The Bubbles of Radio

I wanted to share this wonderful image which my colleague Amyas found - a beautiful visualisation of different radio technologies. Click on the picture to find out more...

Can we avoid a "lights out" scenario?

I went to a fascinating Cambridge Energy Forum meeting last week – around 100 people in the Cambridge Union debating chambers. Great mix of entrepreneurs, academics and energy businesspeople present, and the debate was chaired by Prof Ian Fells. The purpose of the evening was to kick-off of a 6-month project to thrash out an energy policy to present to the government. This will be tracked online with a wiki.

There were 3 short talks followed by debate:

1) Prof Fells has just co-authored a paper called “A Pragmatic Energy Policy for the UK”, with Candida Whitmill, who used to work for the DTI on energy. The thrust of the paper is that the lights will go out in the UK in 2014 (specifically, electricity supply will no-longer be able to meet demand), such is the huge hole we have got into due to the lack of new power station build over the past 10 years. It’s too late now even to build new power stations. Therefore forget climate change, energy security is a much more pressing problem.

2) The Financial Times' environmental correspondent Fiona Harvey then countered, saying that some of the assumptions were pessimistic, and that it is still possible to address energy security and climate change together.

3) Then Prof David Mackay, a well-known Cambridge mathematician (and founder of startups including MetaFAQ), presented his plan for getting the UK to carbon neutrality by 2050, avoiding an energy crisis along the way. This was really fun, gazillions of numbers, and he’s written a book which is free online called “Sustainable Energy, without the Hot Air”. From memory:

a. Total energy requirements of the UK now 250GW

b. Convert all transport to electric

c. Knock down majority of old houses, since they are impossible to make energy efficient

d. Convert all home heating to airsource heatpumps (driven by electricity)

e. Build lots of nuclear, and lots of diverse electricity generation sources, from tidal and wind, and massive PV plants covering most of Libya and Algeria, delivering electricity into Europe (you lose 10% per 1000km in high voltage distribution).

f. Avoid all microgeneration. Wind turbines are ineffectual, CHP is much less carbon-efficient than heat-pumps, and even if we covered every rooftop in the UK, PV could only supply 5% (?) of our needs

g. To sustain a home’s energy need using wood burning, each home would need an area 20 times the size of the home’s footprint.

h. Prof MacKay lives in a Victorian home, and he has already reduced his energy consumption by more than 50%, by becoming very aware of where energy is going.

i. 4m people in UK are in fuel poverty today, defined as spending more than 10% of household income on energy. Will be 6m by 2010.

Everything I heard reinforces the view that we need to tackle the energy crisis in many ways simultaneously, and in particular that better management of domestic energy consumption can make a real difference, quickly.

Solar Air Heating in the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

We’ve considered installing a solar-thermal hot water heating system at home - the rear roof of our house faces south-west which would be ideal. But we’ve been put-off by the capital cost and disruption, and also by the realisation that hot-water-heating is only a relatively small part of our total energy bill – which is dominated, in winter at least, by space-heating.

Because we have small children, our house is usually occupied even during the daytime, so in the Winter we have to set our “programmer” (timer) so that our central-heating is “on” for most of the day. In Summer we can of course turn our central-heating off completely. But Spring and Autumn are interesting seasons, because the outside air temperature varies unpredictably from balmy to freezing (so sometimes the heating is needed and sometimes not), and yet it is often sunny.

On the rear of our house we have a conservatory, which gets very warm when the sun shines. My wife realised that throwing-open the doors between the house and the conservatory on warm days provides a very effective way to air-heat the house – with no capital outlay. 

AlertMe makes this effect very visible, and shows us how to optimise it. The chart below shows a week earlier this month. All the inside rooms are averaged-together, and on 4 of the 7 days there is a significant proportion of the day when the conservatory is considerably hotter than the house. 

 

If we zoom-in and display the "typical day" from this data, we see that for about 6 hours of the day our conservatory can on average provide useful heating of our home, and we should open the doors at 11am and close them at 5pm.

EZDC

Back in June we presented two talks at the second European ZigBee Developers Conference, in Munich. The two talks were on our experiences developing the first consumer ZigBee product and on how designers can make their ZigBee products easy to set up, without sacrificing security or interoperability.

It was exciting to see so many people working on ZigBee products - there were some great new enhancements on display including super-low-power designs, polarisation diversity antennae, and 868MHz modules, and we spoke to lots of people using ZigBee in new applications, including agricultural monitors, a lift manufacturer, and domestic energy monitors.

We're always happy to tell people how happy we are with ZigBee - the more companies we can persuade to ZigBify their products, the more devices we'll potentially be able to talk to!

Automated Home podcast out

Automated Home blogger Mark McCall has published an interview with AlertMe co-founder and director Pilgrim Beart and design engineer Amyas Phillips. In it he asks about how AlertMe came to be, our experiences with ZigBee and our plans for the future, plus we both get to recommend favourite pieces of gadgetry at the end.

You can listen online or get the podcast on itunes.

If you enjoy that (or maybe if you want to listen to someone else!) check out Mark's Top 10 Tech Podcasts as well.

Alertme more secure than banks

Our web security guru Steve has been getting all excited about a new website called TLS Report. Its already a massive hit amongst web administrators, now we think its time to share it with our blog readers too!

TLS Report tests the security of supposedly secure web services and gives them a grade and a score. The kind of security it tests is cryptographic, basically how hard it would be for an evesdropper to get hold of confidential information passing between your web browser and a website. That's different to other kinds of security, like not using the same password everywhere and not telling everyone that you collect diamonds as a hobby, but it is the basis for providing secure web services where you know that the website on the other end is the real deal, and that nobody in between you and the website can read what you're saying to each other.

TLS is actually the name of a protocol (Transport Layer Security) which browsers use to set up secure connections to websites. The first part of the protocol's job is to check that the website is really who it claims to be, and not a fraudulent phishing site (what's phishing?). This is done by checking the sites' certificates. To properly understand certificates, you need to understand something about how public key cryptography works, but basically they're digitally-signed documents from people we definitely trust saying "I know this website, and I say you can trust them too". If they check out, your browser can be sure this site is who it says it is. It is good practice to renew certificates regularly.

The next part of the protocol lets your browser agree with the secure website's server what kind of security to use - specifically what cryptographic cipher to use (what's a cipher?) and how to exchange keys (what's a key?). Most browsers support a variety of different ciphers and key exchange mechanisms, often including old and out of date ones which are no longer considered secure. Properly secure websites shouldn't offer to use these antiquated methods.

TLS Report checks the freshness and security of a sites' certificates, how up-to-date the ciphers and key exchange mechanisms are, whether the version of the TLS protocol itself is up to date, and whether the site meets the minimum requirements for some payments-related security standards. Then it gives the site a score.

Secure.alertme.com, where Alertme customers log in to their systems, ranks joint 3rd in the roll of honour with a grade A and a score of 82. Shop.alertme.com does equally well.

Is that good? Yes it is! Compare our score with some online banking web sites:

• LloydsTSB (online.lloydstsb.co.uk) - score B 78
• HSBC (www.hsbc.co.uk) - score C 64
• Barclays (ibank.barclays.co.uk) - score C 67
• Natwest (www.nwolb.com) - score C 61
• RBS (www.rbs.co.uk) - score D 54

According to TLS Report, Alertme is better than all of them! (as of June 17th 2008 anyway)

There's some debate as to how TLS Report awards its grades, and the banks are sure to improve - that's really the point of TLS Report - but congratulations to Steve and his team!

June newsletter out today!

If you're not on our mailing list already, read the latest AlertMe newsletter online here.

To subscribe, just send a blank email to friends@whenineedtoknow.com with the word 'subscribe' in the subject line.

Alertme comes out top in MSN.com review

MSN technology columnist Rob Clymo reviewed AlertMe against another system, and handed the laurels to us!

We've worked very hard on good design and ease of use, so we were especially pleased that Rob picked out those features for special praise:

"AlertMe wins the prize for idiot-proof set-up and installation."

"The component parts have been fabulously designed and look like a family of iPod peripherals in their brilliant white plastic finish."

Read the full review Beating the Burglars on MSN.com.

New features now available!

We've been working hard since our launch to bring you new features and a better AlertMe experience. Now we're delighted to announce that version 1.2 of the Alertme software is ready, and available as a free upgrade to all our customers.


So what's new?

'At Home' and 'Away' are now joined by 'Night Mode', a new mode for you to use when you're at home but want to protect unoccupied parts of your home. A new Lamp service lets you choose what you want each lamp to do when you are At Home, Away or in Night Mode. Keyfobs are now automatically detected when they leave or come back home, and you can set up Presence alerts to let you know by SMS or email when someone comes home, goes out or both. There is a new Voice of AlertMe to welcome you back to your home (and tell your intruders to go away).

We've also made lots of useful improvements:

Battery Life of battery-powered accessories is improved to between 18 months and 3 years, depending on the accessory. We now tell you the Causes of Alerts - when an Alarm goes off, we tell you why. The window/door sensor icons on the Accessories page now show you whether the corresponding door or window is open or closed. When an intruder alert has occurred, the hub now continues to sound the alarm until the alert is cleared by a keyfob or remotely via SMS or the website. myHistory now contains more information and events for you to browse and enjoy, and if you click on any accessory in the Accessories page a detailed information pane will appear. You can now delete sensors from your system. Finally, SMS control allows you to control and monitor your home via SMS text message on your mobile phone.

You can download a PDF of the full release notes here.

Changing faces

Laura James has left AlertMe. Laura's contributed a huge amount to AlertMe, and we all wish her luck in her new job.

You'll now find QA engineer Charles and the Customer Services team manning the forums, and various of us updating the blog. For AlertMe technology issues, including ZigBee and connected homes, please contact :

Dr Amyas Phillips
email : amyas@alertme.com
direct line +44 (0) 1223 222 157

For non-AlertMe things, Laura can be reached at lbjames /at/ gmail.com

Crowdsourcing - for security?

AlertMe is always keen to spot other home security projects, even "hobbyist" ones that we know most of our customers wouldn't be able to do for themselves, because sometimes they embody interesting ideas.

The BUGLabs team, who produce an open source consumer electronics development platform, blogged this week about their home (well, office) security system. They've connected motion sensors and cameras, via a BUG system, to twitter and twitxr, so that friends of the company who follow these data feeds can spot people coming in to their office. You can keep an eye on their office with the rest of the crowd here; this is an example of crowdsourcing (what's crowd-sourcing?).

I think AlertMe disproves the statement "the static/automatic nature of an off-the-shelf consumer electronics device [means that it is] designed to do its task very specifically" - we show that consumer electronics can be a platform and can have new services deployed on it. But the general idea of crowd-sourcing security raises some interesting issues. Would you trust your twitter, or facebook, friends to monitor your home, or assess whether a picture was of an intruder or not? Does having information about your home's security online - either for anyone to read, or just for your online friends - is a security risk? Do you think they are more able to take action to help you and your home than other friends, family and neighbours? Or is AlertMe in fact already crowd-sourcing security, by keeping you and your nominated contacts in the loop via text and email? (Feel free to discuss this on our forum)

Nonetheless, the idea of a "Social Gadget Network" discussed in the post is an interesting one, and with AlertMe already producing text and email notifications from the home, we're part of it (along with Andy's house, the botanicalls potplants, and more).

European ZigBee developers conference

For all the ZigBee fans out there, AlertMe has had two talks accepted for the EuroZDC next month.

Amyas will be talking about the elephant in the room: commissioning, which is how you set up a ZigBee network from a bunch of disparate devices each with a ZigBee radio, and how you make it secure and functional for a range of applications. My talk is about AlertMe's experiences with ZigBee, how we choose it and tested its suitability for our application, and the challenges of going from prototype to product.

Hope to meet some of our readers in Munich! We're looking forward to getting more involved in the ZigBee community.

Gadget Show success!

AlertMe is enjoying the holiday weekend here in the UK, after a great week following our appearance on Channel 5's Gadget Show.

You can read what the show said about us here - we detected the burglars and informed the householder in seconds - just the way we intended :)

Set your recording devices!

AlertMe will be on the Gadget Show, Monday 28th April, Channel 5, 8pm.

All the staff will be poised with popcorn to see our kit starring on the small screen. We've not seen the footage yet, so we're waiting with baited breath...

Fighting crime, Web2.0 style

Greater Manchester Police now have a Facebook application, to alert users to local crime! Users get crime news items in their Facebook feed, and can post items of their own too.

There are even videos to raise awareness of crime issues.

Chief Constable Rob Taylor says “Facebook has 59 million users, seven million of which live in the UK, so we realised that this was an excellent way of spreading our messages to people on a more personal basis.”


(Thanks to Techcrunch UK for the link!)