In an attempt to stop myself from pounding my head against a Billy Bookcase to try to induce sweet sweet unconsciousness in our last 4 hour Ikea ‘Let’s just pop in and browse’ trip I ended up picking up some of these:
My plan was pretty basic, as in ‘Oh, look, shiny thing’ and I ignored them after that. Last night I finally got round to noticing we bought them and set them up. There seems to be lots of home automation stuff on the market, with the Philips Hue stuff something I had looked at before. The Trådfri (is that swedish for ‘no wires?’) had the advantage of being cheap and within arms grasp, so definitely don’t take this as some sort of ‘review’ of what’s best out there.
The deal is you get the bulbs and they have a couple of advantages - (a) They are meant to last 2000 years or something, so ignoring all those dangerous metals and whatnot, is a nice high five to the polar bears and (b) they connect to your home network, e.g. you can do automation stuff with them.
Setting up was pretty easy, in that they relied upon NFC (hold it close) to verify it was really you and to boostrap each bulb on your wireless network. The ‘hub’ plugs into your network and then they run a simple wireless network so that each ‘device’ (switch, dimmer, bulb etc) is then able to be operated from a mobile app. The mobile app actually works pretty well, but after changing the bulbs on/off at random and changing the color temperature (ooh, golden, ooh bright white) I thought I’d do some hacking.
Here’s a decent article that goes through the bits (although I used a linux PC, not a pi):
So what I ended up doing (not with a specific ‘mission’, just an hour hacking around for fun) was setting up the various rooms in the house to operate the lights centrally and with some simple programs from a central server I had anyway. What I’ve done is a couple of ‘recipes’ that include:
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When the family calendar (Google ical) says we’re on vacation then do a random lights on/off in rooms in the evenings.
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Depending on the time of sunset (internet lookup) and the current weather (local METAR), put the lights into ‘evening mode’ (lamps, color temperature 2700k, a sort of ‘yellow’).
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If netflix is started on the main TV (via Plex) then do the lights in ‘Cinema mode’ in Den downstairs.
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Make my desk light flash when getting a ‘Mudspike out of disk space’ alert.
Anyway, they are actually kind of fun to play around with, although could do with some socket switched ones as well to make it more than lights. I started playing around with open source home automation servers and such like, but basically just ran out of time. The standardization in the area seems promising, so I’m now curious about getting some other devices to hook up. Ikea seems pretty open about updating the Hub bit, so soon it’ll be Alexa, Google, Siri’d enabled as well. The wife acceptance factor has been pretty good, in that switches still work, as the physical ‘dimmer’ units are littered around the house.
Anyone play with this sort of stuff?
