jeviathon

Home automation is booming

I love being right. I predicted that Nest would prove to be a technology that would be of considerable value to consumers and to other companies as well. The $3.2 billion acquisition of the company by Google pretty much says it all. I’m betting Honeywell, and the other companies out there who lagged behind several years in advancing their line of products, is really kicking themselves now. I was an early adopter of Nest and I love the device. I loved it so much, I proceeded to automate other parts of my home. At present, I also have Chamberlain MyQ light switches and garage door openers, Belkin Wemo plugs and a couple of switches, Foscam security cameras and other odds and ends that make up a pretty advanced smart home. I like to tinker and my next project at home is to tie a Raspberry Pi into my home automation center to control and monitor my security system.

It saves you money

The fiscal conservatives and the green energy folks love these connected devices. For example, my Nest has already paid for itself in the few years I have had it just by it’s “smart” reactions to my habits and the way I like my house to be heated and cooled. I no longer leave my outdoor lights on all night to deter prowlers since the motion sensors and automatic switches take care of it all. I even replaced every incandescent bulb in my house with energy efficient LEDs. It was an enormous up front cost, but if a light is left on, it only uses a fraction of the power of the older bulbs. I thought I’d just compile some of the advantages of a “smart home” that I have experienced. These are by no means all inclusive and the extent of how you automate your home is all a matter of your imagination.

• Chamberlain MyQ notifies me if I leave my garage door opens or it stays open too long. I can close it remotely if I drive away and forget
• Chamberlain MyQ switches allow me to turn on all my outdoor lights at the touch of a button. I do this if I hear dogs barking at night
• Foscam Cameras monitor my entrance ways and send me notifications of movement
• Belkin Wemo devices monitor energy usage of my lights and appliances and allow me to control them and automate their operation
• HDMI-CEC (built into most TVs now) allows external control of devices like a receiver so I don’t need multiple remote and I don’t need to turn off the power to devices when I turn off the TV. It does it for me.
• Chromecast, Samsung and Apple TV allow me to broadcast video and audio from any device to another
• Green initiatives: Solar film on windows, enhanced attic insulation, and other energy saving modifications

Other areas of automation include wifi/bluetooth enabled door locks, the new Nest Protect smoke and carbon monoxide alarms and much more. All of these are available on the Internet but I will warn you that most of these devices are not cheap. The cost of the Nest Protect alone has been prohibiting me from diving into that technology.

All my excitement and gushing aside, I think this is the year for a home automation boom. The acquisition of Nest signals to other companies that the race is on. I’m pretty excited about what is headed our way this year myself and I look forward to my own projects as well.

Integrating Spring 3.1 and Lucene 4

Integrating Spring 3.1 and Lucene 4 is a fairly trivial matter, but I didn’t want to use the XML configuration so utilizing the @Configuration annotation, I was able to configure the Lucene indexer, analyzer and queryParser.  Here is the configuration code:

...

@Configuration
@PropertySource("classpath:/app.properties")
@ComponentScan(basePackages={"com.doozer"})
public class AppConfig {

    private @Value("#{appProperties['index.location']}") String indexLocation;
    private @Value("#{appProperties['index.source']}") String indexSource;
  
    @Bean(name="analyzer")
    public Analyzer getAnalyzer() {

        return new StandardAnalyzer(Version.LUCENE_40);
    }

    @Bean(name="fsDirectory")
    @DependsOn("analyzer")
    public FSDirectory getFSDirectory() throws IOException {

         File location = new File(indexLocation);

        if (!location.exists() || !location.canRead()) {
              System.out.println("Creating directory: '" +location.getAbsolutePath()+ "'");
              location.mkdirs();
         }

        return FSDirectory.open(location, new NativeFSLockFactory() );
     }


    @Bean(name="indexWriter")
    @DependsOn("fsDirectory")
    public IndexWriter getIndexWriter() throws IOException {
        IndexWriterConfig iwc = new IndexWriterConfig(Version.LUCENE_40, getAnalyzer());
        iwc.setOpenMode(OpenMode.CREATE_OR_APPEND);
         // Optional: for better indexing performance, if you
           // are indexing many documents, increase the RAM
             // buffer.  But if you do this, increase the max heap
           // size to the JVM (eg add -Xmx512m or -Xmx1g):
             //
               // iwc.setRAMBufferSizeMB(256.0);

        // NOTE: if you want to maximize search performance,
        // you can optionally call forceMerge here.  This can be
          // a terribly costly operation, so generally it's only
        // worth it when your index is relatively static (ie
           // you're done adding documents to it):
           //
          // writer.forceMerge(1);

        IndexWriter writer = null;
     try {
        writer = new IndexWriter(getFSDirectory(), iwc);
        indexDocs(writer,  new File(indexSource));

     } catch (Throwable t) {

         System.out.println("Unable to create IndexWriter!: " + t.getMessage());
         t.printStackTrace();

     }

        return writer;
    }




    @Bean(name="indexSearcher")
    @DependsOn("indexWriter")
    public IndexSearcher getIndexSearcher() throws IOException {

        return new IndexSearcher(DirectoryReader.open(getFSDirectory()));
    }



    @Bean(name="queryParser")
    @DependsOn("analyzer")
    public StandardQueryParser getQueryParser() throws IOException {

        return new StandardQueryParser(getAnalyzer());
    }

 
    static void indexDocs(IndexWriter writer, File file)  throws IOException {
      // do not try to index files that cannot be read
       if (file.canRead()) {
          if (file.isDirectory()) {
            String[] files = file.list();
            // an IO error could occur
             if (files != null) {
              for (int i = 0; i < files.length; i++) {
                indexDocs(writer, new File(file, files[i]));
              }
            }
          } else {

            FileInputStream fis;
           try {
              fis = new FileInputStream(file);
            } catch (FileNotFoundException fnfe) {
              // at least on windows, some temporary files raise this exception with an "access denied" message
              // checking if the file can be read doesn't help
              return;
            }

           try {

              // make a new, empty document
              Document doc = new Document();

              // Add the path of the file as a field named "path".  Use a
              // field that is indexed (i.e. searchable), but don't tokenize
              // the field into separate words and don't index term frequency
              // or positional information:
              Field pathField = new StringField("path", file.getPath(), Field.Store.YES);
              doc.add(pathField);

              // Add the last modified date of the file a field named "modified".
              // Use a LongField that is indexed (i.e. efficiently filterable with
              // NumericRangeFilter).  This indexes to milli-second resolution, which
              // is often too fine.  You could instead create a number based on
              // year/month/day/hour/minutes/seconds, down the resolution you require.
              // For example the long value 2011021714 would mean
              // February 17, 2011, 2-3 PM.
              doc.add(new LongField("modified", file.lastModified(), Field.Store.NO));

              // Add the contents of the file to a field named "contents".  Specify a Reader,
              // so that the text of the file is tokenized and indexed, but not stored.
              // Note that FileReader expects the file to be in UTF-8 encoding.
              // If that's not the case searching for special characters will fail.
              doc.add(new TextField("contents", new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(fis, "UTF-8"))));

              if (writer.getConfig().getOpenMode() == OpenMode.CREATE) {
                // New index, so we just add the document (no old document can be there):
                System.out.println("adding " + file);
                writer.addDocument(doc);
              } else {
                // Existing index (an old copy of this document may have been indexed) so
                // we use updateDocument instead to replace the old one matching the exact
                // path, if present:
                System.out.println("updating " + file);
                writer.updateDocument(new Term("path", file.getPath()), doc);
              }

            } finally {
              fis.close();
            }
         }
       }
    }
}


...

@Configurable
public class App
{

    @Autowired
    public MongoOperations mongoOperation;
    @Autowired
    public StorageService storageService;

    ApplicationContext ctx;

    public App() {

      ctx =  new AnnotationConfigApplicationContext(AppConfig.class);