Alexa, is The Smart Home vision failing?
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BildverstehenKontextbezogenes SystemAnpassung <Mathematik>Notebook-ComputerE-MailFormation <Mathematik>Ubiquitous ComputingPlastikkarteMultiplikationsoperatorHalbleiterspeicherSampler <Musikinstrument>DiagrammVorlesung/KonferenzComputeranimation
00:47
Familie <Mathematik>BeweistheorieBildverstehenVideokonferenzMessage-PassingYouTubeSystemaufrufHoaxMaschinelles SehenMultiplikationsoperatorNotepad-ComputerComputeranimationVorlesung/KonferenzBesprechung/Interview
01:59
ComputervisualistikEndliche ModelltheorieSystemverwaltungFamilie <Mathematik>Vorlesung/KonferenzComputeranimation
02:49
SoftwareHardwareSoftwareentwicklerMultiplikationsoperatorBruchrechnungUmsetzung <Informatik>Formation <Mathematik>Vorlesung/Konferenz
03:24
Lesezeichen <Internet>Formation <Mathematik>PunktMessage-PassingLesezeichen <Internet>BitGraphfärbungMusterspracheMereologieUmwandlungsenthalpieMultiplikationsoperatorAdressraumPlastikkarteReelle ZahlSoftwareRPCDifferenteRandomisierungNummernsystemWort <Informatik>SprachsyntheseZoomZahlenbereichMehrplatzsystemSystemverwaltungSoftwareentwicklerProtokoll <Datenverarbeitungssystem>TabellenkalkulationZeichenketteGüte der AnpassungOffice-PaketGamecontrollerLeistung <Physik>Vorlesung/Konferenz
06:24
ThreadStandardabweichungProtokoll <Datenverarbeitungssystem>BitSystemverwaltungSchnittmengeFundamentalsatz der AlgebraOffice-PaketMathematikIdeal <Mathematik>Familie <Mathematik>Lesezeichen <Internet>GamecontrollerImplementierungGruppenoperationReelle ZahlRechenzentrumProdukt <Mathematik>RandomisierungGüte der AnpassungVorlesung/Konferenz
08:00
MultiplikationDatenstrukturFamilie <Mathematik>App <Programm>QuellcodeHardwareEinfache GenauigkeitHyperbelverfahrenSoftwareentwicklungFrequenzMehrplatzsystemComputeranimationVorlesung/Konferenz
08:44
ÄhnlichkeitsgeometrieDefaultKontrollstrukturSoftwareDualitätssatzMultiplikationsoperatorVererbungshierarchieDualitätssatzSelbst organisierendes SystemFamilie <Mathematik>BitHumanoider RoboterMereologieCloud ComputingDatenstrukturDefaultFrequenzVollständigkeitSoftware Development KitVorlesung/KonferenzComputeranimation
10:22
IkosaederVersionsverwaltungRandomisierungFormation <Mathematik>BildschirmsymbolZahlenbereichVorlesung/Konferenz
10:56
BildschirmsymbolComputerspielHardwareZahlenbereichTesselation
11:33
SoftwareentwicklerSystemplattformEinfach zusammenhängender RaumComputersicherheitDatenmissbrauchFokalpunktEntscheidungstheorieRandverteilungFitnessfunktionComputervisualistikVersionsverwaltungGüte der AnpassungFront-End <Software>GamecontrollerDatenflussE-MailSoftwarewartungKategorie <Mathematik>GoogolCloud ComputingDienst <Informatik>Thermische ZustandsgleichungApp <Programm>Pay-TVComputerspielHumanoider RoboterInformationsspeicherungVorlesung/Konferenz
13:25
Peripheres GerätTouchscreenFunktion <Mathematik>MultiplikationsoperatorÄquivalenzklasseBeamerHumanoider RoboterComputeranimationVorlesung/Konferenz
14:06
WebDAVPeripheres Gerätsinc-FunktionSchnittmengeBenutzerbeteiligungApp <Programm>Vorlesung/Konferenz
14:50
Weg <Topologie>WärmeübergangMultigraphFamilie <Mathematik>Vorlesung/Konferenz
15:29
SoftwareQuellcodeNotepad-ComputerLokales MinimumOffene MengeComputerspielPi <Zahl>GamecontrollerEinsKomplex <Algebra>Notepad-ComputerQuick-SortNotebook-ComputerEin-AusgabeComputeranimationVorlesung/Konferenz
16:07
Rechter WinkelCloud ComputingGamecontrollerDatenflussApp <Programm>PunktKonfiguration <Informatik>Strategisches SpielExistenzsatzVersionsverwaltungSoftwareDefaultMultiplikationsoperatorVorlesung/Konferenz
17:18
App <Programm>DatenverwaltungHumanoider RoboterVideokonferenzErneuerungstheorieKartesische KoordinatenBitSichtenkonzeptMultiplikationsoperatorNotebook-ComputerGebäude <Mathematik>Green-ITUnrundheitSpieltheorieVorlesung/Konferenz
19:04
MultiplikationsoperatorErneuerungstheorieLokales MinimumFlächeninhaltBildschirmsymbolApp <Programm>DifferenteDigitale PhotographieHumanoider RoboterGoogolTeilmengeLeistung <Physik>UnternehmensmodellFacebookRuhmassePersönliche IdentifikationsnummerMAPVorlesung/Konferenz
20:57
Weg <Topologie>ZahlenbereichApp <Programm>Vorlesung/Konferenz
21:27
Machsches PrinzipSichtenkonzeptAggregatzustandNotepad-ComputerLeistung <Physik>
22:07
DatenverwaltungInformationNotepad-ComputerAggregatzustandPlug inSichtenkonzeptSchnittmengeMultiplikationsoperatorRepository <Informatik>Spannweite <Stochastik>Token-RingElektronische PublikationGüte der AnpassungProfil <Aerodynamik>Vorzeichen <Mathematik>Vorlesung/Konferenz
22:59
Likelihood-FunktionRoutingPhysikalische TheorieBitComputerspielSchnittmengeMultiplikationLeistung <Physik>Automatische Handlungsplanung
24:04
RoutingAutomatische HandlungsplanungBenutzerbeteiligungApp <Programm>DatensichtgerätSichtenkonzeptKnotenpunktVorlesung/Konferenz
24:48
VersionsverwaltungNotepad-ComputerProgrammbibliothekDefaultInformationSchedulingBit
25:34
CodeGleitendes MittelComputerspielSoftwareentwicklerPunktRandomisierungE-MailAdressraumMultiplikationsoperatorProgrammbibliothekProdukt <Mathematik>GamecontrollerCodeDatensatzVorlesung/Konferenz
27:00
MultiplikationsoperatorVorlesung/Konferenz
27:31
SoftwareProzess <Informatik>OrtsoperatorSpieltheorieUnternehmensmodellInfotainmentRoutingSplinePhysikalisches SystemAnalytische FortsetzungRandverteilungLeistung <Physik>HardwareApp <Programm>Strategisches SpielTouchscreenInformationsspeicherungRichtungVorlesung/Konferenz
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SystemverwaltungNotepad-ComputerProjektive EbeneGüte der AnpassungOffice-PaketKartesische KoordinatenDatensichtgerätMultiplikationsoperatorDienst <Informatik>GamecontrollerRPCSoftwarewartungBitEndliche ModelltheorieVorlesung/KonferenzBesprechung/Interview
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ZahlenbereichMathematikAggregatzustandGraphfärbungQuick-SortAutomatische HandlungsplanungGraphVorlesung/Konferenz
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Notepad-ComputerPhysikalische TheorieNotebook-ComputerMultiplikationsoperatorInternetworkingPasswortSoftwareentwicklerPlug inHochdruckZahlenbereichRFIDBitAutorisierungGamecontrollerVerkehrsinformationPlastikkarteDatenfeldBefehl <Informatik>AuthentifikationBasis <Mathematik>CodierungSoftwarewartungSystemaufrufToken-RingSoftwareVorlesung/Konferenz
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RPCGüte der AnpassungDatenflussDatensatzStochastische AbhängigkeitOpen SourceBenutzerbeteiligungTabellenkalkulationFamilie <Mathematik>MereologieDruckverlaufBitLesezeichen <Internet>PunktMultiplikationsoperatorVorlesung/KonferenzBesprechung/Interview
35:45
PunktDifferenteZentralisatorIdentitätsverwaltungFernwartungMultiplikationsoperatorRPCVorlesung/Konferenz
37:00
VersionsverwaltungGamecontrollerRechter WinkelPlastikkarteVorlesung/Konferenz
38:19
Formation <Mathematik>MultiplikationsoperatorVorlesung/KonferenzDiagramm
Transkript: Englisch(automatisch erzeugt)
00:07
Hello, everyone. I'm Steve. I know some of you are ready. I generally work in server-side big data. So this is just a thing on the side. I will note that during the last century, I actually worked in corporate R&D labs
00:22
on things like devices, client-side things, smart home stuff. Well, not smart home, but ubiquitous computing, ubicomp world. So I actually have vague memories of the time that the idea of a smart home was actually being discussed. So now when I look at what we actually have, I'm just left wondering, was this what we imagined?
00:42
Is it better than what we imagined? Where did it all go horribly wrong? And if you want to start, the way to look at the vision is actually you can find on YouTube Microsoft's 1999 vision video of what it is. Well, they spent large amounts of money building a fake smart house at that time, or a proof of concept one, just to say
01:02
this is what we could ship. So it starts off, somebody very important comes back from Microsoft to somewhere in Bellevue, Washington state, goes up to the front doorbell and says hello to it. It's interesting to just look and tick off which of these things you now have experienced or still do.
01:21
She goes in, brings up Outlook for houses, and works out where the rest of her family is. Sends a text message to her daughter's PDA, telling her to come home. Sends a voice call to her husband on his hands-free phone,
01:43
telling him to buy more wine. They come home and they have a family meal, nobody's playing with a phone, unusual. There is a television in the corner doing something, and the woman is drinking all that wine.
02:02
If you're wondering why, it's because after that she goes onto her computer and does some things, where if you zoom in, she's actually updating the house model, which is something like enhanced Visio, telling her where light bulbs are. So that was the dream.
02:22
Some stereotypical US family where everybody's happy, children do what you ask them, husband does what his wife tells him to, and wine is copious. You can talk to the house and it listens reliably. Doing sysadmin after your dinner is actually
02:41
fine and enjoyable, and the family is happy. Does it work? Well, that is a big question that someone in Amazon is staring at right now, because apparently they lost $10 billion last year, which is quite a lot for a software dev, but actually if you think about doing hardware development
03:01
and custom chips and that, and selling things at cost, it's actually, it's possible. So at the same time, I don't think Jeff Bezos is happy about losing that much money, because it's costing him a fraction of a yacht or something important. And so, you know, there must be big conversations there about is this thing working? And they say, oh, people only use this
03:21
to listen to music. And my thought there is, oh, they get the music to work, do they? At which point I would like to actually welcome everybody who's watching this remote, and I have a special message for you. It is Alexa, play my favorites. Because when you do that and you're wired up to Spotify,
03:41
it does actually play your favorites. Somehow, Amazon is parsing your speech. It's then matching it patterns to say, okay, this is for Spotify, send the string down to Spotify about what you asked for. Spotify says, oh, it came from Steve. No matter who in the household asks for it, it's always Steve's favorites. He doesn't support multiple users.
04:02
And says, right, we'll go and play Steve's favorites. That's kind of good, except I quite like to shuffle my favorites. So if I go, Alexa, shuffle my favorites to the remote audience, they will find it plays something random from Spotify with the word favorites in their title.
04:20
And it really is random from day to day. I have no idea what or why. But, you know, so the foundational stuff of playing music is hit and miss. You know, so people say, oh, wow, people don't do much in the way of smart home. And they can just stop at the music, okay. We went a bit far. We actually have some light bulbs as well.
04:42
I actually really like this, okay. I have my office, I set up, I can have different color schemes. I'm coding at night, it's red, it's different from a Zoom conference. I managed to break a collarbone a while back and was stuck on a chair having to shout at light bulbs and they listened. And so it works really well. And current protocol for using this is something called Zigbee.
05:01
It's a ad hoc, multi-hot network. You put the light bulbs near each other, they talk, they can forward message each other. So you don't need wifi, it's low power. Devices find themselves. And Pacific vendors, Philips Hue, IKEA, they provide both the controllers and the actual lights as well.
05:23
And you can just screw them into existing light bulbs, whatever. Worth to play with if you haven't, if you've got time. And it's really your first introduction to real world system admin. If you notice that light bulb, there was a number on it, that's good because you then have to have a number on it in the spreadsheet.
05:41
Ideally with the MAC address and what kind of light bulb it is and where it is. The problem is that an ad hoc, multi-hop network can kind of disassociate. You need all the hops up and running to get messages through. When a bulb is invisible for long enough, the controllers forget about it and then you're trying to reconnect again. And you don't want to be suddenly standing on a ladder, kind of trying to touch a light bulb
06:02
to try to trigger whatever rebonding you have. So just remember the MAC address, okay. And you're into the world of debugging problems where it turns out that if one light bulb is turned off, then you can't send messages to other parts of the house because it doesn't get through. And you have cross-vendor interoperability.
06:20
I don't know why people in this room are laughing. We're software developers. We're the people who should be fixing this. Now, there is a promise that there is now a bit of another standard coming between Apple and Google and that called Thread for a Wire Protocol and Matter for an API, which is essentially IPv6 plus layers on top.
06:42
And it may help. It may help because one, we will get interoperability. More devices, better hops, better forwarding. And in the ideal world, they could be able to build this straight into their phones. We shouldn't need these controllers. You've got phones, they've got IPv6 and just get rid of the junk. Now, debugging.
07:00
It has good fun here, though, is that one day I was doing all this stuff, and suddenly it stopped working. My command's in my office to say my work is done, turn off the amplifiers, turn off playing somebody's random favorites, and turn the lights off, just suddenly stop turning off the lights. I eventually debugged this. I had to track it down to the fact that my Phillips Huey had a set of groups
07:21
called things like office and kitchen and living room, and Alexa had things like office and kitchen, living room, and somehow some firmware change meant that Alexa was suddenly discovering the groups of Phillips and saying, oh, you have two offices now. Which one do you want? So I had to track this down, trying to delete the things. It doesn't actually work. They're being rediscovered.
07:41
So I eventually just had to rename some of the things, telly room, food room, stuff like that, just to stop the things bonding. And I think this is exactly the kind of fundamental sysadmin that I think families really need to enjoy. Once you've done this, you're actually gonna be really set up for real world production data center design and implementation.
08:02
I think if you look at the most foundational problem, it is not actually software implementations or hardware. It's just there is no idea of how people work, of how families work. Every single app that ships goes, oh, well, we'll ship this and we'll do multi-user later. It'll be something like Netflix. Nope, you're gonna have one thing
08:20
that everybody looks and our preferences will look for children's programs and period dramas and other stuff you hate. And families never get divorced. Children don't grow up. You've got a child account. They can't become an adult account even after decades. Source of tension in our household. And so it's just utterly wrong.
08:40
It's not actually wrong. It's just people might have thought about this stuff and said, oh, we don't need to worry about it. But in the real world, it matters. And if you look, it just doesn't happen. So Netflix is a mess there. My Amazon account, I've had to misspell my name. I've got the Scottish spelling, so it actually pronounces it properly. And in this thing, it has Alexander. He's still a child and have my wife four times.
09:02
No idea why. I really don't know why. Now, there's an Apple thing in there too. It has families. I'm as a parent guardian. Alexander has become an adult and my wife is actually in charge. She's the organizer. Does Apple get it right? A bit of a mess. HomeKit, you can actually say, you can add guests. So you have the home and you say,
09:20
we have a guest who's also using the phone. It's not exclusive to your household. But they have to be using iPhones and their iPhones have to be up to date. So we can't accept any family members coming to stay on Android phones. They have to stay in Airbnb up the road. And even the phones, we have to do an audit before they're allowed in. Cloud is actually younger then. There's something in the Apple thing.
09:40
Apple helps think, can we have a child that basically is part of two families? And the answer is no. Now, having grown up with parents divorced, this isn't a good idea. You get to spend Sundays with the other parents stuck there with nothing to happen. You can't even use Netflix and remember where you were in the period drama. So it's a complete let down for social structure.
10:00
And also, if you want some fun with Apple HomeKit, try creating a room called Default Room. There is a secret room in HomeKit called the Default Room where things doesn't know where ends up. And the next time actually in Cupertino, I know somebody who's partner works at Apple and is gonna find out, do they have a default room? Is it where Amazon stuff goes? Because in the UK, so I'll just leave it there
10:21
in the corner of the hallway and we'll trip over it for a while or something like that. Anyway, so not even Apple get it right. Then people discuss the ecosystem conflict. Every single vendor assumes that they will own the ecosystem. And you can see this because every single vendor uses the icon of a house pretty much
10:40
because it's gonna be our house. You end up playing this stuff. You end up with a vast number of houses, each of which only support like a light bulb or a switch or playing random music channels or whatever. And people say, oh, it's like this battle of ecosystems. But that's the wrong way to view it. There is one ecosystem. There are a number of people
11:02
who want to be the apex predator. Amazon, Google, Apple, they want to own everything. And then you have everything else in the world who are people like Philips and Ikea that say we'll do specific hardware. And then there are other people who are just struggling to survive. And they are what the apex predators go for.
11:21
If you start doing something that's interesting, they might come out and compete with you. My notice is I don't have a tile icon here because we have air tags. And their life is threatened. And the problem with prey is eventually it gets eaten. We have some Nest heating controllers and thermostats and stuff.
11:41
Google bought Nest. Google turned off the feature where you can control it from other things because that doesn't fit in with Google's world. And that's a fundamental issue, I think, is that if you go with something like one of the large vendors for your technology, then somebody like Google might decide
12:01
to stop it on a whim with nothing but an email. They've been known to do that recently. But if you go with one of the smaller people, they need to survive. And to do that, they need cash flow. And how do people make money in this world to keep things going? Because in this world, everyone's app needs to be updated for the next version of the phone OS.
12:21
So that means ongoing maintenance costs that go forever. And just paying Apple, their Apple store taxes. And everyone's running stuff in cloud. There are things out there at the back end doing computation. And Amazon do make vast amounts of money in that world, which probably makes Jeff slightly happier.
12:41
So every single person in the prey category needs to worry about where their money is coming from. It can either come from selling devices which cost vast amounts of money with good profit margins every few years, selling things that don't have good profit margins and they stop working after about a year or so.
13:01
You have to replace them regularly. Android phones, I'd say. And then or providing something, getting money either indirectly, that's advertising, it's understanding everything you're doing, Google and Facebook, or it's through subscription services. I think if you want to actually stay in control of your life, those subscription services
13:20
from small companies are the only things that you really have to work with. So fundamental issues, then, I think they all think notion of a house, maybe with people in. But we live in a world where actually every single person has a phone, and that phone represents them. So we shouldn't be trying to say, oh, I've got a new house.
13:41
I have to build a controller and say who my guests are. It should just be wherever your phone goes, that's you. All those devices, they should just be dumb projectors of what you're doing. Apple Play for the screens, the Android equivalent, it should just be Bluetooth output. And just stop trying to be so smart. Everything should just be kind of dim, really.
14:01
They should be I-O devices for your phones. At the same time, phone-only, so app-only devices, is pretty brittle as well. An example of this is we got a hand-me-down set of colored Christmas lights from some friends, from Little, you may have heard of them in this country.
14:21
And they worked for our friends. It was just controlling it with Bluetooth. Didn't work for us properly. And the reason is that in the year since Christmas came out, Apple did an upgrade. And why should people doing last year's Christmas lights bother to update their app? Things break. So I think everything needs a web UI
14:41
and fundamentally a documented API so that anyone can talk to it directly if we need to. So what else can we do? Go self-sufficient. This is my friend here who's using Grafana into MariaDB to keep track of heating flow in his house.
15:01
Is there anyone in the audience that has instrumented their house using Grafana and is fully obsessive about graphs of it? Niels. You can talk to him later. It's very impressive. But I thought my friend here was pretty ambitious. But actually Niels has done more. So there you go. I think he basically keeps track of all the heating, the cooling, everything like that.
15:22
And when the family electricity builds too hard, you'll sit down and work out who had a shower and tell them to stop it, really. You can roll your own. You can embrace your own home controller. There are two big ones. Home Assistant and OpenHAB. I kind of set these up. They both run on Raspberry Pis or Docker containers.
15:40
I set one up and just gave up because it was just too much extra bonus complexity in my life. We'll get back to that in a minute. Or just give up and say, I've got my phone. I can maybe get Spotify to work. Will we be happy? And we sort of were. We stopped getting new stuff. And then about a month ago, I bought a very large laptop
16:01
with a very large battery and four wheels attached. It's got a USB out, but the input is this really weird, complicated port. And it sits in a default room, right in front of our house. And it actually has, we need to charge it.
16:21
And we have a little controller for that. Everything, every EV charge controller has an app that you control it through. You have to worry about how long they're going to be in existence. This is actually a Scandinavian one, easy, where I spent some time trying to cut my strategy of saying, oh, this thing has to survive. And then I gave up really and said, no, this thing has to work.
16:43
And so actually, it comes from Sweden. It has a built-in cellular network. So when the Wi-Fi is playing up, you still talk to it. And you absolutely depend on their cloud services to work. Apparently sometime in February, there was an outage. And nobody in Sweden could charge their cars for half an hour.
17:00
But my assumption is that enough people across Scandinavia have bought these things and will refresh these things. And because they also provide commercial versions of it, there will be enough cash flow to keep them going. And you only have to assume, OK, well, after five years, I'm going to have to replace this. It'll probably stop working at that point, so make the most of it.
17:22
By the way, it has an app. And it has an API as well. The car has an app. It doesn't really document its primary API. People have worked it out from Android. But it does have a fleet management API as well. So if you're a fleet manager, you can see a big chunk of what your vehicle has done.
17:41
And that is documented. And I get my electricity of a little company called Octopus. And they're pretty cute. They are, A, they're renewables only. They've got enough money they're helping fund building an electricity cable coming from Morocco to Britain.
18:00
So we can basically have solar all year round, which is going to be fantastic. No, it really will be, because it's sunny there. And it isn't for half a year. And what they do nicely is they will, you say you've got a car, they'll basically give you less electricity. Basically, you charge a quarter of much if you charge your vehicle up in the evening or do any electricity, because that's
18:21
when they have a surplus of renewables and things like that. So that's when they want to charge your car. They have an API, so you can keep an eye on it. This is a third-party application somebody has that just relies on bits of donations to keep going. And they'll give you really nice views of what's happening. So green is basically the days of the week. We did lots of off-peak use. That means we charged the toy up.
18:40
The rest of the time, it's green. It's basically using stuff in the house, laptops, video games, that kind of stuff. They are also doing something I haven't dared try yet, which is if you can get octopus to talk to the car via the charger, it will even charge the car up during the day
19:00
when there's a surplus of renewables in the middle of the day. So when it's sunny, that's when it gets charged up. That is really nice. That's the way to keep an electric world going is to give everything that wants electricity time when renewables are at their maximum. I haven't tried that yet. It's going to be where those cross-device APIs are going
19:20
to be stressed to anything. What we're seeing then is we're seeing a repetition of that home world. We've now moved on from an icon of a home to everyone doing apps in this area. They must make their icons a proper subset of an electric spark, a Google pin, a plug, possibly a car, and a primary color.
19:42
So you can work out from that exactly how many apps there are going to be. And you end up having to have most of them just to find out what charges are up to and where they are and how to pay and all that kind of stuff. So it's a disjoint mess. Same world, same thing again. The multi-user problem, our car,
20:00
we have to create new user accounts, different photos. Yes, once you've got the account, it says, OK, you bond your phone to it. It knows it's your phone. It maybe might start recognizing our voice, but it's a different voice API. And it doesn't handle the social structure of we're going on a long journey. We're going to stop somewhere for a coffee, top the car up, and then go where the other person is driving.
20:23
That's kind of invalid. You can do that, but then it forgets the map where you were going, because that's a different person. And some of the cars now, Renault, Volvo, and that, they're moving to Android automotive, where actually Google Android is running in the car. It does integrate quite nicely.
20:41
You don't have to create a new account. But Google is now tracking everything you're doing, and we know Google's business model. On a brighter note, it's not Facebook. But again, it's that power struggle, then, between the car manufacturers who view themselves as the big devices who want to make the money and the phone companies who want to actually be
21:02
relevant to people. We know whatever is built into our car will be obsolete software-wise within a number of years, because they're obsolescent. The cars last longer. The phones will be updated. So that's why I think the phone should be everything.
21:24
One of the problems here is keeping track on all the different apps. There's the electricity app. There's the charger app. There's the car status. And actually, this is where I got back into home automation. Home Assistant, that's it, Raspberry Pi. So now this is my one-stop view in the house of what's going on.
21:41
We have the charger over there. That's the easy one. They provide a documented API so we can see what's going on. It says right now it's plugged in. It's waiting to start when it gets late enough. And there's a little blip of power, blip around midday when the car got actually plugged in. The rest of the state is coming from this company,
22:01
Tronity, a German company. Has anyone heard of them? They're very nice people. So they do the fleet management. They use all the fleet management APIs for the different vendors and those people that actually document their APIs. And then they provide a unified API to get information about your vehicle.
22:22
You can do things like you can download CSV files of their charging profiles. You can download GPX files of where you've driven. And there's a Home Assistant plug-in for it. And it's fairly straightforward to plug in. You simply download Home Assistant. You add some settings to download arbitrary GitHub repos. You create an OAuth token.
22:42
You can read the documentation. It goes, create an OAuth token. And that's a warning sign, that is, that even the doc people couldn't understand it. But then it's really nice, the view. It says, OK, here's your battery state over time. Here's how your range has gone up and down over time. And just nice green light, all is good. Don't worry about plugging it in for a while. I really like this.
23:01
They bill me a few euros a month. But those euros are the way that I guarantee that, or not guarantee, but increase the likelihood that they will still be there the following month. And I do it. The other interesting company is these people called A Better Route Planner, ABRP,
23:23
whose aim in life is to let people who want to plan long journeys actually do them. Well, you can say things like, this is my car. They talk to Tronity, and they work out how well you actually drive. Not the manufacturer's theoretical power consumptions, but how you drive on different journeys.
23:41
You can even have different settings like, I have a bike trailer, so it consumes a bit more. Or my wife is driving, so it consumes even more. And she's a bit more aggressive, that's all. And then you can also say things like, I like these charges. IONITY, I hate these other charges because they're unreliable. And then you say where you want to go,
24:00
and it just gives you multiple route plans. And it says, right, OK. You drive up here to get to North Wales. There's no electricity here, so you better go that way or you can stop for eight minutes. And you can do that across anywhere in Europe. You can come up with a nice complicated route plan. You can do it on the web. You don't even need an app. It does have an app, but you can do it on the web. And yeah, and then when you get the phone app,
24:22
it actually plugs in and pops up in the display. And it gives you that same view. And it's really nice. That's how it should be. Unfortunately, because there isn't really a car API, there is no way to get that route plan into the car. And the car likes to know, because once it knows where it's going, it can start planning things
24:42
like saying, oh, I know, they'll be turning less at this junction, so let's start gradually slowing it down to recharge the battery. We'll be stopping there for eight minutes, so let's preheat it so it charges faster. So the car needs to know this stuff, but it doesn't get the information from the people that know what they're doing. Again, subscription-based. Again, worth doing. But you can see this mismatch between the car manufacturers who
25:04
think they know best and the people doing interesting things that provide stuff that's useful, who can be agile and adaptive and keep their stuff up to date. It's where there's just those lack of public APIs doing it. And we're seeing exactly the same conflict and problems
25:20
in the home as we're now seeing outside in the default room. I'm going ahead of schedule, actually. In that case, I can add a little bit about things like e-bikes and the same thing. So I think, what do we do in this world? The answer is, you can either give up, try and roll your own,
25:46
or as developers, try and strive for a better life. The key one is every single device you do, demand those APIs. Again, Neil has some anecdotes there
26:01
about chasing around the weird APIs to control solar panels and PDF files and getting it working. If you want to provide code for that and actually provide a library for other people to use, I think that would be a great, ambitious thing to do. I would also do it under a false name and email address because you'll be fielding support records about solar panels forever.
26:22
If you're not going to do that, then fund the people that are. Those little startups, those people that do subscriptions and that, they have to survive or they get eaten by the big players. And they do that, then they will stop working with your products.
26:40
And I think we're pretty much done at that point. I'll take lots of questions and random anecdotes at this point. I will point out that I'm giving a real work-related talk at 13.50 about Vectordio. That's the stuff I've done since I was doing embedded things in the past. I think that's it now. Question time.
27:08
Thank you. Thank you very much, Steve. That was a great talk. We have plenty of time for questions, so don't be shy. I know you're not. Oh, I see your hands there.
27:21
Fokker. Thank you for your very informative talk, and I can relate to a lot of stuff that I'm having the same struggle at home. Did you consider buying a Tesla, which is like great software? No, we didn't. Partly mechanical, but partly I don't trust Elon Musk's release process.
27:45
Finally, Tesla are interesting in that they probably have some of the best in-car APIs, in-car kind of infotainment systems, and a good strategy for keeping that up to date, which is basically not change of software, or kind of continuous hardware, actually.
28:04
They don't actually support Apple or Google Android as display devices for their apps. They're basically trying to be the control point. And it is that power struggle again. It's saying we are in charge, you are not.
28:22
Oh, but they got there first, they've got that position. The more interesting one is very recently General Motors announced that they will be removing Apple CarPlay from their cars and saying if you want to run any kind of third-party app on any of the screens you've paid large money for in their car, you will have to go through them.
28:41
On a bright note, things like a better route planner will actually work on that device direct. The bad news is you'll probably have to go through General Motors App Store. So, rather than five euros a month, it'll probably cost about eight euros a month. And you're under, you know, GM then becomes the control point.
29:02
I think that whole notion of App Store revenue, Apple's biggest profit margin, just lights up the eyes of everybody. It was what Alexa said was, hey, the Alexa business model is there will be lots of third-party apps that you will suddenly talk to. From your Alexa, it didn't happen. That's why all their money and investment hardware hasn't made a profit.
29:21
And I don't see the car manufacturers being able to play that same game. People have their phones, they like their phones, they expect their phones to work. So Tesla might be there, but I don't know about anyone else. Does that answer your question? I was wondering, when you first mentioned Home Assistant,
29:47
you said you tried it together with OpenHAB and had just kind of a surplus of admin work to do that you didn't want to do. And I was wondering when that was because this is a very evolving project
30:01
that makes things easier to jump on and to maintain week by week. OK, so Home Assistant is the Python-based application, home controller thing. It does very good device discovery. It actually tells you what you found. It's all Python-based. If you understand Python, then you can theoretically code for it.
30:22
And they do regular releases, runs on a Raspberry Pi, amongst other places. And if you subscribe to their service, you get the remote access, but it'll run perfectly well for free at home. It's just when you come up, it does this device discovery and it finds everything in your house and just dumps it in one place.
30:42
And it's very intimidating. I also suspect it may have had something to do with that bit where Alexa suddenly discovered that it had two offices and it happened around the same time. It's just something to sit down. You actually have to sit down and learn the conceptual model and understand.
31:00
Once you actually understand what it's doing vaguely, then you really, really, really get good control of what's happening. So essentially, you have lots of things that can act as sensors, and then you can put them in different displays. So for example, the Tronity plug-in, it tells me the battery state, so it just appears a number there. But I can take that same number and say,
31:22
I want it as a kind of thing that changes color at the top, some kind of, I can't be sure what that is really, sort of a bar chart. And then the graph, where it collects the history. Then, and I have not yet begun, you can start doing workflows on that as well. I think my workflow plan is actually,
31:42
I want to control the color of a light based on the state of the vehicle. I want green when it's happy, orange when it's below about 50%, red when you should really start panicking. And then I want it to then change color when it's actually plugged in, ready to charge, and then when it's actually charging.
32:02
And, you know, I think in theory that should be possible, but it's going to take time. Yeah, so I promise you, without any Python, you can do that without a laptop, on your phone with Home Assistant, in less than five minutes. Oh, I am impressed, I'll talk to you later.
32:20
One thing I did try doing is that, I actually did try doing some of the Python coding because I got some smart plugs from Tapo. I did make sure, before I bought them, they worked across with Home Assistant. To get it to work, what did I have to do? I had to debug something. I ended up putting print statements in the Tapo controller to see what's going on.
32:42
I did submit a pull request saying, by the way, here is some logging. As someone that fields field reports, you know, support calls on a regular basis, the I wish we had more logging invariably crops up to about comment number 50 in a year, if you've got that far. I wish we had more logging. And it comes down to the bit where it was doing password authentication,
33:03
couldn't quite handle more than eight characters in a password, so you have to put your plug in, do the eight characters, have it log in, get the OAuth token. Once it's cached the OAuth token, then you can change your password back again so that every time you start up TP link, it doesn't blow up saying, oh dear, your password is too short. Some random person on the internet might turn your light bulbs on and off.
33:22
So, when you start trying to get things to work, as a software developer, I get sucked into the pit of maintenance, really. But yeah, okay, corner me afterwards and we'll discuss. Is there any remote question? Oh, sorry, I've got one here, but you wrote people as well.
33:40
No, no, no. Thank you for the very interesting talk. So, my question is, do you see a path forward in the future where we can align the incentives of interest of big tech companies and those of the consumer? I don't know, I really don't know. Do you? I think, no, I really don't know how we align them.
34:02
I think Google and Apple now want to dominate. I think in the small people, they have to struggle to survive. There are vendors out there that must be terrified every time there's a big Google or Apple Conf that they're going to be announcing what's been rumoured and there might go a large amount of their cash flow.
34:20
As for the big players, they have started to acknowledge that, yes, households are complicated and somebody may be part of a household at some point and there is more than just a notion of a family and a home. And Netflix going the other way saying, oh, if you move around, we'll complain that you might be using a pirate account. So, I think there's that conflict between cash flow and user needs.
34:44
And generally, I think the spreadsheets push the companies more towards their own interests rather than yours. It's where things like open source actually works. It gives you a bit of independence, it gives you that control. Or at the very least, it puts pressure on the big players
35:01
to say you are not the only person in this world. So, that's my answer. No good one. Is there anybody online? If not, those people are online. Echo, shuffle my favourites. Another good one with Echo is that when you say Echo turn my lights off,
35:22
if you're in a room where there are lights, it turns the lights off. But if you're in a room where it doesn't think there are any lights, it turns off all the lights in the house. So, the entire house goes into darkness. It doesn't go, oh, I don't know where the lights are. So, you had better not put any of your Echos in a room where there isn't something that thinks it's a light bulb, okay?
35:44
Joy. More questions here. Yeah, thanks. Very interesting talk. I want to make a point and a question about the difference between the... When you say the phone is becoming central, it's us, it's our identity.
36:02
And it's true to the point that many of us will not even have a landline anymore. And that, you know, we can talk about induced usage or whatever, but it's there. But when it comes to the house or even the car, there is still a big problem. I'm a lifelong renter. There is no way I'm going to do what you did, you know,
36:21
going up to every light in every house every time I move around or whatever. That's not going to happen. If I have to rely on my landlord to provide me with the smart house, I mean, how many times did you move a house with a smart TV and the previous tenants left with the remote control? So, you can't have that. As for the car, it's even worse.
36:41
You have the rental problem. I don't have a, you know, a charger. There's no way I will have a fast charger for my car, electric car, in the house or whatever. 40 kilometres to go to the next charger, you know. So, the car is not a big issue. The house is not a big issue. There's no need, there's no usage for me. So, it's not happening. Don't do it.
37:00
Actually, I was talking to somebody this morning and she'd moved into an apartment in Berlin where the previous owner had a Huey light bulb set up. And, of course, she did talk to her directly through the phone without the controller, but it was happier with the previous tenant's phone than hers. So, that whole notion of somebody else now lives here is clearly one of those social problems that isn't handled well.
37:24
And it's also why, actually, anyone who's attempted to do some of this smart home stuff in a hotel, for example, they've kind of not really made that good deal of it because it's just too fiddly to write. You're in a hotel for three days, so now you can control your light bulb with your phone.
37:41
The nice thing about the phone, though, is that it is you, it represents you, it knows your voice, you know exactly its language. Whereas, if you've got a television you can talk to, you've got to learn the television version of English, if you know your car, you'll know the car version of English. And it's like all those variants of SQL.
38:01
It's exactly that same thing, is that they're all slightly different and you have to train or just give up. And I think that's where I think a lot of people have been pushed back is the fact that it doesn't really work that well. What do you think? Okay, so I think it's time to thank Steve again.