I delivered the following presentation to a meetup of the Quantified Self group in Seattle tonight. The evening was a fascinating fusion of medicine, technology and personal improvement. My talk fell between a session on personal genome sequencing and another on measuring the effects of coffee on blood pressure.
This new technique to compress the time series data collected by my home automation system seems to be working really well.
I've been working on home automation for over 15 years and I'm close to achieving my goal which is a house that understands where everyone is at all times, can predict where you are going next and can control lighting, heating and other systems without you having to do or say anything. That's a true "smart home".
Digital Twin are an online representation of a real world object, a copy of its properties in the digital world and a way to send updated and commands to it. In effect I've been making them for years but now they have a trendy name.
An overview of the many sensors I've experimented with for home automation including my favorite under-floor strain gauge, through all the usual PIR, beam and contact sensors to some more esoteric devices like an 8x8 thermal camera.
Why automated learning is hard for a smart home. The perils of over-fitting, under-fitting and how the general unpredictable nature of life makes it hard to build a system that learns your behavior.
One way to reduce the volume of sensor data is to remove redundant points. In a system with timestamped data recorded on an irregular interval we can achieve this by removing co-linear points.
Home automation systems need to respond to events in the real world. Sometimes it's an analog value, sometimes it's binary, rarely is it clean and not susceptible to problems. Let's discuss some of the ways to convert these inputs into actions.
Another super useful function for handling sensor data and converting to probabilities is the logistic function 1/(1+e^-x). Using this you can easily map values onto a 0.0-1.0 probability range.
In a home automation system we often want to convert a measurement into a probability. The ATAN curve is one of my favorite curves for this as it's easy to map overything onto a 0.0-1.0 range.
Several years ago we did a major remodel. I did all of the finish electrical myself and supervised all of the rough-in electrical. I also put in all of the electrical system and water in our barn. I have opinions ...
I'm testing a T-Mobile Home Internet device as a backup to XFinity and a way to offload half our monthly traffic to avoid the XFinity 1.2TB cap
A probabilistic approach to home automation models the probability that each room is occupied and how many people are in that room.
A statistical approach to understanding which rooms are occupied in a smart house
An if-this-then-that style rules machine is insufficient for lighting control. This state machine accomplishes 90% of the correct behavior for a light that is controlled automatically and manually in a home automation system.
Understanding the many different 'states' a house can have is critical to creating great home automation
Some interesting charts from the gigabytes of data my home automation system produces
My notes on the iBeacon meetup in Seattle held in January 2015
Using nodes and links to represent a home and all the devices in it
Using n-gram analysis to spot patterns in sensor activations
Building a Xamarin Forms application to control my home automation system
Multicolored LEDs can convey a lot of information in a small space
The diminutive Arduino boards include a powerful transmitter/receiver
POSTing data to a home automation system from Arduino devices
A novel approach to adding history to variables in a programming language
Some new features for my home automation using an Android phone
Just thought I should mention that I built a web-like system before the web existed
At the risk of looking seriously old, here's something found on a paper tape
My favorite home automation features for Halloween
Historical note about moving my servers into a datacenter
Running conduit can be expensive but maybe you don't need one to every room
Why disk speed is the most critical aspect for most modern PCs and servers
Monitoring a cable modem using its HTML management interface
A friend died last year, it wasn't unexpected. He left a lot for his friends to cleanup. Maybe these notes can help someone else prepare better.
