Home Automation At A Glance Using AI Glasses

August 15, 2019 by Tom Nardi 3 Comments

There was a time when you had to get up from the couch to change the channel on your TV. But then came the remote control, which saved us from having to move our legs. Later still we got electronic assistants from the likes of Amazon and Google which allowed us to command our home electronics with nothing more than our voice, so now we don’t even have to pick up the remote. Ushering in the next era of consumer gelification, [Nick Bild] has created ShAIdes: a pair of AI-enabled glasses that allow you to control devices by looking at them.

Of course on a more serious note, vision-based home automation could be a hugely beneficial assistive technology for those with limited mobility. By simply looking at the device you want to control and waving in its direction, the system knows which appliance to activate. In the video after the break, you can see [Nick] control lamps and his speakers with such ease that it almost looks like magic; a defining trait of any sufficiently advanced technology.

So how does it work? A Raspberry Pi camera module mounted to a pair of sunglasses captures video which is sent down to a NVIDIA Jetson Nano. Here, two separate image classification Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models are being used to identify objects which can be controlled in the background, and hand gestures in the foreground. When there’s a match for both, the system can fire off the appropriate signal to turn the device on or off. Between the Nano, the camera, and the battery pack to make it all mobile, [Nick] says the hardware cost about $150 to put together.

But really, the hardware is only one small piece of the puzzle in a project like this. Which is why we’re happy to see [Nick] go into such detail about how the software functions, and crucially, how he trained the system. Just the gesture recognition subroutine alone went through nearly 20K images so it could reliably detect an arm extended into the frame.

If controlling your home with a glance and wave isn’t quite mystical enough, you could always add an infrared wand to the mix for that authentic Harry Potter experience.

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Uncovering The Echo Dot’s Hidden USB Port

August 15, 2019 by Tom Nardi 62 Comments

If you upgraded to Amazon’s latest Echo Dot, you might have been surprised to find that the diminutive voice assistant had shed its USB port. Earlier models of the Dot used a garden variety micro USB port for power, which hackers eventually figured out also provided a helpful way to snoop around inside the device’s firmware. The fact that the USB port was deleted on the latest Echo Dot in favor of a simple barrel connector for power was seen by some as a sign that Amazon was trying to keep curious owners out of their hardware.

But as [Brian Dorey] shows, all they did was put a bump in the road. While they removed the external USB connector, the traces for it are still on the board waiting to be accessed. Even better, it turns out the USB data lines are connected to the test points located on the bottom of the Dot. All you need is a simple breakout that will connect through the existing opening in the device’s case, and you’ve got your USB port back.

So what can you do with USB on the Echo Dot? Well, not much right now. [Brian] found that the Dot shows up as a Mediatek device under Linux using lsusb, and fastboot can see it and even confirms the presence of a locked bootloader. It’s going to take some work from the community to see how deep this particular rabbit hole goes.

Even if you’re not interested in restoring its USB port, [Brian] has uncovered a wealth of fascinating hardware information about the Echo Dot during his deep-dive. He’s mapped out many of the test points located throughout the device’s PCBs, and found a few interesting points that might be worth further investigation. For example, he found that driving one of the pins high would trigger the Dot to mute its microphones; which could be useful for anyone looking to cover Alexa’s ears.

[Brian] first cracked open the Echo Dot last month, after scoring one for cheap during Amazon’s Prime Day sale. It looks like he’s making fairly rapid progress on unraveling the mysteries of this popular gadget, and we’re very interested in seeing where this research takes us.

Data Mining Home Water Usage; Your Water Meter Knows You A Bit Too Well

August 14, 2019 by Tom Nardi 70 Comments

The average person has become depressingly comfortable with the surveillance dystopia we live in. For better or for worse, they’ve come to accept the fact that data about their lives is constantly being collected and analyzed. We’re at the point where a sizable chunk of people believe their smartphone is listening in on their personal conversations and tailoring advertisements to overheard keywords, yet it’s unlikely they’re troubled enough by the idea that they’d actually turn off the phone.

But even the most privacy-conscious among us probably wouldn’t consider our water usage to be any great secret. After all, what could anyone possibly learn from studying how much water you use? Well, as [Jason Bowling] has proven with his fascinating water-meter data research, it turns out you can learn a whole hell of a lot by watching water use patterns. By polling a whole-house water flow meter every second and running the resulting data through various machine learning algorithms, [Jason] found there is a lot of personal information hidden in this seemingly innocuous data stream.

The key is that every water-consuming device in your home has a discernible “fingerprint” that, with enough time, can be identified and tracked. Appliances that always use the same amount of water, like an ice maker or dishwasher, are obvious spikes among the noise. But [Jason] was able to pick up even more subtle differences, such as which individual toilet in the home had been flushed and when.

Further, if you watch the data long enough, you can even start to identify information about individuals within the home. Want to know how many kids are in the family? Monitoring for frequent baths that don’t fill the tub all the way would be a good start. Want to know how restful somebody’s sleep was? A count of how many times the toilet was flushed overnight could give you an idea.

In terms of the privacy implications of what [Jason] has discovered, we’re mildly horrified. Especially since we’ve already seen how utility meters can be sniffed with nothing more exotic than an RTL-SDR. But on the other hand, his write-up is a fantastic look at how you can put machine learning to work in even the most unlikely of applications. The information he’s collected on using Python to classify time series data and create visualizations will undoubtedly be of interest to anyone who’s got a big data problem they’re looking to solve.

Fail Of The Week: Toilets And High Voltage Do Not Mix

August 2, 2019 by Dan Maloney 23 Comments

Imagine if you will that you are enthroned upon the porcelain, minding your own business while doing your business. You’re catching up on Hackaday on your phone – c’mon, admit it – when a whir and a buzz comes from behind you. You sit up in alarm, whereupon your lower back suddenly feels as if someone is scrubbing it with a steel wool pad. Then the real pain sets in as super-hot plasma lances into your skin, the smell of burning flesh fills the bathroom, and you crack your head on the towel bar trying to escape this torture chamber in a panic.

Sound good? Then [Vije Miller]’s plasma-powered toilet air freshener is a must-build for you. We’re not entirely sure where this was going, but the name of the project seems to indicate a desire to, ahem, clear the air near your derrière with the power of ions. While that might work – we’ve recently seen an electrostatic precipitator for 3D-printer fumes – the implementation here is a bit sketchy. The ball of steel wool? It was possibly intended as a way to disperse the ions, but it served as nothing more than fuel when touched by the plasma. The Contact-esque gimballed rings? Not a clue what they’re for, but they look cool. And hats off to [Vije] for the intricate 3D-printed parts, the geartrain and linkages, and the DIY slip rings.

It may be a head-scratcher of a build, but the video below is entertaining. Check out some of [Vije]’s other projects of dubious value, like his licorice launcher or the smartphone back scratcher.

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Building A Safe ESP32 Home Energy Monitor

July 27, 2019 by Tom Nardi 45 Comments

The first step to reducing the energy consumption of your home is figuring out how much you actually use in the first place. After all, you need a baseline to compare against when you start making changes. But fiddling around with high voltage is something a lot of hackers will go out of their way to avoid. Luckily, as [Xavier Decuyper] explains, you can build a very robust DIY energy monitoring system without having to modify your AC wiring.

In the video after the break, [Xavier] goes over the theory of how it all works, but the short version is that you just need to use a Current Transformer (CT) sensor. These little devices clamp over an AC wire and detect how much current is passing through it via induction. In his case, he used a YHDC SCT-013-030 sensor that can measure up to 30 amps and costs about $12 USD. It outputs a voltage between 0 and 1 volts, which makes it extremely easy to read using the ADC of your favorite microcontroller.

Once you’ve got the CT sensor connected to your microcontroller, the rest really just depends on how far you want to take the software side of things. You could just log the current consumption to a plain text file if that’s your style, but [Xavier] wanted to challenge himself to develop a energy monitoring system that rivaled commercial offerings so he took the data and ran with it.

A good chunk of his write-up explains how the used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to process and ultimately display all the data he collects with his ESP32 energy monitor. Every 30 seconds, the hardware reports the current consumption to AWS through MQTT. The readings are stored in a database, and [Xavier] uses GraphQL and Dygraphs to generate visualizations. He even used Ionic to develop a cross-platform mobile application so he can fawn over his professional looking charts and graphs on the go.

We’ve already seen how carefully monitoring energy consumption can uncover some surprising trends, so if you want to go green and don’t have an optically coupled electricity meter, the CT sensor method might be just what you need.

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Shower Water Monitor Tracks The Dollars And Cents

July 24, 2019 by Lewin Day 27 Comments

There’s nothing quite as relaxing as a long, hot shower. This has the tendency of making the bather absent minded as to the amount of water being used, which can lead to excessive bills. [LiamOSM] built a device to monitor this instead, and calculate the cost, to boot.

The device consists of an Arduino hooked up to a cheap flow meter sourced from Banggood. The sensor consists of a paddle wheel that sits in the water flow, fitted with a magnet. A hall effect sensor picks up pulses as the magnet spins, and counting these allows the flow rate to be measured. An HD44780 LCD screen is used to display the readings, controlled over I²C.

To avoid issues in the bathroom environment, the enclosure was designed to be waterproof. The LCD is mounted behind a clear plastic window sourced from vegetable packaging, and the button chosen was specially selected for its sealing grommets. We’d love to see a proper submersion test, but for the most part, it appears to be doing a good job in the bathroom.

If you’re interested in monitoring your water use as a household, you might find it possible to piggy back on the municipal meter.

Homekit Compatible Sonoff Firmware Without A Bridge

July 14, 2019 by Tom Nardi 38 Comments

Generally speaking, home automation isn’t as cheap or as easy as most people would like. There are too many incompatible protocols, and more often than not, getting everything talking requires you to begrudgingly sign up for some “cloud” service that you didn’t ask for. If you’re an Apple aficionado, there can be even more hoops to jump through; getting your unsupported smart home devices working with that Cupertino designed ecosystem often involves running your own HomeKit bridge.

To try and simplify things, [Michele Gruppioni] has developed a firmware for the ubiquitous Sonoff WIFI Smart Switch that allows it to speak native HomeKit. No more using a Raspberry Pi to act as a mediator between your fancy Apple hardware and that stack of $4 Sonoff’s from AliExpress, they can now talk to each other directly. In the video after the break you can see that the iPad identifies the switch as unofficial device, but since it’s compliant with the HomeKit API, that doesn’t prevent them from talking to each other.

Not only will this MIT licensed firmware get your Sonoff Basic, Sonoff Slampher, or Sonoff S26 talking with your Apple gadgets, but it also provides a web interface and REST API so it retains compatibility with whatever else you might be running in your home automation setup. So while the more pedestrian users of your system might be turning the porch light on with their iPhones, you can still fire it up with a Bash script as nature intended.

Of course, if you don’t mind adding a Raspberry Pi bridge to the growing collection of devices on your network, we’ve got plenty of other HomeKit-enabled projects for you to take a look at.

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