Yes, that model might boot faster, especially with custom firmware. I learned after placing my order that the 702 does not have enough RAM for custom firmware.
Yea I noticed the RAM issue so sticking with the 703. Not so sure its going to boot any faster, but for me I have no intentions right now to have anything tied to car starting with an immediate response. I currently park in a long driveway and don’t park any cars in the garage.
Not that my wife or I ever leave home without a phone but I could use it for a separate vehicle proximity and I’m sure I’ll come up with something else in the future.
[quote=“awake33”]I feel more than confident that there are no risks of injury or death posed by my setup.
[ul][li]The car only runs for 5 minutes.[/li]
[li]We only start it a few seconds before heading out to the car or loading our toddler into the car seat.[/li]
[li]We get alerts on our phones for open close status (The garage door is the only device I use alerts for).[/li]
[li]The furnace uses outside air to replenish itself.[/li]
[li]You can hear the garage door.[/li][/ul][/quote]
Oh really? Your list seems an attempt to rationalize a frivolous automation exercise which poses a legitimate safety risk. Toxic CO. Now you’ve offered there is a toddler involved and this borderlines on reckless. Maybe share this thread with your wife so she can see the guidance from others.
How about switch the order. Put a remote start dongle tied to a switch that closes when the door is fully open. Then it has more of a fail safe aspect to it. Better still, automate something more useful and less risky.
Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
@awake33 I am just following the discussion and finding it interesting on how you use the iViri app. Obviously, iViri could be changed a little bit just to accommodate your needs but I think it is cool how you are getting the polling going using GPS to get a more accurate location. The problem with Geofences that @RichardT touched on isn’t so much the GPS because it doesn’t actually (on iOS at least) fire up on region crossings. The geofence technology basically comes down to cell phone triangulation and for obvious reason that can only be so accurate, plus to preserve battery life the device only wakes itself up so often to see if you have crossed but in my case I must have found the right distance as it does it right as we pull up to the drive way 95% of the time and the other times its a little before or a little after. I wanted to add one additional thing since people did mention using RFID, is that iViri in v1.3 which will be released soon supports the use of iBeacons, so kind of inexpensive (3 for 100$ from estimote), you could slap one of those on the outside of your garage and tell it to send a 250m radius signal and as long as you have your phone setup to detect that beacon and what to do it could start everything as you were a little bit closer to your garage. If your happy with your setup which it sounds like you have it tuned nicely then don’t worry about the change but these beacons are low cost and you can do some cool proximity stuff in your home with them as far as turing on and off lights as you come and go from a room. Also as a side note I am happy that @RichardT is taking this forward on the android platform as I know I don’t have the time to ever get around to doing it! So thanks Richard.
[quote=“curiousB, post:23, topic:180862”][quote=“awake33”]I feel more than confident that there are no risks of injury or death posed by my setup.
[ul][li]The car only runs for 5 minutes.[/li]
[li]We only start it a few seconds before heading out to the car or loading our toddler into the car seat.[/li]
[li]We get alerts on our phones for open close status (The garage door is the only device I use alerts for).[/li]
[li]The furnace uses outside air to replenish itself.[/li]
[li]You can hear the garage door.[/li][/ul][/quote]
Oh really? Your list seems an attempt to rationalize a frivolous automation exercise which poses a legitimate safety risk. Toxic CO. Now you’ve offered there is a toddler involved and this borderlines on reckless. Maybe share this thread with your wife so she can see the guidance from others.
How about switch the order. Put a remote start dongle tied to a switch that closes when the door is fully open. Then it has more of a fail safe aspect to it. Better still, automate something more useful and less risky.
Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk[/quote]
I must say, your righteous indignation is hilarious. I’d say that I appreciate your concern, but I don’t; you are simply another annoying, self appointed Internet Police Member.
How many safety nets does it take to make the mambi-pambies of the world to feel warm and fuzzy? Are you anti-gun too? :
My house is 2700sf, and with the car running for 5 minutes straight, even if the door was closed, would not flood my house with CO because my furnace has ducting for both fresh air and expulsion of its own CO going outside. The simple fact is that we would be far more likely to have an incident from the furnace itself than from CO generated from the car. Did you know that the ‘experts’ say that one should not even run their vehicle in an attached garage with the garage bay door open? Yeah, like everything else, a one-size fits all rule has been made because some idiot with a crappy old truck did exactly that and his family got sick. If I was driving an older car, especially something like a 1980 Camaro or something, then I wouldn’t even run it in the garage with it open.
We are grown adults who can safely take on this monumental task of being self aware enough to realize when we have started our own car for #$%&sake! When we start the car, we are less than 10ft from the interior garage door and we start is as we are leaving! It takes 3 deliberate button presses to operate the OEM remote start in this brand new 2014 vehicle. I mention that it is new, and OEM, because modern cars have very reliable and sophisticated electrical and computer systems, and much lower/cleaner emissions. If someone cannot have the awareness to keep track of whether they have started their vehicle, then they probably shouldn’t be driving.
Thankfully, my wife is intelligent enough to understand this on her own. She thinks you are either overly emotional, or a woman. Lol, yes I think that is funny, coming from a woman.
Now how about you go police someone else and determine what is useful when automated for them.
How reliable and consistent is this right now? How fast is it? Does the phone have to be awake or in certain state to pick it up? How often does it search for the connection?
Does it face any of the similar issues we face already with geofence and wifi pinging? Phone has to be awake… Only checks so often?
Easy to do with the garage door sensor on the lowest panel.
How reliable and consistent is this right now? How fast is it? Does the phone have to be awake or in certain state to pick it up? How often does it search for the connection?
Does it face any of the similar issues we face already with geofence and wifi pinging? Phone has to be awake… Only checks so often?[/quote]
These are just little radios, I have not done any testing with them being in a car and pulling up to the house. Currently I use them to indicate when my wife and I have been in bed for 60 minutes and has it shutdown the house if we missed anything, or unlock the front door as I walk up to it, etc… I am using them to give my Vera Proximity information as I am inside my home and away from using any GPS functions. All I can say is from my testing thus far the reaction 95% of the time is within seconds, but there has been a couple of instances where that isn’t the case and I am trying to track that down as I think I am getting random Vera Restarts causing it to behave that the notification wasn’t picked up. The phone can be asleep and it is all on the apple iOS on how often it polls or how it detects when you have entered a beacon region, the iViri app just listens for the call back and does something with it such as change a switch value on your Vera. I am not stating that this will be the end all say all solution for you, but what I can say is it has opened my eyes to different possibilities and apple is getting their with their software as you can expect to see a lot of stores using this for advertisements and interaction with their app as you move through the store. I practically never open iViri app on my phone anymore as the Geofences are good enough for me to indicate when we are home or away and the iBeacons are great to have different rooms turn on as I enter or exit them (as long as I carry my phone which is not a problem).
I’m not much of any iOS person and my main phones are Android, So I guess I’ll hold out on the OS system questions. T
hey need to be 110v powered? Couldn’t put one in an unpowered mailbox out at the street for arriving?
How is the fence sizing? You said your using yours for rooms, what about two bedrooms next to each other? Rooms are not round how well does that work? Or do you need to keep them more distant? How does setting the radius work and how accurate is it. If you set it to 10 feet could that mean 20 sometimes?
I’m not much of any iOS person and my main phones are Android, So I guess I’ll hold out on the OS system questions. T
hey need to be 110v powered? Couldn’t put one in an unpowered mailbox out at the street for arriving?
How is the fence sizing? You said your using yours for rooms, what about two bedrooms next to each other? Rooms are not round how well does that work? Or do you need to keep them more distant? How does setting the radius work and how accurate is it. If you set it to 10 feet could that mean 20 sometimes?[/quote]
The estimotes that I have run off of a watch battery (I believe CR2032). It looks like there are some companies that sell wall outlet ones that just plug in the wall plug in the room. They say the battery last 2 years but that is with their default settings. I used the estimotes application to adjust the proximity of the devices and the advertising interval. Supposedly, and I have see this work pretty well you can go as low of a distance as 5ft and work your way up from there. Not sure how the mailbox will work because it does need pretty close to line of sight in order for it to work, since it is just radio waves there are different objects that could block the signal. As for my setup in my home, I have them all set to 12ft broadcasting and sending a advertising signal at 50ms, which is as fast as it can advertise. I am sure this has reduced my life expectancy for the beacons but it is what I have had the best success with. As for the room to room issues, I will say that I have a drop ceiling in my basement, therefore there isn’t a lot blocking the signal and I do sometimes trip the basement switch with a fant signal seeping through the floor when I walk through the dining room. I am not here to say this technology will be that useful for home automation, but I am just trying to take advantage of the latest technologies offered and to see what ways they could potentially be implemented. My VeraLite has a lot of devices and when I started out didn’t research to see that I should have gone with the Vera3 for everything I was going to do and therefore I have issues with frequent reboots and some even occur at times that would make you think the iViri app is what is wrong but in fact it had to do with a reboot. If you are interested in this technology and how you could use it in your home the iViri app now supports it, but ultimately it comes down to how well apple is finding these beacons in the core location services and then performing the call backs to the apps that are waiting for region crossings. iViri takes a lot of heat for the failures and short comings of geofences, there are somethings that were oversight and are resolved in v1.3 where I basically took any of my logic out of the code and just handle the calls backs directly, that way I can confidently say it comes down to the users cell phone service and how close they are to towers. Since apple invested it’s money in other technologies other than NFC, ibeacons is that technology that they expect to take over so I am sure in future releases apple will have it down to a science and working great but iOS 7 was the first OS to even support it, so its just time to log bugs and wait for fixes.
Good to know info. At the vacation house I have a long steep driveway with an electronic gate up at the top to get into the yard (garages are all in the back). Currently using geofence (without being very stable) to open the gate when I get there. I was thinking of putting a beacon in the mailbox down at the street to signal me comming up the driveway to open the gate. You drive within feet of the mailbox. Are they outdoor proof? This is in Arizona and it will be 120 outside in the near future.
Good to know info. At the vacation house I have a long steep driveway with an electronic gate up at the top to get into the yard (garages are all in the back). Currently using geofence (without being very stable) to open the gate when I get there. I was thinking of putting a beacon in the mailbox down at the street to signal me comming up the driveway to open the gate. You drive within feet of the mailbox. Are they outdoor proof? This is in Arizona and it will be 120 outside in the near future.[/quote]
You should check out estimotes website (http://estimote.com/). From what I have read they are water proof and sealed components, however, if you have to change the battery it no longer is but its a new company and they (from what I have read) will send you new if your battery dies since currently they have no way to disassemble without basically destroying the units packaging. I am fairly new to this technology but I can see how this will change lives, especially with how cost effective they will become with more companies entering the market. So that should lead apple to make its reaction to this technology more stable and better off. I think if I was just designing for myself and not for the masses an app for this, I would have a few different things:
These are just ideas on changes I could make to the app
1.) Have a large geofence like 500m around your destination you want monitor for.
2.) Once that geofence is crossed (as the region crossing should happen well before you head down your street) have it activate the GPS in the background to monitoring until it is within a specific range of your home and then shut down the GPS and flip the switch.
This is potentially a change that I could make, but I would need some major feedback as there are users that are happy with the current behavior and it doesn’t drain the battery at all. Also it would only do this on the entrance of a geofence region, not many care when the exit occurs, and the exit seems highly more accurate than the entrance. This could be because the phone is still awake actively doing stuff like transferring off of your home wifi and onto your providers network, etc… which would keep the phone alive and doing stuff. Another thing I can say is if you wake your iDevice just by tapping the top power button it will scan the geofences setup right at that time. I know this gets away from “automation” but we are all at the mercy of the mobile core OS developers, no matter the platform!