It’s been a slow couple months between the holidays, travelling, and work. I did manage to accomplish a few things with the Home Dashboard project, though. I redesigned the UI to move away from an exclusively mobile interface as the amount of data and type of data I’m including in the project now simply don’t all make sense to squeeze into a mobile UI. Sometime in early January, the system broke the 2 millionth record milestone — I’m unsure what I’ll do with some of the data I’m collecting at this point but I’ve learned a lot through collecting it and I’m sure I’ll learn more analyzing it at some point in the future.
This brings the list of events I’m collecting to:
- Indoor temperature and humidity
- Amazon Echo music events
- DirecTV program and DVR information
- Cell phone location and status details
- Local fire and police emergency events
- Home lights and other Wink hub events
- …and now home network information
Analyzing home network information
The biggest change was the addition of network event logging. After seeing that a foreign IP was accessing my LAN, I started logging each request to or from my home network until I was sure I had fixed the vulnerability. After that, I found the information interesting so I just kept logging it. For example, I was able to discover that an app on my phone was making repeated calls (~2,000 per day) to an app monitoring service (New Relic) which wasn’t doing my phone’s battery life any favors.
Collecting additional phone data
After launching Location to HTTP, I’ve been tinkering with additional data collection from my cellphone such as Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS, battery, and screen status. After collecting this information for a month or so, here are some useless data points from the most recent 30 days:
- I’ve actively used my phone for 104.5 hours (3.5hrs per day – I need to cut back on the work email…)
- Average battery level: 61%
- Average free memory: 516MB (12.6%)
- Average location accuracy: +/-31FT
- Average altitude: 154FT
- Average speed: 1MPH
- Average uptime: 153.3HRs
- Maximum uptime: 437.4HRs
I also improved the location history mapping to show different color map markers depending on the age of the record and phone details at the time the record was made:
Improved home climate visuals
I added some simple graphs of MoM temperature and humidity and also updated the heat-mappings for the daily climate information. These are a bit easier to read that those I had in the previous UI. It’s interesting to see the effectiveness of thermostat automation and our daily routines.
More detailed emergency event
Lastly, I expanded on the emergency event information to surface the top event types and the total number of events by type:
