Context - Using old smartphones as stationary IoT devices

Overview: Turning sensors into signals for human consumption.

• Use existing hardware like old smartphones.
• Use built-in sensors to passively derive as much meaning from ambient information as possible.
• Privacy: eg, not recording voice, just presence/absence of sound.

Use-Cases

• No sound for 2hrs, something is wrong. Mom had a heart attack.
• While traveling, get notification of power outage at home.
• While at work, get notification of "Joe's iPhone" in the house. WTF.
• Getting dark and no people are around, so turn the lights off.
• How am I sleeping? Analyse relative noise/motion.
• You haven't left the house in 5 days (Genevieve Bell)

Usage

There's no UI for this yet.

Example code for listening to a sensor and taking action based on it.

// Notify me when the power goes out.

var trigger = {
  source: 'source-power',
  signal: 'batteryCharging',
  value: false // trigger when the value for batteryCharging changes to false
};

var notification = {
  title: 'Power Outage',
  description: 'The power went out!'
};

registerTrigger([matcher], [], [notification]);

// Take a picture and send it to me when a new Bluetooth device is detected.

var trigger = {
  source: 'source-bluetooth-devices',
  signal: 'bluetoothDevice'
};

var action = {
  id: 'takePicture',
  timeout: 1000
};

var notification = {
  title: 'New Bluetooth Device',
  description: 'New Bluetooth device detected.'
};

registerTrigger(matcher, action, notification);

Concepts

Sources & Signals

• Hardware capabilities are 'sources', eg Wifi.
• Sources can emit multiple signals, eg 'current wifi connection lost', 'new wifi network found'
• Properties: ** sourceId (string), eg 'bluetooth' ** sourceLabel (string), eg 'Bluetooth' ** sourceIcon (string URL) ** signalId: (string), eg 'newdevice' ** signalLabel (string): Readable description ** signalIcon (string URL) ** type (string), 'scalar' or 'stream' ** value (anything)

Triggers

• Triggers match signal events and configures notifications in response.
• Can assign notifications per trigger for each criticality level
• Properties: ** events (array), Array of event matcher objects ** actions (array), Array of actions ** notifications (array), Array of notifications

Event Matching Triggers

• An object that configures how a trigger matches against a signal
• Properties: ** sourceId (string, reqd), id of source ** signalId (string, reqd), id of signal ** value: (mixed, opt), Unsure yet. Regex? Matching function? How to handle streams? Percent change? ** criticality (int, 1-3, reqd), the criticality resulting from a match

Notifications

• Properties: ** title ** description ** icon ** criticality (int, 1-3) ** data

Actions

• actions to take based on a trigger match
• TODO results are included in notifications somehow ** actionId (string), eg 'takePicture' ** actionLabel (string), eg 'Take picture' ** actionIcon (string URL), URL of icon ** actionOutput
• action request ** actionId ** timeout

Contributing

TODO

Implement broad classifications:

• home vs away vs asleep
• people present - active or not
• relative noisiness
• a person is in my house (bluetooth, sound, speech)
• a person has arrived
• a person has departed
• how many people are around
• detect a cat, dog, bird

V1 TODO

• set up some default triggers: power, camera, sound
• trigger support for cache in matches (eg: new bluetooth device, compared to if ever found)
• triggers for any value change (eg, true/false in batteryCharging - you want to know when the power goes back on)
• fix tests (use default triggers?)
• datastorage should be in signal?
• notification system: expand to use plugins
• rewrite ui render using triggers?
• fix sound variable cache length
• fix stream data scaling
• persist data (have viz pull from persistent cache?)
• settings UI for ifttt maker channel
• settings UI integration for trigger/notification
• check notifications config against web notification spec
• list unsupported sensors (output to console?)
• generated docs from sources

V2 TODO

• storage infra (pouchdb)
• store module logs
• action system (takePicture, recordSound, saySomething, webRequest, beep,
• move everything to a worker?
• Connect listener devices via NFC, which installs app and registers for push notifications

Fun Stuff TODO

• generated music
• wifi networks add/remove
• light
• motion