Comment by Ixiaus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ixiaus | Hacker News Reader

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This is actually what we're doing at Plum. We're making WiFi and Bluetooth enabled dimmer switches that are running Linux on-top of an ARM9. The primary software for controlling it is written in Erlang and we're using distributed consensus for providing "advanced lighting configuration and control features". Your light switches form a cluster in your own home.

That's the first step (we're trying to launch a product) and ultimately the goal is enabling customers to completely sever the Plum cloud dependency. Right now if you want 100% of the features (schedules, scenes, provisioning, what-not), you have to connect them to the internet, but we want users to have all of the features without any need for Plum's servers. As it stands, about 40% of the features do not require Plum's cloud and actually don't even use it if it's available, so we're working in that direction.

We've also talked about open sourcing a subset of the cloud infrastructure so that users could prop-up their own servers if they really wanted "remote control" of lights (which does matter to people).

Privacy sensitive IoT devices are certainly possible but until more people care about their privacy, it will unfortunately be very niche and a bit of an after-thought to go the extra mile to provide services that can be decoupled from the "smart devices" in the home. Particularly so, considering there's a land grab happening in the IoT space right now and corporations are trying to dominate the home IoT platform.

Humans, in a capitalist society, pretty reliably follow "ask for forgiveness, not permission". Which is interestingly at odds with the more fringe ethical philosophies of free software, privacy respecting software, and generally "ethical" software (that obviously needs explication but I won't go into it here).

What kind of features beyond those that a normal dimmer provides do you add when you have a wifi/bluetooth enabled dimmer? Does that translate into 'you can control the light from your phone'? Or are there other things that I haven't thought of that a light can do other than being on/off or somewhere in between?

Responding to various conditions and sensors (in my case a legacy Kinect), sequenced timers, coordinated scenes across multiple lights, etc. My devices don't connect to the Internet to do it, but the local network is required. I use Hue and DMX-512 myself, but any Wifi-enabled light could benefit.

Nest-like machine learning (the thinking on which predates Nest) can later be added in a cloudless way that starts to anticipate what lights to turn on together, what actions should trigger what scenes, etc.

Presumably Plum has similar ideas.

Lighting which slowly increases in intensity in concert with an alarm clock.

Home lighting which is activated by a motion sensor but doesn't blind you or awaken others but helps prevent you from stumbling through the home in the middle of the night.

Lighting which could be coordinated with media controls.

Simply more economical way to move or add an additional light switch than hiring an electrician to do it the old fashioned way.

Schedules for when and how long to turn a light on, artificially intelligent schedule or scene recommendations based on data from the motion detection sensor (recos first because poltergeist lights are more irritating than your thermostat occasionally thinking you're not home when you are), integration between our led light ring and security products, scenes for different moods triggered via phone or via AppleTV or an alarm clock / schedule, integration with Amazon Echo to control lights, rooms, and scenes via voice; geo-fencing of mobile phone to control lights or scenes based on whether you're coming home or leaving, etc...

> We've also talked about open sourcing a subset of the cloud infrastructure so that users could prop-up their own servers if they really wanted "remote control" of lights (which does matter to people).

As someone who runs his own home-automation server: Have you thought about something like a stand-alone server, that I'm able to turn off net-access for (open-source or not)? I'm currently looking for something like that, and I'm not aware of anything that exists.

I make such a device. There are also expensive systems from AMX, Crestron, Control4 and others that presumably don't require an Internet connection. And you can run apps on a PC like LinuxMCE or Homeseer.

Interesting. Link? I would be interested in perusing your wares, sir!

http://www.nitrogenlogic.com/. The website needs an update and the ordering process could be better. It's a back burner project at the moment, but still available and getting occasional firmware updates as I find time.

https://youtube.com/tl880linux has demo videos.

No because the lightpads themselves are clustered, full-featured Linux machines in the form factor of a switch, they serve that purpose [of a server] within the home so you won't need a server internally at all.

But if you needed any access to the lights from outside the home, you would. In which case you can either colocate one or prop one up on AWS to serve as the remote command bus. Plum provides that right now but I want to, at some point, enable folks to do it themselves.

Or if you really want to, run the server in-house and port forward. That could work too.

Is this you: http://plumlife.com/ ?

Interesting. The pricepoint is a little high, but I didn't know that they were full linux-clusters. I run my own home-automation server in-house, so I could use this. I see that the android-client is in the works. Is that still the case?

Yes that's us. Android app will definitely come (I'm the Director of Software and I'm an Android user) but it's going to follow the iOS app which is what we're focusing on / nailing down currently.

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