Using iBeacons for Smart House

1

Good afternoon everyone. I’d like to ask your thoughts on a project I’m trying to start up. First thing’s first, I’m Eric, I’m very new to all this stuff, but I’ve got a very creative mind. I’m an IT, worked with the military and government here in the US for several years, and I have a passion for making the most awesome smart home ever.

Well here’s what I’m trying to do.

First and foremost, I’m wanting to use the beacons to allow for in home mapping AND for controlling the rest of my home’s appliances.

For example. I’m playing a song on my android phone and I’m casting it to my chromecast network. What I’d like to do is have the beacons, through IFTTT or whatever other platform you want to use, select which chromecast to play from, depending on the user’s location, and from there, the speaker that’s associated with that area will start to play that song on that speaker. I’d like to be able to walk around the house and have my music follow me.

I’d like to be able to use Jarvis (http://www.jarvis.ai-dot.net/), and be able to say, “Jarvis, where is my wife?” and have it reply, “Your wife is in the upstairs bathroom, sir.”

I want to be able to make a phone call, and have the phone call broadcast to the speakers around my house and use the microphone’s near those same speakers, so that as I walk throughout the house, I can hold my phone conversation anywhere and with my own privacy.

I know this isn’t what Beacon was designed for specifically, but I think it’s got huge potential if we could just make a platform for it to work from. I already know that the beacons can transmit X,Y coordinates for your location in a grid like system, and if we say, use IFTTT’s maker channel (www.ifttt.com/maker) and have it update numbers in the Numerous channel on Ifttt, then we can setup the rest of the system to be automated from there. So it constantly updates the X,Y coordinate in numerous app, and then IF the numerous app equals, say, 12,26 then turn on light 12. Something like that.

What do you guys think? I don’t know if anyone else is already working on something like this, but I’d definitely like to see what can be done to make a smarthouse more accurate with indoor location and map tracking.

2

All of this sounds amazing (:

There’s two approaches to indoor positioning w/ beacons:

  1. (Easier) Place beacons in points of interests: e.g., if you’re interested in a per-room resolution, that’d be one per room; if you want to know when sb approached, e.g., the kitchen sink, place on near the kitchen sink, etc. Then you simply detect which beacon you’re closest to, and act on that. The SDK for that: https://github.com/estimote/ios-sdk. It works even if the phone is locked, and is very energy-efficient, resulting in very little additional battery drain.

  2. (Harder) True (x,y) positioning. This is much harder due to the physics of the RF signals, but we have a different SDK for that too: https://github.com/estimote/ios-indoor-sdk. It requires you to place beacons on the perimeter of the room, map out the space, and then it gives you (x,y) coordinates w/ about 1-4 m accuracy. Currently, this only works when an app that does the positioning is running and visible on screen, and is less efficient than (1).

And finally, there’s already a handful of ready-made apps that go the (1) route, and provide home-automation or IFTTT integration, e.g.:

http://contrast.co/launch-center-pro/