Saturday, July 23, 2016

Multi-Featured iPad Wall Mount for Home Automation

Disclaimer: I make no promises whatsoever that this does anything useful and anything you do with these instructions are your own decision.  I take no responsibility for any injuries (including death!), property damage, wasted money, wasted time or any other negative consequences from your reading or acting on this -- use at your own risk!

Overview

I describe a multi-featured iPad Wall-Mount designed for use as a home automation user interface. The mount provides power and wired networking to the tablet, digital audio extraction from the tablet, and four customizable buttons.  It also provides an auto-on feature to smartly and automatically turn on the tablet’s display when a user approaches its location and turns it off after they have left.  The mount can be built for about $200 worth of parts and requires light general electronics skill to assemble. I first built this in January of 2016 and have improved it through a half dozen iterations since then.

Problem Statement

Contemporary tablet wall mounts solve very few of the problems facing home automation user interfaces.  Among those problems are:


  • P1: Tablets rely on WiFi which is inferior to a hard-wired connection for a permanently wall-mounted tablet.
  • P2: Tablets often are used to control a separate music player instead of directly providing their digital audio output to an amplifier for use directly as a music source.
  • P3: Tablets generally have no physical customizable buttons
  • P4: Tablets manage power by turning off their display when not in use, focusing on direct user interaction with the screen to define use and do not automatically turn on when a user is about to engage with the tablet.
  • P5: Tablets require power to remain charged and functional.


Generally, most permanent tablet wall mounts only address the last of these problems, yet all are important.  My solution addresses all five of these problems using a custom 3D-printed frame, various off-the-shelf components that get hidden in the wall behind the tablet, and light general electronics skill to assemble.

Design and Key Insights

Solution #1: Support wired ethernet
Wireless networking is great for a tablet on the move, but when it’s stationary, the combination of lower reliability, wasted wireless bandwidth, and unnecessary RF interference make using a wireless connection unsatisfactory.
More recent versions of iOS support wired Ethernet networking.  You simply must use USB OTG (on-the-go) so that the iPad can work as a USB host (rather than client).  The Apple Lightning-to-USB Camera adapter is an OTG adapter for the iPad that duplicates the Lightning input (to provide power to the client device and the iPad) and provides a USB jack for devices.  The Apple USB Network Adapter plugs into that USB jack and receives an RJ45 plug connected to a network switch, and the iPad will use that Ethernet port for connectivity.


Solution #2: Extract Digital Audio
Oftentimes a home-automation tablet is used to control a separate music player such as a Sonos or Squeezebox (via iPeng or similar).  Generally, the best player interfaces are those that are native to the software outputting music directly on the phone or tablet, so it’s a shame to not be able to harness that output audio in its highest-quality digital form.


Recent versions of iOS also support external audio devices.  That same OTG USB port can be used to an audio adapter that has a variety of features.  I like the Muse USB DAC because it has an Coax and Optical Digital S/PDIF output and RCA analog outputs.  It’s then easy to use a pair of wires from a CAT6 cable to carry the electrical (not the optical) S/PDIF output back to a receiver to drive speakers or distribute the audio signal.


Solution #3: Add customizable Buttons
For issuing a quick command at a wall switch, a physical button that can be customized to do anything is hard to beat.


Arbitrary physical buttons are a favorite IoT project and are straightforward to set up once you decide how you want them to signal the action when they’re pressed.  For this mount, I simply provide a layout for four momentary switches, and wire them either a) to digital inputs of a micro-controller and program the microcontroller to make configurable HTTP requests when each button is pressed; or b) wire them directly to relays to provide dry contact inputs to a separate controller that then accepts the contact closure as a trigger for an arbitrary action in its universe.


Solution #4: Turn the Display On When a User Approaches It
If an iPad screen is dark on a conventional wall mount and a user wishes to issue a command to the currently-running app, they first must wake the tablet up by touching the screen and perform the relevant action in that app.  If the currently-running app is, for example, virtual switches for the current room’s lights or an audio play where the user might have a simple desire such as pausing or restarting music, the single extra click to wake up the tablet more than doubles the interaction time.  This is unacceptable in a high-use environment, as is leaving the display on all the time (distracting plus energy inefficient).


The foundations of my approach to this problem are: 1) An infrared distance sensor with a range of 20-150cm that reports the distance as an analog voltage; and 2) a pair of magnets -- one of which is physically moved by a servo -- that emulate an iPad cover and tickle the iPad’s magnetic sensors to turn the display on and off just like the manual covers do.  The distance sensor is connected to an analog input of a Particle photon microcontroller, and the microcontroller is coded to watch for objects under a certain distance away.  When something is close, it assumes a user has approached the tablet and triggers the servo to move one of the permanent magnets away from the home key on the iPad thus deactivating the second magnetic sensor and turns the iPad on (when both magnetic sensors on the iPad sense magnets -- like they do when the iPad’s cover is on) the iPad display goes off.


(There are several alternative possibilities to this solution that I explain in alternative designs, later.)


Solution #5: Provide Power to the Tablet
This is straightforward and I simply use a passive POE (power-over-ethernet) solution to power the powered USB hub and then plug the lightning connector that comes with the iPad into the hub and into the tablet or Lightning-to-Camera USB Adapter used for solving Problems #1 and #2.  There’s some modest trickery in ensuring that the Apple device will take the charge, but when you’re just trying to trickle-charge the iPad on the wall, many solutions suffice.


All of these solutions must, of course, be embedded in an attractive and functional mount that actually holds the iPad and the components necessary to interact with the iPad (e.g., cable management, mounting the distance sensor, servo, magnets, and buttons, etc.). I designed this part in Sketchup and 3D-printed it using Shapeways’ service.  My mount focuses on the bottom-left corner of the mount so that it fits inside of a 18cm x 10cm x 2cm bounding box which accelerates the speed of delivery from Shapeways and reduces its cost during prototyping.

Parts List (BOM) for the Wall Mount

My Custom 3D Printable iPad Mini Mount Frame
Price: ~$50 to print in strong and flexible plastic from Shapeways


Price: $39


Price: $28


Price: $20


Price: $24


Price: $17


Price: $19


(optional if you need contact-closures for the buttons - $30)


Price: $4


Price: $16


Price: $4


Price: $12 each = $24


Price: $8 for 25 (so <$1 for the two you need)


Price: $6 for 20 (so $1.20 for the four you need)


Price: $5


Thin paperclip, glue, 22 gauge solid patch wire, RCA audio cable


Sketchup Model



Front View:


Back View:


The Circuit

Using a Particle Photon microcontroller, the circuit is straightforward.  We wire D1, D2, D3, and D4 to the momentary contacts (i.e., the pushbuttons).  We wire the IR distance sensor to analog input A0. Finally, we wire the pulse output for the servo motor from analog output A4, one of the pins that supports PWM output and the servo API.  See the Breadboard and circuit views that I drew using Fritzing.

Breadboard View    

Schematic View

Assembly Instructions

After printing out the 3D model, assembly is a simple matter and takes about 30-40 minutes (probably allocated 2-3x for this the first time you try):


  1. Attach the servo bar to the top of the servo, bend a small paperclip into a right angle and attach it to the servo (see the finished prototype photos).
  2. Push the four pushbuttons through the opening in the mount and glue the bottoms of the buttons to mount.
  3. Solder the buttons to the power and D1 through D4 (note that the prototype photos only show one button soldered -- I didn’t bother connecting all 4 when I took the photo).
  4. Assemble a mini breadboard with the circuit including the Particle Photon microcontroller and connect the IR sensor and the servo wires to the breadboard.
  5. Connect the lightning port of the iPad to a digital camera adapter (use a lightning extension cable if you prefer).  Plug another lightning cable into the digital camera adapter to power the adapter (and charge the iPad Mini), plug the other end into the 4-port powered hub.
  6. Plug the digital audio USB adapter into the hub, connect the S/PDIF output of the adapter to the appropriate wires on the RJ45 screw connector.
  7. Plug the Apple USB ethernet adapter into the hub, and plug a networking ethernet cable into the RJ45 jack on the USB ethernet adapter (the other end goes in your networking router/switch).
  8. Connect the +5V and GND power wires from the RJ45 screw connector to the power connectors on the powered USB hub and also to the + and - on the breadboard.
  9. Glue the one fixed magnet into the upper/higher magnet location in the mount, put the second, moving, magnet into the lower magnet location where it can slide around and put the other end of the paperclip through the hole from the back of the mount.

Early Prototype Photos



Finished Prototype Photos and Video

Alternative Designs

In this section I explain a couple alternative approaches that I considered and either discarded or might explore further.


Turning on the iPad screen
My first design used an electromagnet that either is activated (to turn the display off) or deactivated (to turn the display on) instead of a permanent magnet moved by a servo.  The flaw with that design is that the solenoid required about 2 watts of power from behind the tablet to trigger its magnetic sensor. Drawing 2 watts in order to keep a display turned off seems unacceptable, hence the newer design using two permanent magnets and a servo.


Another alternative design worth exploring further is simply interrupting the charging current to the iPad and then reinstating it.  iPads appear to turn on their display when plugged in, so this is also an easy solution to turning the screen on.  However, the screen won’t turn off until it times out per your display settings.  This approach may work well with a short timeout for turning the display off.


Sensing a User in front of the screen
I didn’t explore the alternatives for this much in designing this iPad mount because I had some experience with different approaches from an earlier project where I designed and built a directional motion sensor for counting the number of people in a room with a single doorway for entry and exit.  

The sensor choices worthy of contemplating are: 1) Passive infrared (PIR); 2) Ultrasonic; and 3) IR Laser.  


The disadvantage of PIR is that it’s hard to tune distance and far away larger heat footprints look identical to smaller up-close heat masses.  PIR is great for its low power and completely passive nature.  Note that for Android tablets, it’s possible to configure a motion detection application that uses the (visual spectrum) front-facing camera and then uses Tasker to turn on the display.  Apple’s more limited power-user API precludes this approach.  Using simple motion detection on the camera is flawed in similar ways to PIR, but a more heavyweight facial-recognizer would likely reduce false positives (at the expense of computational and energy expense.


Ultrasonic has a number of great properties including wider visibility and accurate distance measurement, but depending on the  frequency, the sound may bother pets and more importantly, multiple uncoordinated ultrasonic sensors within earshot results in bad readings.  See the Ultrasonic Doorjamb for more of a discussion of this issue (which I only found after doing my doorjamb sensor that I ultimately switched to using IR laser).


Those shortcomings ultimately led me to use an IR laser sensor.  One downside that is rumored that I’ve not encountered is the worry that it can confuse IR receivers on electronics and interfere with IR cameras.

Next Steps

I’d love to see a consumer electronics company pick up on some of these ideas and make a powerful and flexible wall mount using these ideas.  I’m happy to be contacted by folks interested in productionizing this.


I’m still slightly partial to tablet-stands for tablets and may turn this more into a tablet-stand to place in a wired display shelf rather than mounted on the wall.


If the push buttons on the mount are not of interest or do not need to be labelled, the mount could shrink horizontally by mounting the distance sensor vertically and using a right-angle Lightning connector.  In particular, that would be easier if making a full-height frame which would allow more vertically room for the sensor.  (Thanks to Eric Badros for that observation.)

Thursday, January 7, 2016

Meet Alexa, the Amazon Echo - New Features for Home Automation

In early January 2015, I received the Amazon Echo. I'm always curious about new consumer electronics devices, and this looked to be something pretty different.  It purported to be a music player (competing with Sonos and many others, it seemed) but also announced voice recognition, natural language understanding, and interactive question answering capabilities that put it in a different category.

When the device did arrive, I was pleasantly surprised.  In particular, it's a good quality single-channel bookshelf speaker: it can pair with a bluetooth device and act as a speaker for your phone or iPad as well as play music from your personal music collection or Amazon Prime Music or several other online music catalogs.  But more importantly, it has a wicked-good array of microphones that pick up your voice commands after saying the hotword "Alexa" or "Amazon".  I'd been trying lots of microphone solutions to integrate voice into my home automation system, and back in 2010 gave up on open-air speech solutions, relenting after configuring Skype as a whole house microphone which requires speaking into a phone or iPod Touch.  The Echo microphones coupled with their voice recognition engine works beautifully from across the room even with some significant background noise.  Off the shelf, you can ask it about the weather, sports scores, to play music or a specific song, and lots more.  Everything you say shows up in a companion app on your phone that also lets you interact with some of the features via a classical small-screen user-interface.

Jump ahead a couple months and Amazon released the Echo SDK which made it possible to do integrations as extensions to the grammar Amazon provided.  Even the earliest versions of the SDK were sufficiently solid that I was able to code an integration into Homeseer/Rover in a short afternoon, so now we can say, e.g., "Alexa, ask house to turn fireplace lights on" and exactly that happens.  It understands various devices, events, and scenes given the set of sample utterances I auto-generate from metadata of my home control software.  Sidenote: I use AWS Lambda as the execution platform for the code -- I love not needing an always-running server to handle this computationally-simple and infrequently executed actions.

But lots is missing...

The Amazon Echo is already a compelling gadget, and because it's off to a great start, I realized that it could be an important component in the whole-house automation system I'm working on for a new home we're building now.   Here's my list of improvements to the hardware and software for the Echo that will make the Echo's successor be able to serve among the underpinnings of any smart home.

Whole House Audio Support

The Echo could take a play from the playbook of Sonos and enable two Echos to work as a stereo pair, or perhaps pair with a speaker-only companion that can be the second speaker in a pair.  For lots of folks, though, what would be better is simply enabling digital-audio output from the single Echo itself.  The on-board mono speaker is great for talking back to the user, but for any at-length music listening experience, you really want to use an amp or receiver with your preferred speakers.  Ideally the digital-audio would be a coax out (not optical) since the coax digital plays nicer with inexpensive baluns (gadgets on both ends that let you use the copper on a CAT5/6 cable to transmit signals other than ethernet) for a centrally-wired whole house audio system.  The Echo should still turned down the music when it hears the hotword since that's an essential feature to being able to control the music after its started.

In addition to wired digital audio-out, I'd love to see the Echo pair with other bluetooth devices as a music player (as opposed to as a speaker).  I.e., to support the music being played by the Echo to be transmitted via Bluetooth (ideally with the aptX low-latency codec) to a bluetooth receiver connected to your preferred speaker system.

An alternative to having Echo drive the music itself is to integrate Echo as a controller for SqueezeBox or Sonos music systems.  Those systems are already in place in many houses driving speakers as desired, but don't have good voice integration.  Asking "Alexa, play One by U2" (a tough sentence to parse for sure) should queue up that song on the SqueezePlayer serving the same room as the Alexa.

Echo App Improvements

The companion Echo app on the phone/tablet also needs to be improved to be competitive with the other music apps out there.  In particular, it needs to 1) start up in less than 1.5 seconds -- right now on a LG G4, I wait 10 seconds or more to do anything with the app; 2) integrate with Android Wear for pausing, volume changing, and confirmation of what you just said coupled to Undo functionality; 3) support multiple Echos including switching which one you're controlling.

I'd also like to see the Echo app have a display mode where it's reporting about what's happening on the echo in that room.  This mode would be useful for mounted tablets near each Echo for when voice control isn't sufficient or you just want to know what song is playing, pause it, change the volume, or whatever.

Even better is for the Echo to be able to pair to a tablet as its display partner to support multi-modal interfaces rather than just having the tablet (or phone) reporting its status.  For example, the voice command "Alexa, buy tickets to The Force Awakens" is best served by a continued interaction on a screen rather than reading off a list of possible venues, show times, and viewing options.  If a screen isn't available, the more tedious voice interface could continue, but by using a touch screen in collaboration with voice commands, the interaction becomes much more natural allowing a click or a response like "The first one looks good" to finalize the purchase.


Multiple Echo Support

One can easily imagine having an Echo in each room of the house, enabling music to follow you around the house (based on Bluetooth beacons or another signal identifying your location).  An important part of this is enabling micro-location awareness of each of the Echos so that they know how they relate to other devices you wish to control.  For example, in my bedroom saying "Ask house to turn the lights on" should have a different affect than in the living room: unqualified device descriptions need to use the context of the room to disambiguate.  (And fully-qualified device names should work anywhere: "Ask house to turn the master bedroom ceiling lights off" should work from anywhere in the house.)

Person Identification

Related to multiple Echos and having per-room context is having per-person context.  Minimally, certain functionality should be able to be limited to certain speakers (perhaps with an override code word when the voice is a close match but not close enough?)  For example, "Alexa, disarm the security system" should do just that but only if a recognized voice issues the command (and perhaps only if a camera near the entrance also confirms facial identification of a household member).

Voice Notifications

Another useful feature is enabling push voice notifications to an Echo.  If my garage door is open for more than 15 minutes, I have tablets in my house that are running my automation control software report "Garage door is open!"  Ideally such notifications could be pushed to any/all of the Echos in a house, and have each local Echo support do-not-disturb functionality to block or delay those notifications from a specific room.

More Hotwords

Having just two hotwords is somewhat limiting (especially since my daughter's name is Alexis -- we can't use Alexa as the hotword, and the word Amazon comes up in our daily conversation too often). It would also be great if some hotwords could tie directly into a skill so instead of saying "Alexa, ask house to turn lights off" one could say "House, turn lights off" where "House" replaces "Alexa, ask house".  Probably having two or three such skill-tied hotwords would make a significant practical difference for high-use skills.  Note also that this approach sidesteps the more complex goal of extending the core grammar with developer-defined utterances -- that seems challenging to do in a scalable way across multiple third-party providers of skills.

Better Control of other Devices

There are already a handful of integrations of the Echo with other device ecosystems (e.g., with SmartThingswith IFTTT), but I'd love to see the Echo just have better support natively for various IP-controllable devices like TiVos, HDTVs, etc.  SimpleControl (formerly Roomie Remote) does a fantastic job with a massive library of controllable devices (including support for IR blasters for older components), and Echo should be able to control the same class of gadgets that don't require new antennas, protocols, or additional hardware support.  If they really want to play in the smart home hub space, adding ZWave (my favorite right now), Zigbee, Weave, Bluetooth mesh, etc., support would be pretty useful.

Conclusion

I'm hopeful that the next generation Echo will have some set of these features, and certainly others from the clearly insightful forward-thinking team that came up with v1.  I can't wait!