Show HN: Turn Touch wooden smart home remote now shipping | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Turn Touch wooden smart home remote now shipping

turntouch.com

110 pointsconesus84 comments

Hey HN, I run NewsBlur and am launching my hardware project Turn Touch today. Launched last year as a Kickstarter campaign, it is now available for immediate shipping.

Turn Touch is a beautiful wooden smart home remote and pedestal. It’s designed to fit both your home and your hand. Use it to instantly control Hue lights, smart devices, Mac and iOS apps, and more. Turn Touch connects to most smart devices in your home that speak WiFi, including Sonos speakers and Belkin Wemo smart plugs. Turn Touch works with your Mac, iPhone, or iPad to control apps like iTunes, Spotify, and Keynote.

Here’s a few more reasons to buy it:

* Extraordinary design — This isn't yet another plastic remote. Turn Touch is carved from solid wood and worked to a show-stopping, textured finish.

* Well connected — Turn Touch is always on, always connected, and always ready to take your breath away. Once you connect your Turn Touch via Bluetooth it stays connected and always available, even without the Turn Touch app actively running. And there's no delay, when you press a button the result is instant.

* Built to last — Not only will Turn Touch stand up to drops and shock, its entire circuit board can be inexpensively replaced with newer, future wireless tech. You won't have to buy a new remote every time Apple comes out with a new phone. And instead of flimsy plastic clasps, a set of 8 strong magnets invisibly hold the remote together.

Plus it’s entirely open source. And good open source projects benefit from good documentation. Here is a five part series on how Turn Touch was built: https://medium.com/@samuelclay/everything-you-need-to-build-...

Is S12 correct? Edit: ah, Newsblur was S12, that's somewhat confusing

I was wondering the same, and became even more confused when I couldn't find Turn Touch on the S12 batch list [0]. This founder first started NewsBlur, which can be found on the S12 batch list, and they are now launching their hardware project Turn Touch. Turn Touch has been a year or so in the making, a much nicer timeline that 6+.

[0] http://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?batch=s2012

Same company, new product. Plus the remote integrates with NewsBlur. I tend to only build productivity tools that use aggregation to get work done.

Five years now. I was researching how to build buttons the day Google announced the Reader sunset (March 13, 2013). That pushed me back a bit as I had to get NewsBlur in shape. It’s a solo project so it took a while to prototype and launch but now here we are.

That’s why I wrote the open source documentation. It’s what I would have wanted when I started this project.

Ah, the timing makes much more sense now. I was looking at the "YC S12" descriptor and wondering, "what's been going on the past 6 years for this to be shipping today?" This looks great by the way, well done.

Where on the website does it say how it actually works? Because "the it works" page, well, doesn't. It seems it connects to a phone via bluetooth? But also uses Wifi? How does it actually connect to any devices? Does it even do that? Or is it just a bluetooth remote for your phone, and the phone then does the real work? If I put this thing next to my bed, and I use it to control my lights, and I left my phone downstairs - will it work?

The remote connects to your iphone, iPad, or Mac. The phone/computer uses wifi or the net to talk to your devices. You can also use IFTTT to control hundreds of devices that aren't natively supported by Turn Touch.

I have a Turn Touch in a pedestal next to my bed and it controls all of the lights in my home.

Huh? It needs my phone to be present to turn on the lights? What if my wife wants to turn on the lights? Why does it need to talk to a phone? Wouldn't a zigbee device compatible with the hue bridge make more sense?

In that case you'd be better off connecting it to a communal iPad or to a Mac that lives at home.

Ooh you may want to make it (much, much) clearer that this won't work without an Apple device.

How many wireless standards are there?

about 18 so far (according to wikipedia) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11

Maybe a good idea for a future add-on to this product: sell a stand-alone hub (something like a Raspberry Pi) that could replace the need for an iOS or MacOS device. You could still use an iOS (or Android) app to configure the hub.

It'd add a bit to the price, but clearly not everyone has a spare Apple device sitting around, that is always-on.

There are dozens of this sort of 'home automation hub' on the market already; some of the based on Raspberry Pi, or on COTS hardware, or dedicated devices.

This is pretty neat, but I was hoping for something not mobile app dependent. Like a ZigBee or Z-Wave connected device. (My automation software currently runs Insteon only, though I've got the hardware to add ZigBee and Z-Wave and will someday get around to it.)

I don't have an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, so I pretty much immediately ended up outside of your market.

I love the idea of the wall dock for it, that I assume is magnetic.

Does it work with non-Apple Bluetooth devices? The language on the "how it works" page seems surprisingly specific to Apple.

Also, does it connect with Sengled hubs?

It's Apple only for now. Once that market shows it's worthwhile I'll expand into Android. As for Sengled hubs, if there's IFTTT support or custom URL support, then it's in there.

Thanks for the response. Personally, I would be more interested in connecting through a Raspberry Pi 3, which has Bluetooth on board, rather than a mobile device.

You should make sure to mention this on the Indigo forums (http://www.perceptiveautomation.com/userforum/index.php) given that it looks like an Apple-centric smarthome device.

FWIW, the wood thing does not really seem like a selling point, and also most likely drives the price up more than a plastic case would.

I like the concept of it though and plan to research the APIs a bit more and then will likely order a couple.

You're absolutely right that wood is driving up the price. But if this does well enough in wood then I'll launch a plastic version in a year or two for $49.

You seem neat and open, personally, I wouldn't put a future price here unless you expect to really hit it. I've already got that in my head. :)

I'm with you on that but I've had that price in my head for a long, long time. The sub $50 point is what I'm aiming for and having thought enough about the plastic version after having made the wood version, I also have a good handle on what it'll cost me.

Please don’t ever make a plastic one.

An aluminum one would be interesting though.

agreed. metal could be cool. I'd still buy the wood myself (if i buy it at all) but i can imagine metal would make some people really happy even if it was more expensive (witness the apple watch)

Anecdatum, I wouldn’t even consider this if it wasn’t wood.

I'm in the same boat. People's homes vary a lot, and any single wood is going to clash badly with at a large percentage of homes.

White (plastic or painted metal) is something that could probably blend in to almost any space.

(It also shows misplaced priorities, in my opinion, when the homepage mentions the Janka hardness of the wood. I don't care how hard the button is because I'm just pressing it with my finger...)

What happens when your fingernail goes into the wood? Mahogany and Rosewood are both hard enough that these remotes will never show any wear unless you abuse them on concrete.

I guess I don't think about that problem because all of the buttons and switches in my life already solve that issue by being made of plastic or metal.

That also just reminded me of another big downside to wood: all the dogs I've ever owned have been really interested in chewing on wooden objects left around the house, even if they were otherwise perfectly respectful of everything else. I've lost quite a few shoe-polish brushes over the years.

Yep, you're completely right. I've already replaced a poor remote that was chewed up by a user's dog. Luckily I give free replacements if the user can provide a photo.

Sounds like you and the GP aren’t in the same boat - they want wood, you don’t...

You're right. I misread the comment. My mistake!

Curious. Why? Do you have no other plastic items or remotes in your house? Are wood accessories so core to you?

It’s just that this device is completely pointless to me. So I’d only be interested if it was an attractive curio.

Congratulations on shipping the product. I must say that it is a beautiful little thing. Good luck moving forward.

I really like how this looks and I bought one to try out. I wish it were standalone and Z-wave (or similar protocol) with Wink (or similar) support. I hate having a different app for every device.

For those that have a bunch of home automation.. is it actually... good?

It strikes me as one of those things that is fun to set up, but probably breaks in weird ways every few months and you have to have a special kind of patience to deal with that. (not to mention a shared sense of patience from spouses etc..)

How reliable and stable is all this stuff? Can you really set this up and forget it and have it work reliably, ie, always? How often do these standards change? Am I going to have to reconfigure all my light switches after getting a new router for example? Or base my light purchasing decisions based on this?

Just curious, I'm intrigued, but having gone down this path in the past it feels more hobby than utility.

I have remotes setup in my home and office and the only time I need to enter the Turn Touch app is when I add a new device. You would be surprised at how easy the app is to use. I looked at every other home automation app I could find and I made my own app with the simplest interface I could design.

It really is a set-it-and-forget-it product.

I would hope that it works now, my worry is more will it still work without me buying new stuff in five years?

Unlike very other tech product, the board inside Turn Touch is user replaceable (without tools!). So you can order a new circuit board when the wireless standards improve and get new functionality without having to spend the full amount.

Try to avoid stuff that depends on the Internet, Revolv was one example where customers got burned because Google essentially bricked the service after acquiring it. Logitech did a similar thing to their Harmony Link hub, though were more generous in offering customers an upgrade path.

I predict this will work in five years but not in fifteen. By 2033 you will have an iPhone XXIV which will not support Bluetooth, and even if you find an ancient iPhone XVI with Bluetooth on eBay, the remote maker will no longer be working on improving the app, so Apple won't let you install it. Of course today he's here to say the circuit board is replaceable but unless this thing is a breakout hit there won't be enough motivation to enhance it in 2033.

For those who may say if a remote lasts five years it's good enough: maybe you're right in today's context. Things I grew up with came with remotes that lasted 20 years and were only obsolete when the thing they controlled was. I guess that's true of Turn Touch too, if you consider that the device it controls is your iPhone.

I setup my own "internet buttons", but I did it in a cheating way - my buttons are nothing more than dumb radio-transmitters. There is no bluetooth, no wifi, and no complexity.

The buttons are dumb, so they are cheap.

Because the aim of the button is to do something "internetty" there is a single receiver which is plugged into my desktop PC which recieves the radio-transmissions, decodes the button IDs, and completes tasks.

There is a brief overview here:

https://blog.steve.fi/creating_an_iot_button__the_smart_way....

I have two receivers, an ESP8266 based device, and a hacked copy of software which uses an SDR dongle. Both are reliable and stable.

In terms of functionality though, they're useful. Dotted around the flat they let me control music, disable lights, and similar.

Cool, that sounds like a reasonable approach. I like the idea of a series of cheap buttons that can connect to a central hub in the home. Couple of questions though:

1. Do these buttons have their own power supply? If so how long does a battery last?

2. Is their a secure radio channel of communication?

3. Is their any feedback on the button that the computer received that button press. (To avoid multiple presses)

1. Yes, the buttons are powered by CR2032 batteries, and when the button is pressed an LED lights to let you know it worked. (i.e. You can detect when they're empty.) My batteries have lasted for several months so far, but I don't know how long to expect them to work.

2. Not sure what you're getting at here; anybody "local" could probably overhear the transmission. And probably perform a replay attack.

3. There is no feedback on the buttons, you press the button and they send a radio transmission (+ light the LED). There is no facility for two-way communication.

If I were building the buttons myself I'd probably have them both send and receive, such that you could use an ACK system. But the whole point is to use cheap & off-the-shelf parts so ..

Nice, wow those batteries are tiny!!

Replay attacks might be acceptable for insignificant tasks light lights and Air Conditioning I suppose. Also gives a much simpler architecture to the system.

I have one of these, and love it. It's so much nicer than the plasticky remotes that come with anything else, and the system support out of the box is great. Sam is very responsive on the forums too.

I have written a raspberry pi server component[1] that can be extended to support any smart device (if you've got an API for it).

You can, if you wish, use the device completely without any supplied software, it operates via bluetooth only so does not phone home. If you want to class up your own hacked together/secure smart home setup, this is a great device.

1: https://github.com/fredley/raspi-turntouch

I don't understand, does this replace the need for the iOS/Mac application?

Yep, the RaspPi client is instead of the iOS/Mac app. Basically the Turn Touch API and Bluetooth spec is open source (https://shop.turntouch.com/pages/open-source) so you can extend it in ways that I haven't built natively.

This is wonderful, thanks. I hope to leverage this into a Home Assistant[0] component (assuming someone else doesn't do it first).

[0] https://www.home-assistant.io/

Oh yeah, I would love that! And if you do, email me and I'll add it to the open source list, where you can also find the API and my email: https://turntouch.com/api

Is this an intuitive interface for anyone? It looks incredibly frustrating. If I want to turn on a lamp, I want to turn on a lamp, not spend hours configuring the optimal way to navigate to a lamp rpg style (north east north north south).

It's pretty simple. Four buttons for four devices. Each button can toggle a device. You can also hold a button to switch to that button's app, giving you four apps with four buttons each. So music app has volume controls and play/pause and next track. Lighting controls has scenes and hue/brightness controls.

There's no multi-touch or sequences to memorize. Just the four buttons and the four apps.

That sounds simpler than what I was imagining, but you just described a sequence to memorize.

i would expect most folks to just use each one as a simple toggle. I know that's what i was intending when i pondered getting this.

I knew this project sounded familiar! I was following your medium post[1] when I was setting up my old Shapeoko 2. It's a good read for anyone interested in how the parts are manufactured.

[1] https://medium.com/@samuelclay/everything-you-need-to-build-...

I like the design! Very comprehensive built descriptions too (mainly looked into the firmware part). At first I wasn't too sure about the BTLE choice, but it makes sense in a power consumption context.

Zigbee would have been nice for my usecase (I'm using a RaspBee module), but that's not for everyone (I like to try out a lot of different things, interfacing it myself and have everything meet in the middle via MQTT, from there it's up to my imagination, currently trying out Node-RED for instance).

Since my house is rather small, I could probably use the BLE on my Pi.

Not a fan of the text baked into your image on the home page… this is pretty much a solved problem by now…

I did a cmd-F to search for certain technologies and didn't find them, before I realized they _were_ mentioned in the big grid image, just not as searchable text.

It's not baked in. I can select it just fine in Safari. Also, "Bluetooth" is mentioned in How It Works.

I think he meant the "Works With" image (grid of compatible technologies), that one does appear to have the text baked in, and is not searchable.

Congratulations on shipping! Turn Touch looks beautiful. Do you plan on extending the platform to other control devices (a larger version that is fixed in place, or a wall control unit) with the same software backing and aesthetic?

The pedestal (pictured on the site) is exactly that wall control. I built the pedestal because I wanted my remote to live somewhere. The pedestal holds the remote in place with 6 hidden magnets, leaving you free to pull the remote off the wall to use interactivity. The pedestal also works on a table top just as well, which is where I have a remote situated next to my bed on a nightstand.

Guess I should check the site and not ask questions based on year old recollections :P

Very cool

Ah I remember meeting Sam in 2015 at TechShop where he was milling one of the early TurnTouch protoypes. Damn, making good hardware takes time. Congrats on the launch Sam, and best of luck with the project. It looks gorgeous!

I'm going to disagree and say I don't like the wood.

Personally, I think glass fiber reinforced nylon -- the kind of plastic you see in high end power tools -- would be a much better aesthetic, as well as being far more durable than any hardwood. It's also much easier to scale if you want to make 100,000 of these things.

Also not a huge fan of the square body. If it's dark, all I have to orient the remote is those two chevrons. Maybe that works, maybe it doesn't, but I'm still partial to the rectangle.

Don't knock it til you've tried it. It's easier than you think to orient the remote in your hand without looking. That north ridge (the chevron) is quite pronounced by feel and you can feel it through clothing.

As for the wood, I agree that different tastes are something I should strive to accommodate. Plastic is next and I also love the feel of glass filled nylon. I'll be looking into it as soon as the wood remotes do well enough.

Fair enough. Looking at an item is no substitute for feel in hand.

“Turn Touch is a perfect match with Philips Hue lights” - I must be missing something in this prominently highlighted scenario. Instead of walking over to the lamp and turning it on, you have to find the remote and press its button to turn on the same lamp. Where’s the value in this?

I understand the advantage of voice control, but operating one physical object vs another sounds like a simple substitution.

Don't just count the one lamp. A home will have dozen of bulbs. This remote lets you control all of the bulbs/lamps at once. Use Turn Touch to set scenes or interactively cycle through "random" scenes until you get the lighting you want.

Typically when I get home I press a single button and I get a single color for my apartment. If I'm not feeling that color, I press the button again and switch to another color. The other buttons let me adjust brightness and hue. The remote then also lets me control music and smart power plugs. It's really amazing to have everything wired up and controllable with only four buttons.

As an embedded developer that has done contracting for people with all of the capital, and none of the misunderstanding of electronics, I'd like to offer a thought experiment. I realize that Amazon has all sorts of guardrails in place, but I can control anything in my house with Alexa today, regardless of Amazon's prior approval, because I can make anything in my house appear to my Alexa as a Hue hub.

The internet has already reverse engineered Alexa to make it a weapon, and unsavvy people like shiny things. So how long until an unsavvy wealthy person hires an embedded developer to integrate his entire house to work under the emulated hue model? Because the day its up and running, that unsavvy rich guy is going to throw a party. And that embedded developer might just show up and say "Hey alexa, set a timer for everyone's sleep monitors within your geofence. when they're all asleep, disarm the security system for 1 hour, turn up everyones binaural sleep aids for one hour, and hire me three ubers so I can make a clean getaway with the goldbars in the basement. Oh yeah, Alexa, unlock the vault.

I realize that Amazon has all sorts of guardrails in place, but I can control anything in my house with Alexa today, regardless of Amazon's prior approval, because I can make anything in my house appear to my Alexa as a Hue hub.

That's not even remotely true without a significant amount of physical hacking and a substantial amount of software programming. Most appliances are not smart devices and do not provide simple control interfaces, let alone APIs that can integrate with Alexa, et al.

I too get up to change the volume on the tv every time, why is there this redudant control hardware shipped with every television? So wasteful!

Snark aside, the illision of leisure/luxury/laziness is often valued as the real thing, effective or not. Could an app for your already omnipresent phone do this? Sure, but this is a sleek tactile button, no apps to futz with. I wouldn't buy one, but I get the appeal.

What do we want? Change. When do we want it? As soon as we can be convinced we need it.

The next evolution will be "you know the integrated home is great, but everyone's wifi still goes out every once in a while. wouldn't it be great if we could make that more robust with CAT5? What if we could do ethernet over your existing electical wiring? Then we could do Lights over Voice over IP over ethernet over AC. The best part is, we soft launched at hardware stores about 100 years ago". Welcome to the future!!!!!!

I either take out my phone to change the color, or I pick up the remote to change the color. It's a little faster with the remote since I don't have to find the app first. (This is hypothetical since I don't own either device, but it definitely seems like something I would do.)

I have a specific use case. When I go to sleep I don't have a laptop or my phone on me, but I want to tell my flat that I'm going to sleep now and it should shut down all the lights, the TV, the music and other things. And in the morning if I'm still asleep it should not tell me that my train is leaving in 7 minutes because I will not catch it anyway.

In the morning my flat turns on the light in the sleeping room automatically to wake me up, but everything else is still switched off, untill I really wake up. Then I want to say to my flat that I'm awake and it should start brewing the coffe and tell me that I need to leave soon because the train is leaving, it also should start the radio so I can listen to the news while brushing my teeth.

For that a button in the sleeping room would be awesome, I even build one myself for about $2 https://github.com/jeena/esp8266-button

My flat shuts everything down which might use energy when I leave and it can't see my phone on bluetooth anymore. Then it also starts the CCTV cam so it can notify me if someone came into my flat while I'm away. When I come back it cuts the power to that CCTV.

I remember these other things we used to put on the wall and use to control the lights. We called them "light switches", and they didn't require secondary devices to have apps installed in the middle. They were also incredibly difficult to lose track of.

And no light switch in the world is as versatile as this remote is.

Is there any plan to support Android/Windows devices? From a quick glance over the website, it doesn't seem like they are currently supported. Hopefully I just missed it though, this device is beautifully made!

Eventually I'd like to build an Android app. NewsBlur has a native Android app, so I would just divert my Android developers attention to the Turn Touch app. I'm waiting to see if there's sufficient demand for the iOS and macOS apps first.

This is awesome, will there be a Gabon ebony version??

Anyone else getting a HTTPS certificate error?

I would hope not, that certificate is powered by Shopify. The other certificate on turntouch.com proper is a Let's Encrypt cert.

Cool, but its way cooler to run OpenHAB2 on a raspberry pi. True home automation system.

This is a nice button - openhab is an entire home automation platform. With no buttons.

Kinda like saying ‘that’s a nice keyboard, but Linux is cooler’

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