This is part 2 in my Apartment Automation series. For part 1, Controlling an IR Air Conditioner, click here.
For me, the holy grail of home automation isn’t just being able to control lights with your smartphone. Connecting your lights to the internet opens up a ton of possibilities. Your smartphone is just one way to control them. The holy grail of home automation is removing the need to even control your devices at all.
When I watch a movie, I want my lights set a certain way. Seems simple enough. I watch everything on my Apple TV, so surely there should be a way to detect that and send the message along to HomeKit. In the past I’ve used a plugin for Plex that handled this quite well. The only downsides were that it was painstakingly tedious to program in the lighting settings, and it only worked in Plex. I figured the Apple TV must transmit its global play/pause state somehow, seeing as the Apple TV iOS app displays it. …
Ahem…is this thing on?
If you’ve followed me on Twitter at some point over the last five years, you know that I’m obsessed with home automation. And since I’ve recently moved into a new apartment, I figured it’d be fun to reboot my blog with a series on automating said new apartment. First up, controlling the non-smart air conditioners that came with the apartment.
Back in 2012, my first foray into home automation was back in college when I bought my first Arduino, a strip of WS2801 RGB LEDs, and wrote an iOS app to control them. These days I don’t like the idea of having to maintain and use multiple apps to control my devices, so I want everything to be controllable via HomeKit. …
This post is focused on iOS engineering and the learning curve behind understanding ReactiveCocoa and MVVM. This post was written by Evan Coleman, and was originally published on Timehop’s Blog.
When I walked into my first day of work at Timehop this past summer, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had just graduated from college and had spent my spare time during the school year doing contract work for them. This mainly consisted of fixing bugs and adding small features.
On that first day, I sat down with Chris and he briefed me on what was going on in the iOS world at Timehop. He told me about TimehopThree, which was meant to be a complete rewrite of the iOS app that would take full advantage of ReactiveCocoa and MVVM. I had heard of ReactiveCocoa before, but knew nothing about it. MVVM, on the other hand, I had never heard anything about that. He gave me a quick overview of what MVVM was and how it made more sense for our app than MVC. …
About
