Comments on: Doorbell update

By: Roo

Roo — Mon, 26 May 2008 23:14:27 +0000

Update: it’s been offline for a while; I broke the antenna. I now have a new soldering iron, so I shall fix it soon. I might use a longer piece of wire to see if I can improve the range and reliability too.

By: rooreynolds.com: Hacking the doorbell

rooreynolds.com: Hacking the doorbell — Tue, 20 May 2008 21:24:33 +0000

[...] Doorbell update [...]

By: Roo

Roo — Tue, 20 May 2008 12:28:08 +0000

“internal telemetry is cheap and not for direct human consumption - regular updates from sensors and stuff like that would be welcome there, but the ->Jabber gateway would do ’smart’ analysis of the data and convert it into more interesting streams of pertinent messages when things change or exceed limits”.

Exactly. Well put.

I’ll take a look at Clickatell too. Sounds handy.

By: Alaric Snell-Pym

Alaric Snell-Pym — Tue, 20 May 2008 09:39:43 +0000

Yeah, similarly, I’m taking the approach that internal telemetry is cheap and not for direct human consumption - regular updates from sensors and stuff like that would be welcome there, but the ->Jabber gateway would do ’smart’ analysis of the data and convert it into more interesting streams of pertinent messages when things change or exceed limits.

But yeah, Jabber can do the IM stuff, and SMS is easy too (see http://www.clickatell.com/; sign up, buy some credit, then invoke their SMTP or HTTP APIs); those are what I’m currently using for event notification in my external systems. Finally wiring the house properly will take a bit longer, though - we’ve only just got the floor back in! :-)

By: Roo

Roo — Mon, 19 May 2008 10:46:35 +0000

I use Twitter to expose this (so far, more outputs coming soon) partly because Twitter already fits nicely into my life. It very easy to get things sent to IM and/or SMS. I’d only expose the just-for-fun stuff of course, and I’m not planning to publish any ultra sensitive stuff in a channel which is both public and (let’s be honest) prone to random failure. :-)

There is a pub/sub messaging system inside my house already (using the MQTT protocol, but I’m also thinking about Jabber/XMPP too). This external exposure of certain bits of it is a subset of that of course.

By: Alaric Snell-Pym

Alaric Snell-Pym — Mon, 19 May 2008 09:32:51 +0000

Why use Twitter for this, out of interest? I was thinking of using a combination of Spread and Jabber for those kinds of things myself - a Spread group running over my private network for events to be notified to and things to subscribe to, one of which would be a Jabber bot that notifies a select list of people (Wife and I) of interesting events.

Mainly, this is because I feel nervous about (a) making stuff about my house’s workings public, for security reasons (you should see the security system I’m designing… but, then I’d have to kill you) and (b) relying on a third-party online free thing like Twitter for anything important rather than just fun!