Tech Guides - Home Automation

IoT has been around for a while now and big players like Google, Apple and Amazon have been creating buzz around smart devices over past couple of years. But 2018 is seeing a particular interest in smart speakers. That’s no surprise after Amazon succeeding with Echo it was obvious that other market leaders would love to compete in this area. Speaking about competition, Google recently revealed impressive set of enhancements to their not so old Google Home at Google I/O 2018. Like Amazon Echo, Google Home has entered the arena where users can interact with Home to play music, get personal assistance, and control their smart home. With Google being backed with their omnipresent search engine, Echo’s place of staying on top looks a little dicey. With that being said, let's get into the crux of the discussion keeping in mind three major components: Entertainment Personal assistant Smart home controller Entertainment The ideal purpose of a speaker is to entertain you with music but here your smart speaker can interact with you and play your favourite tracks. So, if you are at a moderate distance from your device all you have to do is wake the Echo with the command “Alexa” and Google Home with “Okay Google”. Don’t close your options here as both devices provide users with alternative commands such as the Echo wakes up with "Echo," "Amazon" or "Computer" and Home with "Hey Google”. Both these devices do a fair job of hearing users as they are always listening and their built-in microphone can listen to users over moderate background disturbance. These devices offer almost similar means of connection where your Echo can be plugged in to your existing home system while Home is capable of controlling any Google Cast-enabled speaker. When it comes to connecting these devices to your TV, Home does the job well by partially controlling a CEC (Consumer Electronics Control) supported television. On the other hand, Echo needs to be integrated with Fire TV in order to control your TV. With this you must have already guessed the winner but this does not end here, Google Home has a upper hand when it comes to connecting to multiple speakers to play a single song. Amazon Echo being more than a year older still misses this feature. Personal assistant Considering the variety of personal services Google offers (Google calendar, GTasks, and Google Maps) you must be expecting a straight win for Home here as well. However, Echo hasn’t stayed behind in this race. Echo uses Alexa as its digital assistant whereas Home uses the Google assistant, the digital assistant that is shipped with other Google products such as Pixel, to respond to voice commands. So, if you ask Google Home Who is Harry Potter?, you will get a definite answer from Home. You can follow that question with Which other movie is he associated with?, Home will again provide you a definite answer as it inferred the ‘he’ you referred to is actor Daniel Radcliffe. Similarly, Echo kept up with its standards when Alexa is asked about the weather. Then, when asked How about Thursday?, the response received is accurate despite the word ‘weather’ not being used in the follow-up question. Surprisingly Google falls short when it comes to updating personal tasks. The Echo can set reminders and stack-up a to-do list which the Google Home still cannot. But it would just be a matter of time to see these features added in Google Home. When it comes to assisting a group of people, Google Home supports upto 6 multiple users and when trained is capable of recognizing family member’s voice as long as they don’t sound similar. So, if one of the family members asks for a traffic or calendar update Home will customize the response depending on which member has asked for an update. Unfortunately, Echo lacks this capability. Google Home is still in its initial stages of enhancing its functionalities but already seems to be superior. Apart from a few, Home shares a lot of capabilities that are on Echo and in addition it supports recognizing family members and responding accordingly, so Google steals the show here as well. Smart Home Controller Another major functionality of a smart speaker is controlling your smart home. Both of these devices have displayed versatile functionalities but the winner in this area is a total surprise. Although Echo has a 2 year head start in this market Google Home hasn’t been that far behind in the race. Google has managed to integrate better with IFTTT (If This Then That) than that of Echo. This integration helps in crafting customizable commands. In a nutshell Home has more command options than Echo. So if a bulb is called “desk lamp” in the Philips app, Alexa will not respond to anything other than “desk lamp”. This comes with an additional support twist where you can group all lights and command Alexa to turn on/off all lights and the job’s done. The downside here is that without this grouping you would have to control your appliances with specific names. Well, with Google Home that’s not the case. You can assign a nickname to your home appliance and it would follow your orders. So while you must group your appliances on Echo, Google Assistant automatically groups a particular category of smart appliances helping you refer to it with your choice of command. Although Google Home has a upper hand in customizing commands, Echo is a much better device in terms of home automation control as it supports a vast variety of home appliances unlike Home. So, this time the winner is Amazon Echo. It is kind of difficult to make a clear choice as each of these have their advantages over disadvantages. If home automation is something that matters the most to you, Amazon Echo would be an apt choice. On the other hand, if personal assistant and music is all that your looking for Google Home fits perfectly. So, what are you waiting for, say the command and get things done for you. Related Links Windows 10 IoT Core: What you need to know How to build an Arduino based ‘follow me’ drone ROS Melodic Morenia released

Lately, IoT is beginning to play an integral part in various industries, be it at the consumer-level, or at the enterprise side of it. With a lot of big players like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google entering this market, IoT adoption has scaled tremendously. It is said to have jumped from a hobbyist level to an industry infrastructure where everything functions on smart devices, that can talk. The bulk release of popular IoT products prove that this market is getting bigger and a lot of individuals have been amazed with home automation products such as Amazon Alexa, Apple Homepod, Google Home and others. These devices are one of the most sought-after things for hobbyist and enthusiasts who are interested to do simple automation with sensors. Following are 5 IoT projects ideas that you can build without a hole in the pocket. To learn how to actually build similar kind of projects, check out our books; Internet of Things with Raspberry Pi 3 Smart Internet of Things Projects Raspberry Pi 3 Home Automation Projects Weather control station This project will not only help you measure the room temperature but will also help you measure the altitude and the pressure in the room. For this project you will need the Adafruit Starter Pack for Windows 10 IoT Core on the latest Raspberry Pi kit. Along with the Raspberry Pi Kit you will also be using other sensors that read temperature, pressure, and altitude. To make your weather station advanced, you can connect the device to your cloud account to store the weather data. Hardware Raspberry Pi 2 or 3 Breadboard Adafruit BMP280 Barometric Pressure & Altitude Sensor Software Windows 10 IoT Core Approximate total cost Less than $60 Facial Recognition Door Self-built home security projects are some of the most popular DIY projects because they can be cheaper and simple compared to bulky professional installations. Here's a project that controls entry access using facial recognition, thanks to Microsoft Project Oxford. This project from Mazudo, based on Raspberry Pi and Windows IoT, is posted on Hackster.io. This is a handy project for DIY enthusiasts who want to build a quick security lock for their homes. Hardware Raspberry Pi 3 Breadboard USB camera Relay switch Speaker Software Windows 10 IoT Core Approximate total cost Less than $50 Your very own Alexa Echo Alexa Echo has always been a handy device, which can take notes, schedule reminders for your appointments, and play podcasts for you. Brilliant, isn’t it?  You can build a fully functional customized Alexa Echo with all the features of Alexa, apart from accessing official music servers like Amazon prime. It will also have an integration with recently included third party apps like todoist and Any.do. This DIY Echo can also be connected to your cell phone devices to manage notifications when the timer goes off, and so on. Only one thing that your DIY will be missing is the ability to function as a bluetooth speaker. Hardware Raspberry Pi 3 Breadboard USB speaker and mic Software Raspbian Approximate total cost Less than $50 Pet Feeder You surely don’t want your pet to starve when you’re away, do you? This customized pet feeder is controlled via the internet; set timings and feed your pet automatically later. These pet feeders are directly connected to WiFi using ESP8266 chip. We can easily add features like controlling the device using cell phone and making dashboards using Freeboard. This project can be later upgraded or rightly reprogrammed to fill your snack bowl at regular intervals as well. Hardware Arduino PIR motion sensor ESP8266 ESP-01 Software Arduino IDE ESP8266Flasher.exe Approximate total cost Less than $40 Video Surveillance Robot Video surveillance is a process of monitoring a scenario, person or an environment as a whole. A video surveillance robot can capture the activities happening in the surrounding where it is deployed and can be controlled using a GUI Interface. For further enhancements, you can even connect your device to the cloud and save the recorded data there. Hardware Raspberry Pi ARM Cortex- A7 CPU L293 motor driver Software Raspbian Approximate total cost Less than $50 These are few economical yet highly useful Internet of Things projects, which can be leveraged to improve your daily activities. Still not convinced?. Think of it this way. Buying the microchip board is a one time investment as it can be reused in separate projects. The sensors and other peripherals aren’t that expensive. You might say, it’s just way easier to buy an IoT device. I would argue that, buying an IoT device is not as satisfying as building one for the same purpose. In the end, there are multiple advantages of building one as you can brag about it to your friends and most importantly include it in your resume to give you that edge over others in an interview. Cognitive IoT: How Artificial Intelligence is remoulding Industrial and Consumer IoT Windows 10 IoT Core: What you need to know 5 reasons to choose AWS IoT Core for your next IoT project  

While the Internet of Things(IoT) sounds like some hipster start-up from the valley, it is in actual fact sweeping the technology world as the next big thing and is the topic of conversation (and perhaps development) through the majority of the major league tech titans. Simply, the IoT is the umbrella term for IP-enabled every day devices with the ability to communicate over the Internet. Whether that is your fridge transmitting temperature readings to your smartphone, or your doorbell texting you once it has been rung, anything with power (and even some without) can be hooked up to the World Wide Web and be accessed anywhere, anytime. This will of course have a huge impact on consumer tech, with every device under the sun being designed to work with your smartphone or PC, but whatäó_s worryingis how all this is going to be kept secure. While there are a large number of industry leading brands we can all trust (sometimes), there are an even bigger number of companies shipping devices out of China at extremely low production (and quality) costs. This prompts the questionäóñif the companyäó_s mantra is low cost products and mass sales, do they have the time, money (or care) to have an experienced security team and infrastructure to ensure these devices are secure? Iäó_m sure you know the answer to that question. Unconvinced? How about TrendNetcams back in 2012äó_ The basic gist was that a flaw in the latest firmware enabled you to add /anony/mjpg.cgi to the end of one of the camsäó_ IP addresses and you would be left with a live stream of the IP camera. Scary stuff (and some funny stuff) but this was a huge mistake made by what seems to be a fairly legitimate company. Imagine this on a much larger scale, with many more devices, being developed by much more dubious companies. Want a more up-to-date incident? How about a hacker gaining access to a Foscom IP camera that a couple was using to watch over their child, and the hacker screaming "Wake up, baby! Wake up, baby!äó_ Iäó_ll leave you to read more about that. With the suggestion that by 2020 anywhere between 26 and 212 billion devices will be connected to the Internet, this opens up an unimaginable amount of attack vectors, which will be abused by the black hats among us. Luckily, chip developers such as Broadcom have seen the payoff here by developing chips with a security infrastructure designed for wearable tech and the IoT. The newBCM20737 SoC provides äó_ Bluetooth, RSA encryption and decryption capabilities, and Appleäó_s iBeacon device detection technologyäó_ adding another layer of security that will be of interest to most tech developers. Whether the cost of such technology will appeal to all though is another thing altogetheräóîlow cost tech developers will just not bother. Now, I see the threat of someone hacking your toaster and burning your toast is not something you would worry about, but imagine healthcare implants or house security being given the IoT treatment. Not sure Iäó_d want someone taking control of my pacemaker or having a skeleton key to my house! Security is one of the major barriers to total adoption of the IoT, but is also the only barrier that can be jumped over and forgotten about by less law abiding companies. If I were to give anyone any advice before äó_connectingäó_, it would be to spend your money wisely, donäó_t go cheap, and avoid putting yourself in compromising situations around your IoT tech.