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Community Highlights: 24th edition

by smart home

The 24th edition of the Home Assistant Community Highlights! Some interesting
things popped up around our community, which we thought was worth sharing.

Do you want to share something for the next edition?
Information on how to share.

./Klaas
Intern on Home Assistant Energy

Blueprint of the week

I think this situation is familiar to many parents: your children who get
out of bed too early and who you would like to learn when it is the right
time to get out of bed.

This week’s blueprint is that of koosvanw,
who created a blueprint for the above situation that works with a light that
can change color and where the brightness can also be adjusted. Try it out!
Read more about it on the community forum or install this
automation in your instance with a click on the My button!

Threedy card

Do you have a 3D printer and are you not quite sure how to display it in a
beautiful way in your Lovelace dashboard? Then try this card from
dangreco, which works well in combination
with octoprint.

ESPHome weather station

Have you always wanted to build a weather station in your garden? Then
try the ESPHome variant of hugokernel,
it is quite extensive with many measuring options.

Garage fingerprint

This week we also came across something cool that was shared on our subreddit
page. For example, you could open a garage door by means of geofencing from your
phone or with an NFC tag. But Nhminer has
tried another option, namely opening with a fingerprint sensor 😲

Do you want to know more about it? Then also check
this forum topic.

Got a tip for the next edition?

Have you seen (or made) something awesome, interesting, unique, amazing,
inspirational, unusual or funny, using Home Assistant?

Click here to send us your Community Highlight suggestion.

Also, don’t forget to share your creations with us via Social Media:

See you next edition!

Backpack-Expandable

Kabuto releases a larger version of its smart suitcase

by EuropeGadgetsStartups

Kabuto, the French startup that designs and sells smart suitcases, is releasing a new suitcase today. Called the Kabuto Trunk, this is the company’s biggest suitcase to date. Unlike smart suitcases from other brands, this isn’t just a suitcase with a battery in it.

In particular, there’s a fingerprint reader located at the top of the suitcase. You can save up to 10 different fingerprints. After that, it works pretty much like a fingerprint reader on a smartphone — you put your finger on the reader and it unlocks your suitcase.

In that case, it unlocks the zippers. If somebody else is using your suitcase or the battery is dead, you can also open the suitcase with a traditional key.

The Kabuto Trunk features a hard-shell design with a capacity of 95 liters. It has metal bearing wheels and real tires. Users can choose between two batteries — a 10,000mAh battery and a bigger 20,000mAh battery. Basically you have to choose between weight and battery capacity, as bigger batteries tend to be heavier.

Customers can also choose to buy a backpack that magnetically attaches to the suitcase. Designed with travel in mind, that backpack is expandable and can double in thickness from 9 liters to 18 liters.

Image Credits: Kabuto

The suitcase currently costs $629 and the backpack $299 — the company plans to raise prices once the Kickstarter campaign is over.

As always with Kabuto products, this isn’t a product for everyone. They tend to be more expensive than what you’d normally pay for a suitcase. But some people like to pack things in a very specific way so that important items remain available. The startup has previously raised $1 million (€900,000) from Frédéric Mazzella, Michel & Augustin, Bpifrance, Fabien Pierlot and others.

Image Credits: Kabuto

Huawei officially launches HarmonyOS for smartphones

by AndroidAppleAsiaBluetoothFacebookGadgetsHardwareInternet of ThingsMobileopen source softwareTCXiaomi

Think you’re living in a hyper-connected world? Huawei’s proprietary HarmonyOS wants to eliminate delays and gaps in user experience when you move from one device onto another by adding interoperability to all devices, regardless of the system that powers them.

Two years after Huawei was added to the U.S. entity list that banned the Chinese telecom giant from accessing U.S. technologies, including core chipsets and Android developer services from Google, Huawei’s alternative smartphone operating system was unveiled.

On Wednesday, Huawei officially launched its proprietary operating system HarmonyOS for mobile phones. The firm started building the operating system in 2016 and began letting developers create HarmonyOS-compatible applications for tablets, electric vehicles and smartwatches last September. Its flagship devices such as Mate 40 could upgrade to HarmonyOS starting Wednesday, with the operating system gradually rolling out on lower-end models in the coming quarters.

HarmonyOS is not meant to replace Android or iOS, Huawei said. Rather, its application is more far-reaching, powering not just phones and tablets but an increasing number of smart devices. To that end, Huawei has been trying to attract hardware and home appliance manufacturers to join its ecosystem.

To date, more than 500,000 developers are building applications based on HarmonyOS. It’s unclear whether Google, Facebook and other mainstream apps in the West are working on HarmonyOS versions.

Some Chinese tech firms have answered Huawei’s call. Smartphone maker Meizu hinted on its Weibo account that its smart devices might adopt HarmonyOS. Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi, which are much larger players than Meizu, are probably more reluctant to embrace a rival’s operating system.

Apple sales bounce back in China as Huawei loses smartphone crown

Huawei’s goal is to collapse all HarmonyOS-powered devices into one single control panel, which can, say, remotely pair the Bluetooth connections of headphones and a TV. A game that is played on a phone can be continued seamlessly on a tablet. A smart soymilk blender can customize a drink based on the health data gleaned from a user’s smartwatch.

Devices that aren’t already on HarmonyOS can also communicate with Huawei devices with a simple plug-in. Photos from a Windows-powered laptop can be saved directly onto a Huawei phone if the computer has the HarmonyOS plug-in installed. That raises the question of whether Android, or even iOS, could, one day, talk to HarmonyOS through a common language.

The HarmonyOS launch arrived days before Apple’s annual developer event scheduled for next week. A recent job posting from Apple mentioned a seemingly new concept, homeOS, which may have to do with Apple’s smart home strategy, as noted by MacRumors.

Huawei denied speculations that HarmonyOS is a derivative of Android OS and said no single line of code is identical to that of Android, though Wang Chenglu, president of Huawei Consumer Business Group’s software department, previously said in an interview that HarmonyOS had also used open-source codes from AOSP. A spokesperson for Huawei declined to say whether the operating system is based on Linux, the kernel that powers Android. 

Several tech giants have tried to introduce their own mobile operating systems, to no avail. Alibaba built AliOS based on Linux but has long stopped updating it. Samsungflirted with its own Tizen but the operating system is limited to powering a few Internet of Things, like smart TVs.

Huawei may have a better shot at drumming up developer interest compared to its predecessors. It’s still one of China’s largest smartphone brands despite losing a chunk of its market after the U.S. government cut it off from critical chip suppliers, which could hamper its ability to make cutting-edge phones. HarmonyOS also has a chance to create an alternative for developers who are disgruntled with Android, if Huawei is able to capture their needs.

The U.S. sanctions do not block Huawei from using Android’s open-source software, which major Chinese smartphone makers use to build their third-party Android operating system. But the ban was like a death knell for Huawei’s consumer markets overseas as its phones abroad lost access to Google Play services.

The article and headline were updated with more clarification on HarmonyOS. 

Huawei’s new OS isn’t an Android replacement… yet

US removes Xiaomi’s designation as a Communist Chinese military company

by AsiaGadgetsGovernmentUnited StatesXiaomi

Xiaomi, one of China’s high-profile tech firms that fell in the crosshairs of the Trump administration, has been removed from a U.S. government blacklist that designated it as a Communist Chinese military company.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has vacated the Department of Defense’s designation of Xiaomi as a CCMC in January, a document filed on May 25 shows.

In February, Xiaomi sued the U.S. government over its inclusion in the military blacklist. In March, the D.C. court granted Xiaomi a preliminary injunction against the DoD designation, which would have forbidden all U.S. persons from purchasing or possessing Xiaomi’s securities, saying the decision was “arbitrary and capricious.” The ruling was made to prevent “irreparable harm” to the Chinese phone maker.

Xiaomi has this to say about getting off the blacklist:

The Company is grateful for the trust and support of its global users, partners, employees and shareholders. The Company reiterates that it is an open, transparent, publicly traded, independently operated and managed corporation. The Company will continue to provide reliable consumer electronics products and services to users, and to relentlessly build amazing products with honest prices to let everyone in the world enjoy a better life through innovative technology.

Xiaomi’s domestic competitor Huawei is still struggling with its inclusion in the U.S. trade blacklist, which bans it from accessing critical U.S. technologies and has crippled its smartphone sales around the world.

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Trump administration adds Xiaomi to military blacklist

manipulathor

Deep Science: Robots, meet world

by Artificial IntelligenceGadgetsHardwareRoboticsScienceTC

Research papers come out far too frequently for anyone to read them all. That’s especially true in the field of machine learning, which now affects (and produces papers in) practically every industry and company. This column aims to collect some of the most relevant recent discoveries and papers — particularly in, but not limited to, artificial intelligence — and explain why they matter.

This edition, we have a lot of items concerned with the interface between AI or robotics and the real world. Of course most applications of this type of technology have real-world applications, but specifically this research is about the inevitable difficulties that occur due to limitations on either side of the real-virtual divide.

One issue that constantly comes up in robotics is how slow things actually go in the real world. Naturally some robots trained on certain tasks can do them with superhuman speed and agility, but for most that’s not the case. They need to check their observations against their virtual model of the world so frequently that tasks like picking up an item and putting it down can take minutes.

What’s especially frustrating about this is that the real world is the best place to train robots, since ultimately they’ll be operating in it. One approach to addressing this is by increasing the value of every hour of real-world testing you do, which is the goal of this project over at Google.

In a rather technical blog post the team describes the challenge of using and integrating data from multiple robots learning and performing multiple tasks. It’s complicated, but they talk about creating a unified process for assigning and evaluating tasks, and adjusting future assignments and evaluations based on that. More intuitively, they create a process by which success at task A improves the robots’ ability to do task B, even if they’re different.

Humans do it — knowing how to throw a ball well gives you a head start on throwing a dart, for instance. Making the most of valuable real-world training is important, and this shows there’s lots more optimization to do there.

Another approach is to improve the quality of simulations so they’re closer to what a robot will encounter when it takes its knowledge to the real world. That’s the goal of the Allen Institute for AI’s THOR training environment and its newest denizen, ManipulaTHOR.

Image Credits: Allen Institute

Simulators like THOR provide an analogue to the real world where an AI can learn basic knowledge like how to navigate a room to find a specific object — a surprisingly difficult task! Simulators balance the need for realism with the computational cost of providing it, and the result is a system where a robot agent can spend thousands of virtual “hours” trying things over and over with no need to plug them in, oil their joints and so on.

mokugo-team

Liquid Instruments raises $13.7M to bring its education-focused 8-in-1 engineering gadget to market

by EducationFundings & ExitsGadgetsHardwareRecent FundingScienceStartupsSTEMTC

Part of learning to be an engineer is understanding the tools you’ll have to work with — voltmeters, spectrum analyzers, things like that. But why use two, or eight for that matter, where one will do? The Moku:Go combines several commonly used tools into one compact package, saving room on your workbench or classroom while also providing a modern, software-configurable interface. Creator Liquid Instruments has just raised $13.7 million to bring this gadget to students and engineers everywhere.

Image Credits: Liquid Instruments

The idea behind Moku:Go is largely the same as the company’s previous product, the Moku:Lab. Using a standard input port, a set of FPGA-based tools perform the same kind of breakdowns and analyses of electrical signals as you would get in a larger or analog device. But being digital saves a lot of space that would normally go toward bulky analog components.

The Go takes this miniaturization further than the Lab, doing many of the same tasks at half the weight and with a few useful extra features. It’s intended for use in education or smaller engineering shops where space is at a premium. Combining eight tools into one is a major coup when your bench is also your desk and your file cabinet.

Those eight tools, by the way, are: waveform generator, arbitrary waveform generator, frequency response analyzer, logic analyzer/pattern generator, oscilloscope/voltmeter, PID controller, spectrum analyzer and data logger. It’s hard to say whether that really adds up to more or less than eight, but it’s definitely a lot to have in a package the size of a hardback book.

You access and configure them using a software interface rather than a bunch of knobs and dials — though let’s be clear, there are good arguments for both. When you’re teaching a bunch of young digital natives, however, a clean point-and-click interface is probably a plus. The UI is actually very attractive; you can see several examples by clicking the instruments on this page, but here’s an example of the waveform generator:

Image Credits: Liquid Instruments

Love those pastels.

The Moku:Go currently works with Macs and Windows but doesn’t have a mobile app yet. It integrates with Python, MATLAB and LabVIEW. Data goes over Wi-Fi.

Compared with the Moku:Lab, it has a few perks. A USB-C port instead of a mini, a magnetic power port, a 16-channel digital I/O, optional power supply of up to four channels and of course it’s half the size and weight. It compromises on a few things — no SD card slot and less bandwidth for its outputs, but if you need the range and precision of the more expensive tool, you probably need a lot of other stuff too.

Image Credits: Liquid Instruments

Since the smaller option also costs $500 to start (“a price comparable to a textbook”… yikes) compared with the big one’s $3,500, there’s major savings involved. And it’s definitely cheaper than buying all those instruments individually.

The Moku:Go is “targeted squarely at university education,” said Liquid Instruments VP of marketing Doug Phillips. “Professors are able to employ the device in the classroom and individuals, such as students and electronic engineering hobbyists, can experiment with it on their own time. Since its launch in March, the most common customer profile has been students purchasing the device at the direction of their university.”

About a hundred professors have signed on to use the device as part of their fall classes, and the company is working with other partners in universities around the world. “There is a real demand for portable, flexible systems that can handle the breadth of four years of curriculum,” Phillips said.

Production starts in June (samples are out to testers), the rigors and costs of which likely prompted the recent round of funding. The $13.7 million comes from existing investors Anzu Partners and ANU Connect Ventures, and new investors F1 Solutions and Moelis Australia’s Growth Capital Fund. It’s a convertible note “in advance of an anticipated Series B round in 2022,” Phillips said. It’s a larger amount than they intended to raise at first, and the note nature of the round is also not standard, but given the difficulties faced by hardware companies over the last year, some irregularities are probably to be expected.

No doubt the expected B round will depend considerably on the success of the Moku:Go’s launch and adoption. But this promising product looks as if it might be a commonplace item in thousands of classrooms a couple years from now.

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Apple Watch gets a motion-controlled cursor with ‘Assistive Touch’

by accessibilityAppleApple WatchGadgetsHardware

Tapping the tiny screen of the Apple Watch with precision has a certain level of fundamental difficulty, but for some people with disabilities it’s genuinely impossible. Apple has remedied this with a new mode called “Assistive Touch” that detects hand gestures to control a cursor and navigate that way.

The feature was announced as part of a collection of accessibility-focused additions across its products, but Assistive Touch seems like the one most likely to make a splash across the company’s user base.

It relies on the built-in gyroscope and accelerometer, as well as data from the heart rate sensor, to deduce the position of the wrist and hand. Don’t expect it to tell a peace sign from a metal sign just yet, but for now it detects “pinch” (touching the index finger to the thumb) and “clench” (make a loose fist), which can act as basic “next” and “confirm” actions. Incoming calls, for instance, can be quickly accepted with a clench.

Designing with accessibility in mind: a conversation

Most impressive, however, is the motion pointer. You can activate it either by selecting it in the Assistive Touch menu, or by shaking your wrist vigorously. It then detects the position of your hand as you move it around, allowing you to “swipe” by letting the cursor linger at the edge of the screen, or interact with things using a pinch or clench.

Needless to say this could be extremely helpful for anyone who only has the one hand available for interacting with the watch. And even for those who don’t strictly need it, the ability to keep one hand on the exercise machine, cane or whatever else while doing smartwatch things is surely an attractive possibility. (One wonders about the potential of this control method as a cursor for other platforms as well…)

Image Credits: Apple

Assistive Touch is only one of many accessibility updates Apple shared in this news release; other advances for the company’s platforms include:

  • SignTime, an ASL interpreter video call for Apple Store visits and support
  • Support for new hearing aids
  • Improved VoiceOver-based exploration of images
  • A built-in background noise generator (which I fully intend to use)
  • Replacement of certain buttons with non-verbal mouth noises (for people who have limited speech and mobility)
  • Memoji customizations for people with oxygen tubes, cochlear implants and soft helmets
  • Featured media in the App Store, Apple TV, Books and Maps apps from or geared toward people with disabilities

It’s all clustered around Global Accessibility Awareness Day, which is tomorrow, May 20th.

White House, dark mode: Biden admin refreshes presidency’s website, vows accessibility

material-you-google-io-2021

Everything Google announced at I/O today

by Artificial IntelligenceAugmented RealityFinanceGadgetsGoogleHardwareMediaMobilePrivacyTCTransportationWearables

This year’s I/O event from Google was heavy on the “we’re building something cool” and light on the “here’s something you can use or buy tomorrow.” But there were also some interesting surprises from the semi-live event held in and around the company’s Mountain View campus. Read on for all the interesting bits.

Xbox teams up with Tencent’s Honor of Kings maker TiMi Studios

by AsiaGadgetsGamingNintendoNintendo SwitchVirtual realityxbox

TiMi Studios, one of the world’s most lucrative game makers and part of Tencent’s gargantuan digital entertainment empire, said Thursday that it has struck a strategic partnership with Xbox.

The succinct announcement did not mention whether the tie-up is for content development or Xbox’s console distribution in China, but said more details will be unveiled for the “deep partnership” by the end of this year.

Established in 2008 within Tencent, TiMi is behind popular mobile titles such as Honor of Kings and Call of Duty Mobile. In 2020, Honor of Kings alone generated close to $2.5 billion in player spending, according to market research company SensorTower. In all, TiMi pocketed $10 billion in revenue last year, according to a report from Reuters citing people with knowledge.

The partnership could help TiMi build a name globally by converting its mobile titles into console plays for Microsoft’s Xbox. TiMi has been trying to strengthen its own brand and distinguish itself from other Tencent gaming clusters, such as its internal rival LightSpeed & Quantum Studio, which is known for PUBG Mobile.

6 investors on 2021’s mobile gaming trends and opportunities

TiMi operates a branch in Los Angeles and said in January 2020 that it planned to “triple” its headcount in North America, adding that building high-budget, high-quality AAA mobile games was core to its global strategy. There are clues in a recruitment notice posted recently by a TiMi employee: The unit is hiring developers for an upcoming AAA title that is benchmarked against the Oasis, a massively multiplayer online game that evolves into a virtual society in the fiction and film Ready Player One. Oasis is played via a virtual reality headset.

Xbox’s latest Series X and Series S are to debut in China imminently, though the launch doesn’t appear to be linked to the Tencent deal. Sony’s PlayStation 5 just hit the shelves in China in late April. Nintendo Switch distributes in China through a partnership with Tencent sealed in 2019.

Chinese console players often resort to grey markets for foreign editions because the list of Chinese titles approved by local authorities is tiny compared to what’s available outside the country. But these grey markets, both online and offline, are susceptible to ongoing clampdown. Most recently in March, product listings by multiple top sellers of imported console games vanished from Alibaba’s Taobao marketplace.

A trove of imported console games vanish from Chinese online stores