Have we seen any Christmas village hacks before? None come to mind and our Google-fu didn’t turn up any either. No matter, even if there were a handful this would rank quite high. [Kyle Anderson] built models of the homes each of his loved-ones inhabit. Each model lights up when its occupant is at home.
This reminds us of the Weasley Clock, itself a popular concept to hack on. The idea is that each family member’s location is shown with a unique clock hand and a set of whimsical locations on the clock face.
The Etherhouse, as [Kyle] calls it, performs a similar action. The WiFi access point in each loved one’s home is monitored for their smart phone. When it is detected, the light for their home model is illuminated. Since each person has their own copy of the village, everyone knows who is home and who is away.
Nice but come on, the houses aren’t made of gingerbread!? Son, I am disappoint.
Kind of creepy – unless you’re a stalker, then it’s perfectly normal.
See, it could be creepy – but you have to look at what it is capable of. Say you have a relative who is elderly but still “independent”. Tie it to a bracelet or watch and set up a list of known places, say the bank, the grocery store, the post office, etc. If they deviate from their norm you can have a quick reference of where they are, or at least the last place they were. I bet there’s a commercial system that does this already…
it’s not and they are many devices like that which have an embedded linux (rabbits , penguins, etc.) . they detect what you are doing , if you are here and your lover has one too and so he/she can see if you’r home or not, the color change based on your activity etc. It’s for teen in love mostly.
What would be even cooler would be to differentiate between family members by lighting up the corresponding bedroom for each member of the family who is home, also light the living room whenever any family member is home, and if all the members of a family are home, light all the rooms for that house.
It would also be neat to either dim the lights at night, or try to figure out who has gone to bed by monitoring electricity usage on the TV/Blu-Ray/gaming console and any lights that might be on.
See, now that’s where it gets creepy. I don’t mind my family and friends knowing when I’m home, but there is such a thing as too much knowledge. I don’t need them to know when I am in bed, just when I am home.
I tried to use the smart phone on the premises to determine if i was in or out via a ping but the phones go to sleep, :(
The code is pretty aggressive about pinging and pretty conservative about deciding when it has gone absent.
I tested it up against multiple android and iphone/ios versions to ensure it would correctly detect when they are gone for real.
https://github.com/solarkennedy/ether_house/blob/571470ffcb91f2a78cff919f73b865a6723871c6/client_firmware/client_firmware.ino#L115-139