SMART Living Solution

We asked a friend in the lab to try. He opened the app, found the room, and stopped. He couldn’t work out how to turn a light on.

Looking at the screens now, I’m not surprised. Every device carried the same word. Main Lights said OPEN. Curtains said OPEN. Door Lock said OPEN. Beside each one sat an identical toggle, and nothing on the screen said what state anything was in. OPEN was either what the light was doing or what tapping would do, and there was no way to tell which.

I can see how it happened. We had curtains, windows and a door lock, and for those three OPEN is the right verb. Then the word got applied to the lights, the heater and everything else, because it was already there.

There was no path for it in the interface at all.

At seven in the morning the curtains opened and the lights came on. It ran every day. It lived in the Raspberry Pi, and nobody outside the three of us knew it existed, let alone how to change it.

Six years later I asked my teammate how it was triggered, and neither of us can reconstruct it. If the people who wrote it can’t recall how it worked, the person living in the house never stood a chance. That’s the argument for putting automations on the screen, and I didn’t need to make it, because the project made it for me.

It was too buggy to demonstrate, so we dropped it and didn’t mention it again.

Morning scene and night scene are named, selectable things, with an add button beside them. The behaviour is the one that ran in 2020. The difference is that a person living in the house can see it, choose it and make another one.

Add devices sits right next to the devices it adds to. You scan the code on the device or connect by NFC, choose a room, give it a name, and it’s in.

A new scene takes three steps, each a sheet over the room: name it, pick its devices, done. The Day scene here has two lamps and the speaker.

The control for a light reads Turn off while it’s on, so the label names the action and the state follows from it. The 2020 screen used OPEN for every device, and nothing said whether that word was the state or the action. The air conditioner gets its own controls, with a mode and a target temperature, because a thermostat and a switch are different objects.

Remove device sits in each device’s own menu, and afterwards the app confirms the device is gone. In 2020, removing a device meant editing the code.

The TV and the speaker get their own controls: four modes (Music, Gaming, Movie, Classic), a volume slider and who’s connected. The speaker adds an equalizer. Each sheet still ends in Turn off, like the light’s.

Voice runs through the whole app this time, with its own button in the middle of the tab bar and a wake phrase in settings. The engineering that made it too buggy in 2020 is still unsolved. What’s here is the part a person would see and say.

The camera alert already worked in 2020. In the redesign an alert comes with its next step, like Lock the door when the door has been left open.

In 2020 power consumption was a number on a phone, built by a teammate, and it told you the figure and nothing else. Now it shows use over time and compares each month with the last.