Automate Your Home With Your Own Personal SkyNet | Hacker News Reader

Automate Your Home With Your Own Personal SkyNet

wired.com

52 pointsjamesbritt11 comments

I like the very thought of home automation and the principle of 'automate everything' and as such "kudos to the developers". For my own part I have occasionally thought about what I would like to automate in my environment and came up with ... nothing.

Once I read an article about a guy who used a Kinect to determine where he is located in his room and then let the system switch the lights accordingly. Quite nice, but not really essential or saving time. And my appartment is different so I'd need at least three Kinects (living room, hall, kitchen), which is too much of an effort just for light switching.

Maybe I am simply uninspired. I thought 'well, where are the things I do repeatedly where automating would save me a little time and effort?'. I came up with errands where stuff has to be done. physically. cleaning, laundry, dishes, trash. I purchased a Deebot D76 vacuum cleaner and it was quite nice for a while. But the bearings get dirty pretty soon and the batteries wore out very fast. The second set of batteries is done with again and I'm not sure whether I'll replace them. This thing never got to the point of 'fire and forget'.

Other than switching the lights I can't imagine anything that would be of utility for my beyond gadgetery and 'wow teh awesome!'.

My home does not have any automatable security systems, no electric shades, nothing that would follow a simple logic of 'if this then that'.

Please help. I'd love to live in the future, but I don't know how.

I feel your pain :)

This is somewhat like what I face with things like the Leap Motion or the Kinect. There are clever things you can do with them but rarely are they better than what you would do without them; truly practical use cases that justify the time and expense to implement and maintain are hard to come by.

For the IoT, if you have a garage then you might want to turn on/off house lights or adjust the thermostat when a car enters or leaves. Or have a way to detect if a room has been empty for X minutes (I'm thinking sonar to tell if extra mass is in the space; Kinects are overkill) and automatically turn off lights.

I'd like to be told when I'm running low on milk and eggs.

Link to the Skynet code mentioned: https://github.com/skynetim/skynet

If you're in or near Phoenix AZ come by the IoT meeting on the 2nd Monday of each month. http://www.meetup.com/iotphx

It's run by Chris Matthieu and a lot of fun.

And, of course, come by HeatSync Labs in Mesa.

And don't forget the Wit Speech API if you want to be able to talk to your Skynet-automated home! https://wit.ai/blog/2014/02/12/speech-api

Imagine some commercial product like a light switch using this. I connect the device to my WiFi network (using morse code to enter SSID and password I guess) The switch connects to SkyNet and gets assigned a UUID and token. How do I get that info so I can connect my new light switch to my Twitter or Facebook account?

Depending on how you've set up Skynet (presumably running your own local instance) you should be able to view the device listings of all things connected.

SkyNet wants me to command it using my smartphone. But I don't always have my phone on me when at home. Can another way be worked out. Perhaps making it thought-controlled or something, so I can simply lay back and have fun?

Can take it serious when the man is holding a LED 2x16 saying "Hello World, via Skynet".

Ohh, we got a badass over here!

Not sure why you are getting downvoted (other than typo). I thought the same thing, this doesn't seem to be much in terms of actually connecting things.

If you want to see a similar technology that actually works and is starting to be widely implemented check out AllJoyn and the AllSeen alliance[1].

1: https://www.alljoyn.org/

I'm puzzled why you suggest Skynet does not actually work.

Here's an example of using it to control AR drones via a Leap Motion:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iJYeK6wFBs

During a recent hackfest we used Skynet to control a wearable computer over Bluetooth low-energy; the device could be controlled via Twitter, SMS, and a Web page.

Sorry if that picture failed to impress but the relative ease with which these connections could be made is indeed pretty bad-ass.

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