential in this, I don't see it as anything that can be put into operation easily at this stage.

[NeverDie]

https://www.oshpark.com/shared_projects/fAVBnmO7

[wallyllama]

@NeverDie nice! Sparkfun has a breakout that is 20% cheaper than just the omron sensor. This is is getting closer to my price range, the radar modules are cheap and might be fun, but this would likely yield a working solution sooner.

[NeverDie]

@wallyllama said in A smart home vs an automated home:

@NeverDie nice! Sparkfun has a breakout that is 20% cheaper than just the omron sensor. This is is getting closer to my price range, the radar modules are cheap and might be fun, but this would likely yield a working solution sooner.

Is this the one you found? https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14289

[wallyllama]

Once a method of sensing people is selected/found, then mySenors can be used as the transport layer. This leads to the question of the actual "smarts". The various mysensors supported packages seem to track state, allow control, and have scenes, which are good data and tools for the smarts to work on, but dont seem to be smart themselves. Am I overlooking something?

Commercial products use the 'cloud' to gather a lot of data from local devices, and create an AI of sorts that local devices then query for the appropriate response to specifuc conditions. I'm not interested in sending all my data to the cloud, so Im interested in completely local solutions.

Again this doesn't currently exist(that I know of), but many pieces do. Some are just pieces (hadoop for storing data e,g), some are partway there (mycroft ai e.g.), some have large backers (movidius ai accelerator). Some assembly required.

Are there more complete solutions that I may not know of?
What goals do others have?

[wallyllama]

@NeverDie no it was an amg8833 breakout and at adafruit not sparkfun sorry, $39us. Mouser and digikey have just the sensor form$22us in small quantities.

https://www.adafruit.com/product/3538

[wallyllama]

The amg8833 has an 8x8 grid, and a 60° field of view, so if you have 8' (2.4m) ceiling that will cover a square with 14' (4m) sides at the floor. One pixel will be about 1' 9" ( 44cm) at the floor. That should be plenty of resolution even without interpolation. I suspect interpolation could give an effective grid of 16x16 at least, maybe more.

Careful planning and mounting in a corner or on a wall would have some trade offs, but might allow for covering a larger area with one sensor.

One trade off is identification. Is that heat blob a person or @gohan 's cat? That might be doable, but is it Mom or Dad, or teenager would probably need supplemental information.

Stationary heat sources, lamps, vents etc, could be filtered out, in probably several different ways. I have some large windows that may blur the data, but this isnwhere situational awareness wouldmc9me in. E.g. if (curtains == open && tod == daytime) then apply filter to pixels x through z, maybe time of year etc.

Other obstacles would probably look like cold spots and unless they are large wouldn't affect detection of people. They might dim a bit, so maybe a filter would be needed here.

This is quite doable. I've been thinking about it for a while and seeing usable sensors for effectivley 1/2 price has me a bit excited. I appologize if I have monopolized the podium a bit.

[gohan]

You are pretty much facing the same problems as all the engineers working on self driving cars or whatever is using computer vision (which is going to be tricky to be handled by an arduino alone, and that is why many services are relying on cloud computing)

[wallyllama]

@gohan true for the larger goals, but this sensor is 64 pixels (256 w/interpolation) and we need to track a dot, i think an arduino could gather the data, do a bit of preprocessing, and (the mysensors part) transmit the data to a raspberry pi for "whole house" tracking.

This is pretty low res and I think a pi could handle it. If not, Intel has a movidius usb stick meant for computer vision/ai acceleration, I believe opencv has been ported to it. So while this is on the edge, some of the blood has dried.

The other plus is houses move slower than cars, unless people are running indoors, a 2 to 3 second refresh rate should be accurate enough.

This is a large project and mysensors would only be a portion of it, so for now I'll try to limit myself to talking about how a node based on this sensor would work and if it fits into mysensors properly or not. There is plenty there to discuss.

@dbemowsk again sorry for hijacking your thread, I'm going to look at the guides for submitting a node to openhardware.io, i dont promise I'll be fast so dont stop working your own ideas.

[NeverDie]

@wallyllama

To what degree will detection range be an issue with these sensors?

[gohan]

@wallyllama I think an easier way to do tracking of people in the house would be through BT tags, this way you have also identification. Image preprocessing on Arduino I think would be hard to achieve, maybe on a pi zero.

[wallyllama]

@NeverDie data sheet says 7 meters max, there is probably enough margin, at least for typical room sizes in the US. I think the 60° fov will be the bigger issue, getting coverage. Imagine you place the sensor in the center of your ceiling. The room is square, 14ft on a side and 8 ft high (~4X2.4 M), the sensors field of view would exactly cover the floor, but it is shaped like a pyramid with the sensor at the peak, so if you stand flat against a wall, only your feet would be in view.

@gohan's suggestion of bluetooth tags doesnt have that problem, it can be seen anywhere the signal gets to. You can have multiple detectors for coverage and triangulation. If you have a smartwatch or phone you always carry then youndont even need a separate tag. It is relatively cheap and simple, and most of the tech is done already.

(Now here is where I loop around and start spinning in circles) I dont want to have to carry anything, it should be possible to detect my presence by all the signals bouncing off me already, like light, or ir, or wifi, or radar, then the googling happens......