Introduction and first post

    This blog is about IoT (Internet-of-Things) in the home, my home.

   Tech pervades the modern hoome, and the presence of technology will increase and the role become increasingly important.

   Currently, I have a solar power station that incorporates high tech, and a home entertainment center that also incorporates high technology. But details on those can be foind in my blogs on those subjects.

   A new addition is the installation, and learning/programming of the Philips HUE system. 

   That system consists of a 'bridge', similar to a hub in concept, and accessory units, e.g. lights, temperature sensors, light sensors, etc..My use specifically,oinvolves the HUE lights. I have seven throughout my home and I recently learned enough about them to put them to good use.

   The lights are color variable. The lights' hue (color), lightness/value, and saturation (purity/intenity), temperature (Kellvin) are variable and can be adjusted using freely available apps for phones and desktop/laptop computers.

   The HUE system is also accessible by experience and skilled computer programmers, using the Windows or Linux command line. The bridge has a webpage that includes debugging options for light scenarios, and can be accessed uisng a web browser.

   The same commands can be issued on the command line using the cURL HTTP request commands GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE.

   The bridge has a lot of resources built in, including scheduling lights and grouping lights. Chosen lights can be grouped and tuned on automatically on a user determined schedule. This I've done for my porch light. Turn on at dusk, and off at dawn. I use an app on my phone to turn lights on/off through out the day/night. Regular wall switches still work.

   My current project involves creating a 'geofence' with my system. A geofence is an invisible boundary that, when crossed, triggers some sort of an event. In my case, I want lights to come on when I arrive home at night.

   I've examined the possibilities. The most likely is purchasing an Apple TV streamer (similar to a Roku) and use that to connect to the Apple Homekit app on my phone. I may need to install 'Home Assistant' or 'Home Bridge' software to access the geofence programming from my laptop.

   I have been toying with using an ESP8266 as trigger. Different sketches (programs)  can scan the airwaves for MAC address, RSSIs, SSIDs, all of which can be used to trigger the lights. But all have the same limitation of uncontrolled output, save one, the RSSI (signal strength). 

   The trigger occurs whenever my phone opens. And as most know, phones go iinto a 'sleep' state when not in use and may 'wake' by simply moving the phone around. The software program would need to be set and reset each time used.

   Monitoring the phones RSSI will in,dicate the closeness of the phoone. This can be used to establish a trend that determines 'Arrival' and 'Departure.' This combined with SSID/MAC scanning are the second most likely possibilities.

   As I said, the most likely possibility is the installation and use of a recent model of an  Apple TV 4K streamer.

   Since this was written, I've added my back porch to the dusk/dawn porch light schedule.


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