Insteon Gets Another Chance

June 18, 2022 by Arya Voronova 31 Comments

It would appear that, sometimes, miracles happen. A few days ago, an update graced the website of Insteon, a company whose abrupt shuttering we covered in detail two months ago. An entity described as “small group of passionate Insteon users” has bought what was left of the company, and is working on getting the infrastructure back up. Previously, there was no sign of life from the company’s APIs. Now, Insteon hubs are coming back to life — or perhaps, they’re Inste-online again.

We’ve explained that revival of these devices without acquiring the company IP would’ve been tricky because of stuff like certificate pinning, and of course, a pile of proprietary code. Buying a company that’s undergoing a liquidation is not exactly end-user-friendly, but it would seem that someone sufficiently business-savvy got it done. The new CEO, as reported by [CNX Software], is a member of an investment committee — it’s fair to assert that this would help. A more sustainable funding source rather than ‘sell hardware and then somehow provide indefinite services’ is promised; they are moving to a subscription model, but only for Insteon Hub users. Recurring payments don’t sound as bad when it comes to paying developers and covering operational costs, and we hope that this revival succeeds.

Nothing is mentioned about moving towards openness in software and hardware — something that protects users from such failures in the first place. The new company is ultimately vulnerable to the same failure mode, and may leave the users in the dark just as abruptly as a result. However, we have our fingers crossed that the updated business model holds, purely for users’ sake. At least, unlike with the Wink hub, Insteon’s transition to a subscription model is better than the Inste-off alternative.

We thank [Itay] for sharing this with us! Via [CNX Software].

Automated Blinds Can Be A Cheap And Easy Build

June 16, 2022 by Lewin Day 22 Comments

Blinds are great for blocking out the sun, but having to get up to open and close them grows tiresome in this computationally-advanced age. [The Hook Up] decided to automate his home blinds instead, hooking them up to the Internet of Things with some common off-the-shelf parts.

The basic idea was to use stepper motors to turn the tilt rod which opens and closes the blinds. An early attempt to open blinds with unipolar stepper motors proved unsuccessful, when the weak motors weren’t capable of fully closing the blinds when running on 5 volts. Not wanting to throw out the hardware on hand, the motors were instead converted to bipolar operation. They were then hooked up to DRV8825 driver boards and run at 12 volts to provide more torque.

With the electromechanical side of things sorted out, it was simple to hook up the motor drivers to a NodeMCU, based on the ESP8266. The IoT-ready device makes it easy to control the motors remotely via the web.

The build came in at a low cost of around $10 per blind. That’s a good saving over commercial options which can cost hundreds of dollars in comparison. We’ve seen other work from [The Hook Up] before too, like his creative Flex Seal screen build. Video after the break.

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Track Your Cat’s Weight Through This Internet-Connected Litter Box

June 3, 2022 by Robin Kearey 26 Comments

With feline obesity on the rise, keeping track of your cat’s weight is an important part of keeping them healthy. However, a weighing session can be anything from a routine job to a painful procedure, depending on your cat’s temperament. [Andy]’s cat Ellie is one of those who dislike being weighed, so in order to track her weight without drama [Andy] got creative and built an internet-connected weighing platform for her litter box.

The platform consists of two pieces of MDF held apart by two load cells, which are hooked up to an ESP8266. The ESP reads out the load cells and reports its findings to the Adafruit IO platform through its WiFi connection, sending updates to [Andy] whenever litter box use has been detected. The cat’s weight can be simply calculated by subtracting the weight of the unused litter box from the weight measured when it’s in use.

Getting reliable readings from the load cells was a bit of a challenge, since the measured weight fluctuated wildly as Ellie moved around the litter box. A combination of waiting for the readings to settle and using timeouts to discard the effect of brief movements resulted in reasonably stable measurements. The resolution was even good enough to measure the difference in litter weight before and after use. We’re not sure what’s the practical value of knowing how much your cat poops each time, but if the data is there you might as well log it.

[Andy] also imagines smart-home features of the IoT litter box: for example, he could run an air purifier or send in the Roomba after heavy usage. This is not even the first internet-connected litter box we’ve featured; we’ve seen one connected to the Thingspeak platform, as well as one that sends poop alerts through Twitter. If you’re not around to clean up the mess, an automatic fume extractor might come in handy.

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Easy Network Config For IoT Devices With RGBeacon

May 11, 2022 by Lewin Day 25 Comments

When you’re hooking up hardware to a network, it can sometimes be a pain to figure out what IP address the device has ended up with. [Bas Pijls] often saw this problem occurring in the classroom, and set about creating a simple method for small devices to communicate their IP address and other data with a minimum of fuss.

[Bas] specifically wanted a way to do this without adding a display to the hardware, as this would add a lot of complexity and expense to simple IoT devices. Instead, RGBeacon was created, wherin a microcontroller flashes out network information with the aid of a single RGB WS2812B LED.

In fact, all three colors of the RGB LED are used to send information to a computer via a webcam. The red channel flashes out a clock signal, the green channel represents the beginning of a byte, and the blue channel flashes to indicate bits that are high. With a little signal processing, a computer running a Javascript app in a web browser can receive information from a microcontroller flashing its LEDs via a webcam.

It’s a neat hack that should make setting up devices in [Bas]’s classes much easier. It needn’t be limited to network info, either; the code could be repurposed to let a microcontroller flash out other messages, too. It’s not dissimilar from the old Timex Datalink watches which used monitor flashes to communicate!

Insteon Abruptly Shuts Down, Users Left Smart-Home-Less

April 25, 2022 by Arya Voronova 88 Comments

In today’s “predictable things that happened before and definitely will happen again”, Insteon, a smart home company boasting the Insteon ecosystem of devices built around their proprietary communication standards, has shut down their servers without a warning. For almost two decades, Insteon used to offer products like smart light switches, dimmers, relays, various sensors, thermostats – the usual home automation offerings, all linked into a cozy system. Looking through the Insteon subreddit’s history, there were signs of the company’s decline for good half a year now, but things were mostly stable – until about a week ago, when users woke up and noticed that parts of their smart home network stopped working, the mobile app would no longer respond, and the company’s resources and infrastructure went down. What’s more – the C-rank management has scrubbed their LinkedIn profiles from mentioning Insteon and SmartLabs (Insteon’s parent company).

Instantly, the Insteon subreddit has livened up. People, rightfully angry about being literally left in the dark, were looking for answers – as if mocking them, Insteon’s homepage claimed that all services were operational. Others, having expected the shutdown to eventually happen, started collecting and rehosting rapidly disappearing documentation, helping each other keep their tech up in the meantime, and looking into alternative platforms. It turned out to be imperative that users don’t factory reset their Insteon hubs, since those have to communicate with the currently Inste-Gone servers as part of initial configuration, diligently verifying the SSL certificates. Sadly, quite a few users, unaware and going through the usual solutions to make their network function again, are now left with hubs that are essentially bricked, save for a few lucky ones.
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Hackaday Links: April 24, 2022

April 24, 2022 by Dan Maloney 11 Comments

Wait, what? Is it possible that a tech company just killed off a product with a huge installed base of hardware and a community of dedicated users, and it wasn’t Google? Apparently not, if the stories of the sudden demise of Insteon are to be believed. The cloud-based home automation concern seems to have just disappeared — users report the service went offline at the end of last week, and hasn’t been back since. What’s more, the company’s executives removed Insteon from their LinkedIn profiles, and the CEO himself went so far as to remove his entire page from LinkedIn. The reasons behind the sudden disappearance remained a mystery until today, when The Register reported that Smartlabs, Inc., the parent company of Insteon, had become financially insolvent after an expected sale of the company failed in March. The fact that the company apparently knew this was going to happen weeks ago and never bothered to give the community a heads up before pulling the switches has led to a lot of hard feelings among the estimated 100,000 Insteonhub users.

Then again, with a comet the size of Rhode Island heading our way, a bunch of bricked smart bulbs might just be a moot point. The comet, known as C/2014 UN271, has a nucleus that is far larger than any previously discovered comet, which makes it a bit of an oddball and an exciting object to study. For those not familiar with the United States, Rhode Island is said to be a state wedged between Connecticut and Massachusetts, but even having lived in both those states, we couldn’t vouch for that. For scale, it’s about 80 miles (128 km) across, or a little bit bigger than Luxembourg, which we’re pretty sure is mythical, too. The comet is a couple of billion miles away at this point; it may never get closer than a billion miles from the Sun, and that in 2031. But given the way things have been going these last few years, we’re not banking on anything.

From the “Answering the Important Questions” file, news this week of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s breakthrough development of the “Oreometer,” a device to characterize the physical properties of Oreo cookies. The 3D printed device is capable of clamping onto the wafer parts of the popular sandwich cookie while applying axial torque. The yield strength of the tasty goop gluing the two wafers together can be analyzed, with particular emphasis on elucidating why it always seems to stay primarily on one wafer. Thoughtfully, the MIT folks made the Oreometer models available to one and all, so you can print one up and start your own line of cookie-related research. As a starting point, maybe take a look at the shear strength of the different flavors of Oreo, which might answer why the world needs Carrot Cake Oreos.

And finally, since we mentioned the word “skiving” last week in this space, it seems like the all-knowing algorithm has taken it upon itself to throw this fascinating look at bookbinding into our feed. We’re not complaining, mind you; the look inside Dublin’s J.E. Newman and Sons bookbinding shop, circa 1981, was worth every second of the 23-minute video. Absolutely everything was done by hand back then, and we’d imagine that very little has changed in the shop over the ensuing decades. The detail work is incredible, especially considering that very few jigs or fixtures are used to ensure that everything lines up. By the way, “skiving” in this case refers to the process of thinning out leather using a razor-sharp knife held on a bias to the material. It’s similar to the just-as-fascinating process used to make heat sinks that we happened upon last week.

Welcome To The Future, Where Your Microwave Thinks It’s A Steam Oven

March 18, 2022 by Jenny List 39 Comments

It’s fair to say that many of us will have at some time inadvertently bricked a device by applying the wrong firmware by mistake. If we’re lucky then firing up some low-level reflashing tools can save the day and return the item in question to health, but we’re guessing that among you will be plenty of people who’ve had to discard a PCB or replace an inaccessible microcontroller chip as a result.

Spare a thought then for the consumer appliance manufacturer Electrolux, whose AEG subsidiary has bricked combi microwave ovens acrosss a swathe of Western Europe (Dutch, Google Translate link). They managed this improbable feat by distributing an over-the-air update that contains the firmware for a steam oven instead. Worse still, the update has disabled over-the-air updates, meaning that any fix requires physical access to the oven.

We can’t help sympathising with whichever poor AEG engineer has had the ultimate in bad days at work, but at the same time we should perhaps consider the difference between a computer and an appliance, and whether there should be a need for an oven to phone home in the first place. Sure, such devices have been computer-controlled for decades, but should a microcontroller doing a control task need constant updates?

We’re guessing this oven has some kind of cloud aspect to it which allows ~~AEG to slurp customer data~~ the user to control it via their app, but even so it should serve as a warning to anyone tempted by an internet-connected kitchen appliance. If the internet isn’t necessary for the food to be cooked, don’t connect it.

We feel sorry for anyone who might have put a pizza in the oven just before it was bricked, and watched in disappointment as their tasty meal remained uncooked.