Invisible ripples in wireless spectrum tell Aura if someone’s in your house

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8updJWoSxE

6 nodes for 430, vs the Aura for 499. The difference is that Xandem is already used by building installers and has been shipping a product for awhile.

http://xandem.com/xandem-home/

I'm not affiliated with them btw, just a fan of the tech.

Knowing that we had two dogs and three people living in the home, none of whom were apparently woken by the intruders? That freaked me out for quite a while.

Owning a gun makes the people in your household statistically more likely to be killed both inside and outside the household[1].

It also makes you more likely to murder an innocent person or have the gun used against a family member[2].

1. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/study-guns-in-home-increase-suic...

2. http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/defensive-gun...

Your goal should be to get them out. Grease those wheels. Offer more. Be blunt. Nothing you own is worth the escalation.

I would probably try to negotiate with a burglar. The only thing I really care about are pictures, videos and my family. They can literally have the rest... funny that sometimes I am a bit jealous of people when their houses burn to the ground. They get to start over... I always hope they keep offsite backups of what really matters.

Really? My nightmare scenario is for these things to have network connections (oh wait) and to work in concert for surveillance purposes.

I'm perpetually amazed at the wolves people invite into their homes. I'm looking at you, Alexa.

It's bad enough owning a cell phone...

If you're not living alone, it's a bit more complicated. Instruct your family to know how to hide in situations of home invasion and to call 911. Engaging with burglars is not really worth the risk. Valuables can be replaced, life cannot.

As for preventative measures, you could get a dog or two (and train them properly), multiple loud alarms all over the house, and put night-vision enabled cameras in very visible places pointed at entry points (the cameras should be obvious to the burglar that it's a camera, it might scare them off).

If you want to go further, burglars tend to not burglarize homes that they know are occupied or with people awake. If you leave lights on or audible TV/radio/music on, it might be enough for them to back out. That could be distracting to sleep/power-bill-costly though.

[Edit] And as another poster said, get a dog.

It's the principle of parking a crappy car next to a Mercedes. You just need to convince the car thief to steal the other guys car, ie, convince the burglar there are easier targets around.

Leave the house. Quietly slip out a window or a back door

I soon stopped, because I think they aren't worth it (which made me the world's worst salesperson. I remember near the end talking one old woman out of it.) The first important thing is that they won't prevent the nightmare encounter where a thief enters the house when you're there. Second, police are too swamped to have ever reacted in time to catch the thief. To my knowledge, it has never, ever happened.

There is a possible benefit that it may truncate the time in the house. To me this is not a big issue, I suspect most competent thieves are efficient with time.

Finally, there is an unobservable deterrence effect, but that is easily obtained by faking the appearance of a system without needing to enter a contract and pay monitoring fees. The most useless thing about security systems, the monitoring, is the only thing that costs serious money.

The final benefit is life-alert style stuff, but there are better solutions for that.

On the other hand, there is a massive placebo effect, a sense of safety that the monitoring provides. I suppose that is what people pay for.

But what was the interesting feature of this was that most sensors were based on infrasound, notionally they were meant to detect shattering glass, but somehow the sensitivity was tweaked in such way that they even detected opening of doors/windows (this was mentioned in manual as feature) and even could detect person moving around the room.

I just cut my losses and installed a good security camera system that covers the full exterior (using Hikvision cameras and a DVR). If that doesn't deter someone an alarm won't, and at the very least I can keep an eye on anything suspicious and have evidence after the fact.

I have it because I had a triple play package, TV/phone/internet, and they offered me quadruple play, TV/phone/internet/security, on a two year package that was actually $40/month cheaper than my triple play and included Starz.

There have been a few minor things that I actually have found it useful for that have nothing to do with security, and could easily be accomplished by simpler means.

1. If there is a power outage while I am at work, I can find out when it started and how long it lasted from the security system logs, which log both power out and power back events. Before, I could figure out when power came back from my digital clocks that reset to 12:00 when power comes on. I could improve this if I added an electric analog clock, since in a power outage that would not reset but it would stop ticking. The amount of time the analog clock was behind would then tell the total time power was out, and the digital clock would tell how long ago power came on. That would not tell me if there was a single outage, or multiple outages. It would be fairly easy to build a gizmo specifically for that: analog electric clock hooked up through a relay in such a way that if it loses power, it does not come back on until you press a reset button. That clock would then record the time the first outage started. From that, the time power came back on for the last time (found via the digital clock), and the total outage duration (from the other analog electric clock), one could figure out if there had been a single outage or multiple outages.

2. I wanted to monitor my home temperature while away. I pointed the security camera at a thermometer, and then could use the remote camera app to look at it. (Later replaced with an ESP8266 and temperature sensor that takes a reading every minute and uploads to my website).

3. I had some work done on the house that required everyone present to use a respirator while work was in progress. I went and spent the day at my office, and used the camera to check if the workmen had left before I headed home.

It just posts all of the events from the sensors to a VPS in the cloud (that I have already to run personal web sites). If its "set" with a post from my phone, it simply texts a list of people (wife, dad, good friend) that an "alarm" went off. Otherwise it just records the events for later curiosity.

I've also got one IP camera that I can jump on and look into the main room with.

It was nearly free except for the happy project time to build it and is all I've ever felt I needed.

It's not a full proper security system but could be made into one. I had it alert me when a certain room was entered or had a high temperature or humidity.

I say used (past tense) because some support is now discontinued but I think it is a worthwhile idea.

I haven't tried the sphere and not sure of the status.

With the base board you can run a couple of relays to trigger whatever you'd like. I use it to turn on the lights when the alarm is tripped which helps the camera system I have actually get a picture and not just a dark room. It is also nice when coming home in the dark, and for automating light schedules when out of town.

The IT-100 gives a simple serial interface to monitor/control the entire system from a computer. I used cereal on debian to follow/interact with the serial stream, and a bunch of perl/bash scripts to do things like log events to a mysql database, turn on/off the zoneminder DVR system, manipulate relays, send emails, and pretty much do whatever I wanted.

As far as B&E deterrent, I think having the monitoring company stickers is 90% of the benefit since most criminals are looking for a quick low-risk fix and will just hit your neighbour without a security system. That said, making it hard for them to hang around and really clean you out makes me feel a lot safer, since most valuable are hidden away somewhat.

I also like the cameras so I can check in while out of town. I have heard that video footage has to be REALLY cut and dried as far as identity for the police to use it, so low-res or low-light images are probably useless for prosecution.

You may find that the monitoring costs are paid for by a house-insurance discount that you get for having active fire alarm monitoring

Still, probably not as good as a vicious-sounding dog.

[0] http://people.csail.mit.edu/fadel/papers/wivi-paper.pdf SIGCOMM'13

One thing i've wanted since I started doing home-automation stuff is a system that can turn off lights after someone has been out of the room for like 10-15 minutes. IR sensors have false readings a lot (if you are sitting still reading a book, suddenly the lights go out...), not to mention the need for a sensor in each room with good visual coverage of the whole room.

Something like this would be fantastic for that use case, and knowing if someone was home when they aren't supposed to be is just an added bonus.

And you don't need a security service to take action, a neighbor can check if needed, or if you are certain that something is wrong, a call to the police.

Most systems are installed inside a home, and track entry and exit. That works great if you own the home and start from an empty state (so everything is fine unless someone enters).

But if you don't control the building, or don't know who's inside to start out, then most existing systems fail. Which means Aura seems like a breakthrough specifically for surveilling locations you don't have full ownership of, like someone else's house or a neighboring apartment. Which is a bit disconcerting.

There are acoustic versions and they also thread fiber optic cameras under your door, so passive systems that image a building from the emissions in the building are probably something they'd buy too.

This will turn into alerts in network or power outages, but that might be desirable for he same reasons.