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Show HN: Home automation and lighting control with Kinect

nitrogen.posterous.com

98 pointsnitrogen31 comments

For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive - you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme. -- Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy

Impressive foresight from Douglas Adams there, though I suppose with the Theremin as precedent it's believable.

I confess that I did have exactly this problem in the early stages of development :).

Looks like his "automation controller" is a sheevaplug miniature "plug computer".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug

I'd love to know more about all of the steps involved with hooking that up to a Kinect and getting it to process input and perform tasks.

It involves a lot of custom software that I will be describing in more detail in the future. Naturally there's also some open source code, like libfreenect and Linux+GNU.

You know what'd be awesome? (Just throwing it out here). If the lights smoothly ramp up and down instead of winking on and off. It'd be way more Star Trek and much more impressive looking to the uninitiated. (Although, if you're already using X10 or similar modules to control the lights, ridiculously easy to actually add.)

They do fade smoothly, actually, but the limited dynamic range of the camera hides this.

That's GNU/Linux to you, you great hacker you. Srsly, release this soon, 'been looking for some FOSS project to manage my home's billion and one power sources, timers, lights, doors, and unicorn stable.

Would love to see how you even begin/approach meddling with hardware via commands to this complete noob anything other than stupid shell and CRUD app scripting.

Well, bits and pieces have been and will be released as open source, but the core automation system will not (at least for now). Check out my GitHub and SourceForge pages linked from my personal web site (linked from my HN profile) for the parts that have been released. If you must have FOSS, LinuxMCE might work for you, otherwise I'll continue to post more information about my system in the future.

P.S. I said "Linux+GNU" instead of GNU/Linux because I think of and use them as separate, replaceable pieces. And thanks for the compliment ("great hacker", hah) :).

Don't those have issues with overheating and/or power supplies that wore out...

They redesigned the power supply to fix the issues with the SheevaPlug, and straight-up discontinued the GuruPlug Server Plus. I did have to replace one power supply on an older SheevaPlug that was in a location with a very high ambient temperature (well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit), but haven't had any other problems with either the old or new power supplies.

Just quickly, do others also pronounce "posterous" as nitrogen does in the video? (post to rhyme with "frost" rather than "post")

I might have it all wrong! Assumed it was because you were "posting" something, not a play on "preposterous."

In the Mixergy interview I saw (I think it's this one: http://mixergy.com/posterous-heyzap-etacts/), Posterous's founder pronounced it to rhyme with frost and preposterous (as in "preposterously easy" IIRC).

It's a play on posterity, I believe.

It would be nice if it would pause the movie when he gets up to grab a snack

Maybe you got up because it's a boring part. I think an autonomous system like this should assume the minimum possible.

Of course if you have xbox you can always voice command it to pause if you really want it to pause when you get up.

In my case the screen is still visible from where the food is, so I want the movie to keep playing. It is possible to customize this, of course.

My cat just got more annoying.

Though I wonder how hard it would be to deal with given the kinetic can see outlines . . .

You could design your control system so that the cat can't reach the active control area.

Very impressive setup he's got. Might have to get him to setup my house.

I wonder what happens when there are multiple people in the house, coming in and out of rooms, etc.

At present it considers the zone with the highest occupation as the active zone. I will be adding better support for multiple people in the future.

This comment made me smile as I thought about how it sounded.

Great work. Looking forward to exploring the code someday.

Maybe you could also add the option to control the lights by waving your hand in the air. Say in a slow 90 degree motion to the right, as well voice commands.

Anyway this is really cool!

Well you should really consider any accupation as the active zone. But very creative use of the Kinect.

Cool stuff, but I was half-expecting that you would be detecting touching/tapping light fixtures with a finger and using that to turn them on and off. Version 2 perhaps? :)

Would this actually save electricity? Wouldn't the power used by the Kinect and the host computer/server outweigh the electricity used by keeping a few unnecessary lamps on?

His whole control computer uses around 5 watts. I think a Kinect might take 2 more. It doesn't take much lamp off time to break even and start seeing savings.

But that's not why geeks do such things. If you're going to take over the world, the lights simply must automatically come on when entering your lair, accompanied by a cold, female, disembodied voice intoning "Welcome, Doctor".

You are planning on doing the voice eventually as well, right Nitro?

Heh, there's already a voice, but for now it's just espeak or festival, and it's usually disabled.

And yes, the system uses very, very little power compared to the lights. My light dimmer uses ~4 watts when off, while each single bulb uses 100 (still waiting for dimmable fluorescents to be able to dim smoothly to zero). I've measured the Kinect at ~4W as well. One thing to keep in mind with home automation is that, yes, it usually does save power, but that's not why you do it -- it's about saving time.

Thanks for the info, I just wondered about power usage to understand the practicalities of the technology. I understand the other benefits, like the fact it looks awesome and none of your friend's houses can do it!

At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.

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