Home Control System Diagnostics
In the early days of developing our HCS we realised we need extensive activity logging, to understand what was happening in in our smart home and to gain maximum insight and learning. But the logs only provide an historical, "timeline" view of what has happened. To get a real-time "snapshot" of what is happening we realised we needed some real-time 'views' and set about developing a web-based diagnostics tool to meet our needs.
Note:
Our smart home diagnostics is used for investigation and for analysis. It is not designed to be a
dashboard or
user interface typically used by people in our home. These types of interfaces are covered under our
user interfaces research.
Our diagnostic 'views' are currently split into the following sections:
- Cameras
- Devices
- Sensors
- System
- External
Cameras
Allows a view of cameras in real-time and historical view of media captured.
Devices
Allows a view of state and other information on devices by object type:
- Appliances
- Blinds
- Curtains
- Fans
- Lighting
- Networked Devices
Sensors
Allows a view of state and other information on devices by object type:
- Binary
- Our binary sensors are sensors that report a state of On or Off, such as a float switch to indicate a tank is empty or full, or our twilight sensor.
- Beam
- All the beam break sensors.
- Contact
- All the other contact sensors but, not doors or windows, which are a unique type in their own right. Typically this includes things like our parcel store or storage boxes.
- Door
- Every door in our contextual smart home is connected. These are basically a special variant of normal contact sensors. A door can automatically update occupancy in two zones.
- Humidity
- All the humidity sensors.
- Percent
- This includes light level sensors and all our Smartisant Soil Moisture Level Sensor SML1 sensors.
- Momentary
- The momentary sensors include the many 'buttons' in our contextual smart home.
- Motion
- All the motion sensors including microwave motion sensors and PIR sensors.
- Numeric
- These are sensors that are represented by a number, for example: wind speed, UV index, gas meter reading, etc.
- Safety
- This includes CO sensorsflood sensors, heat sensors and smoke sensors.
- Temperature
- All the temperature sensors.
- Window
- All the window sensors. These are basically a special variant of normal contact sensors.
System
A view of all the key system functions and internal system features:
- Alarm
- Batteries
- Controllers
- Logs
- People
- Services
- Slaves
- Voltages
- Zones
- System Monitor
External
Visualisation
The diagnostics also allows us to visualise the data, to gain more insight and meaning from it. Typically this would be a graph showing values over time (day, week, month, etc.).
Reporting
The diagnostics also enables a full report to be displayed for each object modelled and every attribute associated with it. In addition we can request our @smartest_home tweets about each object.
