The Incrementalist

Over the past year, MAYA Design has been working on a pretty cool project for Eaton, but I haven’t been able to say anything about it. However, since it’s being shown at CES and now has a public site, I think I can start writing about it. I should mention that while I work for MAYA, I haven’t had much personal involvement in this project, I just think it’s nifty.

Home Heartbeat is an inexpensive nervous system for your home. It’s one of the first consumer-level uses of Ember’s low-power mesh-networking technologies. While the individual sensors don’t actually relay messages from other sensors for power reasons (that way, they can supposedly last for years on one battery), you’ll be able to get repeater modules to extend the coverage range of the net (you get about 90 feet per base or repeater). When you bring home the starter kit and plug in the base station, you will effectively have a mesh network in your house.

So what does this get you? Well, the Ember chips are cheaper and more power-efficient than, say, WiFi, so it’s more feasible to place networked sensors (and actuators) around your house and just forget about them until they have something interesting to tell you. (A network supports up to 30 devices.) Here’s the starting lineup of sensors:

• wet/dry sensor — can tell you if the basement’s flooded or Sparky’s water bowl has run dry
• open/closed sensor — tells you the current state of a door or window
• power sensor — stick this between the outlet and your iron or TV’s cord and you’ll know if it’s on or off (I want one that can tell me the actual power draw, though, like the Kill A Watt)
• water valve shutoff — hey, an actuator snuck in there! I don’t know much about this one; presumably, you could set it up to cut off your water if the wet/dry sensor detects flooding
• reminder — Here’s where things start to get interesting. This thing is a timer that you stick next to some task you’ll need to accomplish in the future. When you take care of it, you touch it and the timer starts over. So you can put it next to your air system filter, and tell it to ping you in three months—or stick it on the washing machine and have it remind you to put your laundry in the dryer in 40 minutes.
• attention sensor — This is actually a networked button, which is kind of cool in itself. Stick it by the door and have the kids press it when they get home—or give one to your neighbor to stick on their fridge, so they can press it if they see a suspicious character lurking around your house.

That’s the input, what about the output? Well, the base station comes with a small pocketable display which the team informally called the “key fob” (you can actually use it as a keychain), but which is apparently called the Home Key^TM in the product. It’s got a vibration feature (and probably some loathsome beepy stuff) to alert you to sensor messages, but it also acts as the setup interface. When you first get a new sensor, you slide the key into it, and the sensor bonds with your network. At the same time, it becomes the user interface for that sensor so that you can name it and configure it. When you’re done tweaking the sensor, you just pull out the key and stick it back in your pocket.

What happens when you leave the house? Unfortunately, your key is left high and dry, though it does remember the last state of all your sensors, so you’ll still be able to check whether you left your iron on or not. In addition, the base station can call out using your landline to send SMS messages to your cell phone for simple alerts. It’s too bad that they couldn’t work in a pager chip or something so that you could keep using the same key for your alerts.

So, basement flood warnings are great and all, but what else can you do with a household mesh network? Well, the base station has a USB port, which will probably support some interesting programming possibilities, along with allowing you to use your broadband connection for the SMS alerts. From what I hear, there will be some effort set aside to help the developer community do interesting things with this platform in the coming months.

If you’re interested in more details, I recommend checking the product manuals in the support section of the site.

Update: My co-worker Mike discusses the philosophy and motivation of Home Heartbeat.

Update: MAYA has now has a page about Home Heartbeat.

While I always liked the idea of Ambient Devices, their first product, the Orb, felt very wishy-washy to me. I like the concept of output devices (in that case a single “pixel”) that can convey general information to me at a subconscious level, but there are also times when I’d like to “zoom in” to get more quantitative detail.

That’s why I find their new Dashboard much more appealing. The basic pitch is this: a battery-powered set of three physical gauges that can display your choice of metrics. The information arrives over old pager networks, so there are absolutely no wires involved. To change which information a gauge is showing, you simply insert a piece of plastic with a different set of tick marks. (If you look closely at the photo, you can see that they use the old punched-card system to detect which of the—hmm—1024? possible data channels the card represents.) The device itself is squarely in Brookstone territory at $150. The data service is free for generic channels like the Dow index, regional forecast, and presidential approval rating, but you pay $6.95 a month to get the personalized ones like pending email count, minutes until next meeting, and traffic congestion. With a nod to their early-adopter market, they also include a couple cards corresponding to developer channels—I’ll have to take another look when they open up their developer program in earnest.