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Author Topic: Thoughts on cloud affiliation and adding sensors?  (Read 4719 times)

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LGNilsson

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Thoughts on cloud affiliation and adding sensors?
« on: March 21, 2014, 01:04:18 pm »
Just wanted to see if there was some more constructive comments here in the forums based on our most recent update on Kickstarter where we showed off the cloud affiliation of the Almond+ and how to associate sensors - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2037429657/almond-80211ac-touchscreen-wifi-router-smart-home/posts/784847

We know there's still a lot of work ahead of us, but we also think we're off to a very strong start with a unique and easy way of doing things.

Offline eldaria

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Re: Thoughts on cloud affiliation and adding sensors?
« Reply #1 on: March 21, 2014, 03:58:19 pm »
Actually one thing I noticed was how smooth and easy it was to hook it into the cloud and adding devices, and it was very responsive.

Now a few questions and thoughts did come up.
Security:
2013 saw a record in the amount of data breaches and leaked information. A cloud service for a home router and home automation would be a goldmine for hackers, imagine someone gaining access to this cloud and the accounts there. They could monitor when you leave your house and then disable your alarm system and even open the front door. Ok I suppose the average burglar won't have the knowledge to hack the cloud, but a hacker could sell the information to organized criminals. So I still see a security issue here.
So it would be interesting to know how you have implemented security, for example the communication between Almond+ and the Cloud, how you manage logins and server security.
I would also like to see the option of increased security, for example token based authentication like Google 2-step Authentication. https://code.google.com/p/google-authenticator/
I hope you will be open about it, as I personally believe that security through obscurity and secrecy is failed security.

Performance:
Ok, so the performance was excellent, even the cloud responded almost instantly.
However, I suppose you do not have so many Almond+ hooked into the cloud feeding their status changes.
Have you ensured scale-ability, so when you start selling this and move 2 Million routers  ;) Will it be able to handle this?

HA Functionality:
So this is an early insight to the Home Automation Gui, and sure thing we saw you could turn a light off and on, and you could see the Fire Alarm go off, but I did not see anything like scenes or similar or how to create them.
So if a door opens the light goes on, unless the alarm is active then it will set of the alarm instead.
Things like that needs to be there. ;-)


LGNilsson

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Re: Thoughts on cloud affiliation and adding sensors?
« Reply #2 on: March 21, 2014, 10:10:10 pm »
Let's see what I can answer off hand.

As to security, there's a lot more going on in the background, but it's stuff we won't be revealing outside of the company (sorry), but it features multiple levels of authentication, not just the simple code you saw in the video. All the connections are encrypted over SSL/HTTPS and although neither is 100% hack proof, it makes it a lot harder for anyone to simply gain access to your data. Things on the server end is of course also encrypted and we're following the news and are aware of all the exploits that have happened. As for the front end, we might consider adding a second layer of security, it shouldn't be that tricky/time consuming to do from our end, but we'll most likely do that as an option for those that wants to use it.
That said, we are working on local control and we're expecting to have this done so the beta/developers can start testing it within the next few weeks.

Our backend is running on Amazon, so it's easy enough for us to scale things as and when needed.

As mentioned, secenes/events/triggers etc. is still being worked on. We know this is a major part of a HA system, but it requires some sensible logic for it to be easy to use. We have some stuff working, but we're not quite happy with it and that's why we haven't shown anything so far. That said, we're working on something much better, but it'll take a little while again to get it to a stage where we can demo it/provide it to our beta/developer testers. This is going to be the part that we'll be putting most of our focus into once we're done with the core parts which we believe will be finished in the next couple of weeks.

Offline pete

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Re: Thoughts on cloud affiliation and adding sensors?
« Reply #3 on: March 25, 2014, 03:24:54 pm »
I am very impressed with the speed of the cloud application updates and means of adding sensors.  Here are I started to add more sensors (baby steps though).  So far have only added Z-Wave devices to the three testing Zigbee devices.  Almond + touch to Z-Wave switch via the cloud applications looks pretty quick to me.  Initially I held down the sensor pairing button too long; then noticed it was only a short press which paired up the devices.

Curious how many clients are now attached to the cloud application these days?

The cloud Almond + interface is just the right size Almond + LCD. (personally my opinion).

Here I try to crowd too many buttons on small (7-8") touch screen interfaces.  It's very low though on the WAF (wife acceptance factor) when I do this; thus WAF is high on the touchscreen interface / cloud application.
[img width= height= alt=" width="250" height="52" class="bbc_img resized]http://forum.securifi.com/Themes/Firox_multicolor_by_SMFSimple/images/logo.png[/img]
Pete
Lockport, IL  USA

LGNilsson

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Re: Thoughts on cloud affiliation and adding sensors?
« Reply #4 on: March 25, 2014, 10:23:41 pm »
Good to hear that you're happy with things so far.

To be honest, we don't know how many of the beta testers have connected to the cloud service as yet, but it'll be a lot more soon, as we're shipping the remaining developer units starting today.
That said, we're running the cloud service on Amazon and as demand increases, we can simply get more compute power on that end. We've done some internal testing and it looks like so far we can handle a fair bit of traffic without any concerns.

 

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