Home Automation

I haven’t written in a while. As you may imagine, life has had a lot to do with it. But the other large contributing factor is the time I have invested into building out a (sweet) home automation system.

I’d love to say it is done, but let’s be honest, is any product ever done? The reality of Marvin, as I am calling my home automation, is that it is in a somewhat functional state. To date, it does a lot of the basics, with nothing more than a few minor bugs. As with any other product, I am prioritizing some of these bug fixes for later.

Here are some of it’s current capabilities:

  • Control Switches (On and Off)
  • Trigger Predefined Routines
  • Display Contact and Tilt Sensor status
  • Control Alarm (Armed, Home, Disarmed)
  • Control Locks
  • Control Garage Doors
  • Control Thermostat and View Temperature
  • Weather and 1 day Forecast
  • Control Entertainment through Spotify
  • Display Reminders and Events

Though the list of capabilities is expected to grow over the next few weeks or months, the above is enough to control at least 90% of my devices. Controlling switches is enough to turn lights on or off, displaying contact status used to display whether doors are open or closed, or the reminders and events used to show garage pickup information from the municipality.

Here is a short (and far from exhaustive) demo of what it looks like so far:

From here, I am looking to focus on entertainment, ensuring that those devices work well together, that mood is more easily set, and that rooms can be better defined and easy to navigate between. The ultimate goal being that this is a system that will compliment our lives and make things better.

My stretch goal, one that I constantly keep at the back of my mind: is there a possibility of making this publicly available. Short answer is yes. Hint: Check out my featured image to see just how easy it is for me to add a fully functioning tile/

Finances: Marvin’s first skills

With Marvin’s core architecture designed, I started developing the framework.  The framework itself is intended to handle multiple use cases, from supporting personal information to provide contextual experiences to controlling devices.  Marvin’s key differentiator is that it is powered by data, rather than a simple trigger based on an action.  This is why the core of the framework contains APIs that handle data and extends itself into building out analytics.  Behind the scenes exists an ETL process that feeds into various services, including machine learning.

I’ve been feeding the last 7 years of financial data through to Marvin’s core databases, with just over 9000 transactions. The transactions look something like this:

Date Description Original Description Amount Transaction Type Category Account Name
6/22/2017 Ooma OOMA, INC 08887116662 CA XX.XX debit Home Phone Smart Cash Platinum Plus MasterCard
6/22/2017 Costco COSTCO WHOLESALE W159 AJAX ON XX.XX debit Home Supplies Smart Cash Platinum Plus MasterCard
6/21/2017 Transfer to Chequing TRANSFER OUT XX.XX debit Transfer General Savings
6/21/2017 Transfer from General Savings TRANSFER IN XX.XX credit Transfer Chequing
6/20/2017 Costco COSTCO WHOLESALE W1128 OSHAWA ON XX.XX debit Groceries Smart Cash Platinum Plus MasterCard
6/20/2017 Costco WWW COSTCO CA 905-264-8337 ON XX.XX debit Sporting Goods Smart Cash Platinum Plus MasterCard
6/20/2017 Taunton Endo TAUNTON ENDO OSHAWA ON XX.XX debit Doctor Smart Cash Platinum Plus MasterCard

These transactions provide a very good base for generating some initial learning models. By including credit or debit, dates, retailers, amounts, categories for purchases and labels, it enables various types of skills to be identified.  These skills help me understand my finances better while also helping me improve.

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Marvin: Automating my Smart Home Devices

Part of the process of designing Marvin is to carefully ensure that all devices within my home fit well into the ecosystem.  I severely underestimated the time it would take to carefully plan out each part of my ecosystem.

I’ve started buying and implementing smart home / IoT devices over the last year or so. The devices were implemented with the idea that they will all be managed a central device / hub in the future.  For a while, my hub of choice was the Wink Hub. But as smart home hubs evolved, SmartThings continued to get better.  While Wink is a terrific hub, SmartThings allows for far more complex automation routines or even create your own SmartApp.

While the hub itself was a difficult choice, the other devices were not a whole lot simpler unfortunately.  For one, I’ve been avoiding maintenance costs, as some devices have, like Nest Cams. Secondly, I tend to go for devices that support Windows devices as much as Android and iOS. Thirdly, the devices need to be user friendly enough that I would enjoy tinkering with it. Lastly, I try to choose devices that have mostly favorable reviews.  For devices to meet all 4 requirements has been surprisingly difficult.

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Marvin – Personalized and Smart Virtual Assistant

Over the last two years, I’ve been buying into Internet of Things (IoT) devices. While the devices themselves may be smart, they do not make a smart home.  In comes Marvin.  Unlike many who have gone for Jarvis as a name, I chose the name Marvin from Hitchhiker’s Guild to the Galaxy. Marvin has a brain the size of a planet, which is fitting considering the information it will be processing.
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Communication is key. Why you should work on effective communication.

Several months ago, I had an employee review. I was relatively new at Avanti at the time. There wasn’t a whole lot at the time they could provide on my review.  I did however get very valuable advice.  Advice that I’ve taken to heart. I need to improve my communication.

I’m coming out here by saying my manager was absolutely right. I’ve known all along that communication was one of my weaker qualities. The fact that someone has finally told me that I should improve was welcomed. For those of you who do not know me, I thrive on criticism. Constructive criticism of course.

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Find me on User Experience Stack Exchange

I’ve recently joined the User Experience chapter of Stack Exchange. Though I’ve been on for only a week, this is a community I am excited about joining.  It is a terrific community for exchange knowledge and providing answers to questions on user experience.

I’ve been getting a lot more requests lately by email for User Experience questions which I am happy to answer. However it you are comfortable, posting on Stack Exchange would allow others to use the feedback myself and others of the community provide to help with user experience.

Check out User Experience on Stack Exchange or my profile.

Looking to get my PMP and need some advice

I’ve been looking to get my PMP for quite some time now.  I think the best time for me to do that would be now.  I’ve gotten a lot of suggestions so far on my Facebook on some possible local options I can take including Cheetah Learning and University of Toronto.

I am wondering if others have some suggestions. I would prefer cheaper options and ones that would allow me to do this as soon as possible. Many of the options that are available will take me up to the end of summer or later before I can get my PMP. Online may be more work, something that isn’t a problem for me.

This is something I am looking to get to not only boost my chances of new employment, but as valuable knowledge I can bring to wherever I go next.

Hello world! An update from me!

I haven’t posted in a while. I know.  Its been quite an exhaustive past few months, but I’m still alive and kicking.  I’ll post a very short summary of what I’ve been up to since March.

Social Game Universe and the Lightning Platform are now powering a live CBC TV show called Over the Rainbow.  Over the Rainbow is a production which asks the audience to pick their favorite Dorothy.  During the show, viewers get to follow along with their computer or mobile device, interact with the TV show and vote at the end of the episode. On the 8th episode, one Dorothy will be cast to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s production of the Wizard of Oz.    This project was a true test to Lightning’s scalability and prowlness, achieving higher amounts of users per minute than we’ve achieved with Dirty Dancing, running on less servers.  The average API call executed in 30ms (0.003 seconds) which really isn’t too shabby when you are seeing such a high number of users, a number I am hoping I can disclose in the near future!

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Pelland.me now with Open Graph “Read” support!

As of today, pelland.me has been upgraded with the ability to keep track of all the articles you read. I’m looking to add some more actions in the near future and make the actions better associated with the interactions you are performing in this blog. To start, you only need to Login with Facebook.

If anyone feels I should post a tutorial or perhaps a plugin for this, let me know in the comments.
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