The Internet of Incompatible Things
Sep. 20th, 2015 01:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mjg59I have an Amazon Echo. I also have a LIFX Smart Bulb. The Echo can integrate with Philips Hue devices, letting you control your lights by voice. It has no integration with LIFX. Worse, the Echo developer program is fairly limited - while the device's built in code supports communicating with devices on your local network, the third party developer interface only allows you to make calls to remote sites[1]. It seemed like I was going to have to put up with either controlling my bedroom light by phone or actually getting out of bed to hit the switch.
Then I found this article describing the implementation of a bridge between the Echo and Belkin Wemo switches, cunningly called Fauxmo. The Echo already supports controlling Wemo switches, and the code in question simply implements enough of the Wemo API to convince the Echo that there's a bunch of Wemo switches on your network. When the Echo sends a command to them asking them to turn on or off, the code executes an arbitrary callback that integrates with whatever API you want.
This seemed like a good starting point. There's a free implementation of the LIFX bulb API called Lazylights, and with a quick bit of hacking I could use the Echo to turn my bulb on or off. But the Echo's Hue support also allows dimming of lights, and that seemed like a nice feature to have. Tcpdump showed that asking the Echo to look for Hue devices resulted in similar UPnP discovery requests to it looking for Wemo devices, so extending the Fauxmo code seemed plausible. I signed up for the Philips developer program and then discovered that the terms and conditions explicitly forbade using any information on their site to implement any kind of Hue-compatible endpoint. So that was out. Thankfully enough people have written their own Hue code at various points that I could figure out enough of the protocol by searching Github instead, and now I have a branch of Fauxmo that supports searching for LIFX bulbs and presenting them as Hues[2].
Running this on a machine on my local network is enough to keep the Echo happy, and I can now dim my bedroom light in addition to turning it on or off. But it demonstrates a somewhat awkward situation. Right now vendors have no real incentive to offer any kind of compatibility with each other. Instead they're all trying to define their own ecosystems with their own incompatible protocols with the aim of forcing users to continue buying from them. Worse, they attempt to restrict developers from implementing any kind of compatibility layers. The inevitable outcome is going to be either stacks of discarded devices speaking abandoned protocols or a cottage industry of developers writing bridge code and trying to avoid DMCA takedowns.
The dystopian future we're heading towards isn't Gibsonian giant megacorporations engaging in physical warfare, it's one where buying a new toaster means replacing all your lightbulbs or discovering that the code making your home alarm system work is now considered a copyright infringement. Is there a market where I can invest in IP lawyers?
[1] It also requires an additional phrase at the beginning of a request to indicate which third party app you want your query to go to, so it's much more clumsy to make those requests compared to using a built-in app.
[2] I only have one bulb, so as yet I haven't added any support for groups.
Then I found this article describing the implementation of a bridge between the Echo and Belkin Wemo switches, cunningly called Fauxmo. The Echo already supports controlling Wemo switches, and the code in question simply implements enough of the Wemo API to convince the Echo that there's a bunch of Wemo switches on your network. When the Echo sends a command to them asking them to turn on or off, the code executes an arbitrary callback that integrates with whatever API you want.
This seemed like a good starting point. There's a free implementation of the LIFX bulb API called Lazylights, and with a quick bit of hacking I could use the Echo to turn my bulb on or off. But the Echo's Hue support also allows dimming of lights, and that seemed like a nice feature to have. Tcpdump showed that asking the Echo to look for Hue devices resulted in similar UPnP discovery requests to it looking for Wemo devices, so extending the Fauxmo code seemed plausible. I signed up for the Philips developer program and then discovered that the terms and conditions explicitly forbade using any information on their site to implement any kind of Hue-compatible endpoint. So that was out. Thankfully enough people have written their own Hue code at various points that I could figure out enough of the protocol by searching Github instead, and now I have a branch of Fauxmo that supports searching for LIFX bulbs and presenting them as Hues[2].
Running this on a machine on my local network is enough to keep the Echo happy, and I can now dim my bedroom light in addition to turning it on or off. But it demonstrates a somewhat awkward situation. Right now vendors have no real incentive to offer any kind of compatibility with each other. Instead they're all trying to define their own ecosystems with their own incompatible protocols with the aim of forcing users to continue buying from them. Worse, they attempt to restrict developers from implementing any kind of compatibility layers. The inevitable outcome is going to be either stacks of discarded devices speaking abandoned protocols or a cottage industry of developers writing bridge code and trying to avoid DMCA takedowns.
The dystopian future we're heading towards isn't Gibsonian giant megacorporations engaging in physical warfare, it's one where buying a new toaster means replacing all your lightbulbs or discovering that the code making your home alarm system work is now considered a copyright infringement. Is there a market where I can invest in IP lawyers?
[1] It also requires an additional phrase at the beginning of a request to indicate which third party app you want your query to go to, so it's much more clumsy to make those requests compared to using a built-in app.
[2] I only have one bulb, so as yet I haven't added any support for groups.
Dystopian future
Date: 2015-10-01 04:24 am (UTC)...it's one where buying a new toaster means replacing all your lightbulbs...
I think in such a scenario it's far more likely that the bulk of people are going to say "screw it, I'm going to toast my bread the old-fashioned way, get back to me when this rolling fuckup is over".
If the companies involved want to build a bigger home automation market, they're going to have to wake up to the fact that they need a great interoperability story.