All posts by umairshafiq

Gadgets, Home Automation, Technology

A Smarter Router

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ImSoap

There are quite a few ways do home automation today. You could standardize on a particular technology such as z-wave, insteon, zigbee or any other technology for that matter. One thing is for sure, the whole setup will get outdated very quickly and you will soon feel jealousy pangs when your friends have the cooler newer toys.

Recently, the trend has been to incorporate transceivers for various protocols in a device that does more than one thing. My previous blog about Piper was about exactly that. A all-in-one device that had various sensors, a wide angle camera, siren, and a transmitter for z-wave devices. The concept is very cool. Now there are quite the few more devices that do that and more. There are two that of interest to me right now. One is the Revolv which is a great concept and will probably get a lot of traction. Another is Soap. Today I am looking at the Soap Router. I would love to read up more about Revolv and compare that as well at another time.

So what is Soap?

A quad-core ARM based Processor running Android as its base OS that supports 802.11AC WIFI. Support for Parental Controls, Virus and Malware protection. This would make it a router. And this is what makes it cooler.

  1. Transceivers for Zigbee, Z-wave, Insteon, Bluetooth, Wemo, TCP, Vuezone and RFID/NFC.
  2. Using Android as its base OS, there are limitless options now available. Here are some of the things their kickstarter campaign envisions that it could do.
    • Let you know when your kids leave the house
    • Alert you if you dog gets out of the backyard
    • Let you know if you dog is barking too loud
    • Turn on your TV when you enter the room
    • Turn on and off lights as walk in and out of parts of your home
    • Let you know if you forgot your wallet or cell phone before you leave your home
  3. The higher end model actually has a touch screen that lets you control certain settings.
  4. Higher end model also comes with 32 GB space that would be used for storing certain profiles for your home and a lot more.
  5. Ability to mirror computers on the network (Very tech-geek James Bond-ish) and I like it. Great to see what your rebellious teenagers are up to lately. (I still recommend talking to them directly but sometimes you have to)
  6.  It also lets you trap a potential hacker by setting up “bait” for him/her.
  7. Block ads, popups, phishing scams (really can use this when the in-laws are in town. Click, click, click. click everything!!!

Soap is supposed to be released in November of 2014. Which is a very long time. Usually what happens when a great product comes to a crowd funding site like Kickstarter is that someone else with a lot more money will go ahead and create a similar product and come out with it sooner to totally annihilate the efforts of true genuine engineers and visionaries that purely want to create something to solve something. So such efforts end up being more academic in nature and provide the stepping stones of where the industry will turn next.

Did I just say that Soap will fail and disappear? I sure hope not. I  hope it succeeds and makes a lot of money along the way.

Would like to lean more about SOAP? Head on to their campaign on kickstarter. Or you can do to their website. 

Gadgets, Home Automation, Technology

The little piper that could(nt) – Part 2

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If you pass the first hurdle of meeting your financial goals, then you pass the phase of manufacturing the product, testing it, and actually shipping it out as promised should it be considered a successful campaign? Most likely yes. Piper would be a success as well with in the same criteria.

But sometimes what happens is that by opening up the chance of success or failure of something to the public can create unwarranted demands on the product. Yes, you gained the ability to mass produce your product out in China without going for Angel or VC funding that would have immediately reduced your ownership of the product but what you lose is the advisory that comes along with a seasoned VC fund. People that are experts in supply chains, manufacturing, process, quality, marketing, setting the correct expectation and all other good things you need for true success of a product.

Thus starts Part 2 of my review of Piper. Let me preface this by saying that I really wanted this product to work. And I am sure that if time and expectations are managed properly, it will succeed. If the blacksumac team loses hope or direction at this point, there is no chance that it will be able to compete against the incumbent industry.

What works 

1. The Siren is nice and loud

2. The app connects eventually, the advertised pieces of information display

3. Everything sort of works

What doesn’t work

In a days worth of testing, here is what I had trouble with

1. App takes over a minute to connect to the piper service.

Connection issues

This process took several minutes
This process took several minutes

2. The video quality is not at par with what the industry is able to do right now.

Video quality is not the best.
Video quality is not the best.

3. The device keeps disconnecting from the Piper service and/or WIFI.

Service keeps disconnecting
Service keeps disconnecting
The device kept disconnecting and reconnecting all day and night.
The device kept disconnecting and reconnecting all day and night.

4.  The rules don’t work properly. I created rule that was supposed to notify me on movement but not trigger the siren. Guess what happened?

5. Data missing from graphs.

Data missing from graphs
Data missing from graphs

6. No video recording happening. I set the rule to record video upon trigger. No video was recorded.

Other concerns

1. How much bandwidth is Piper actually taking?

2. What is the general flow of information? Piper device detects something -> sends it to Piper Service in the cloud -> sends alerts to customer. What exactly is saved in the Piper Cloud?

3. Where exactly is the recorded video supposed to be saved? In the cloud or locally on the device?

4. Since the Piper device is sending a beacon out to the Piper cloud service, can a hacker hack the Piper service and gain video feed access to Piper customer homes?

The product as it stands today is NOT ready for prime time. The team at blacksumac is probably under the gun to deliver hundreds of these devices and are stretched too thin to be thinking about QoS. Whereas that is exactly what they need to be doing. 

I am actually missing the somewhat complexity of my old camera solutions where at least I controlled the ownership of everything. The ability to let the video feed be recorded in circular on an NFS share alone had a lot of value.

How to fix this

1. Take a deep breath

2. Concentrate on quality. Listen to what the field is saying.

3. Move Piper servers over to a better scalable service. AWS perhaps.

Conclusion

I will probably keep the device and check every couple of weeks to see if things have been fixed. I believed in the general philosophy of the blacksumac team and understand that these crowdfunding sites are not market places where you buy products. When you hand over some cash to a campaign, what you are saying is that you want this campaign to succeed in every way and you want to be a part of that journey.

Gadgets, Home Automation, Technology

The little Piper that could

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piper
image from http://getpiper.com/

I spend a good amount of time on indiegogo.com and kickstarter.com looking at all the cool things people are working on. Primarily, it refreshes my mind to see innovative people doing innovative things and trying to make it happen. It is also quite interesting to see some ideas that are absolutely horrendous and get a little chuckle out of it along the way.

Coming back to Piper. I have been using numerous cameras both at my house as well as at my businesses. Am I paranoid about what goes on when I step out? No. I just use certain situations as an excuse for trying out various remote monitoring technologies.

It started with foscam cameras. The pan and tilt was fun to do. Then there was my x10 phase where I tried to put pretty much everything with an on/off switch on an x10 receiver. Why? Why not!

Then, one fine day in August of 2013, I saw Piper on indiegogo. It was the best of all worlds it claimed. I could use its ultrawide camera to see everything without requiring the pan and tilt and at the same time, I could use its zwave transceiver to add and expand the network of remotely controlled devices around the house.

Is it really innovative? Probably not. But at least it was something that an average Joe can do ahead and install and be able to do a certain level of home automation and control without selling a kidney.

I was very excited. Oh I could use one at home as a replacement for my home security camera. I could use one at one of my businesses to monitor certain things. I backed the project and ordered one device. Piper got great press. Picked up by CNET, Engadget, TechCrunch and more. Is this going to be the platform that takes home security away from the ADTs of the world and into the self management of stakeholders? There was hope. It is not as dramatic as it may come of here but paying monthly services for home security gets pretty old pretty quickly.

Then there was the geek factor of this device. Its not just a camera with a zwave controller that makes it cool. It is the fact that it can do pattern learning. It can identify between a house cat and a cat burglar. It can learn what a breaking window sounds like. What is the level of ambient sound and light in the house through out the day.  Patterns, historic data and the ability to make decisions based on them. This is what made Piper interesting. The only question was, will they be able to pull it off.

Finally, today, after a very long day at work, as I rolled into the garage, I noticed a small box by the door. Could it be? Yes! it was finally here. And to think that just today, I had posted something on twitter that why is that I have not received my Piper yet.

Piper

The first thing I noticed was the green tape. Examined by the US custom and border protection. Oh well, its okay. Anything for keeping the borders safe.

Well examined by the US border control
Well examined by the US border control

The next thing I saw sort of worried be a little bit. As I opened up the box, I noticed the device face down in the box without any plastic wrap. I felt that my well awaited gadget has already been played with.

No wrap, placed face down in the box. Clearly the box has been opened and the device has been examined.
No wrap, placed face down in the box. Clearly the box has been opened and the device has been examined.

Okay, lets move on and get this baby out of the box and powered up. Lets see what it can do.

And here is where the problems started. The app would just not connect with the camera no matter how many times I repeated the instructions on the step-by-step card that accompanied the camera.

I started looking online on forums to see if others have had the same problem. Low and behold, I was not the only one with the connectivity problem. Others too were experiencing a variety of problems getting started with Piper. I cursed my need to be on the bleeding edge of things. Another $200+ down the drain with a product that is not ready. But I was not about to give up. I reset the device a few times, threw away the instruction card and used my own know how about how to debug and handle gadgets. It worked!

The device took a long time updating its firmware but it was finally up and running. So far it has been as advertised. I don’t have any zwave controlled devices yet but I plan to add a few over time.

This first post about the piper has mostly been about the anticipation, reception and then first time setup experience about the device. There will be more about it but just not today. I’ll be posting more about how to get the best out of this device. I still believe in this platform. Being an optimist, I’ll give the team at blacksumac a great big thumbs up on having a vision and being able to solve a very basic problem that affects everyone and then be able to come out with a solution that works. I am sure that with time, the process will get better. The interfaces will improve and product support will be better as well.

My advice to the blacksumac team is to answer all the questions that are there on their support site. There is nothing worse than seeing your generic -restart the router, please- type responses to issues that clearly are beyond the reboot fix. But other than that, great work!

Introductions

Introductions

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Hello and welcome to yet another blog out on the interwebs. One might consider that with the amount of data being spewed out on the web these days, who in their right minds would want to publish yet another blog. What value is there in it? Is it about stroking ones ego and feeling important or is it more than that? Well if I said that this blog is going to be different, its going to change your life, and it will revolutionize the internet, I’d be lying to you.

I -as a human- have certain interests. These interests (Yes, more than one) vary in several aspects of daily life. Why must I write about it? Well, I don’t really need to. Most of what I post here, may already have been talked about in the recent past and may just be redundant.

So why do it? Well, mostly as a disciplinary exercise to get myself to write more. Express an opinion about the things I must do, want to do and have to do. Do you need to read it every time? Not at all! If I get too redundant, too boring, simply move on over to the next cat video on the internet. I won’t mind. Promise. Maybe.

So here begins (probably for the 6th or 7th time) yet another blog about things that I do. You’ll get to see some stuff on Automation, Environment Monitoring, Photography, gadgets etc.

So prepare yourself for …. bloggy stuff.