2D/3D Dashboard

Wiki Projects & Stories
21

[sorry if thread-resurrection is frowned upon. this topic is just too good to pass on]

…and yet, have you seen the McDonald’s restaurants in some Dallas, TX suburbs?
Oh my…nice, plush this-n-that, rich-looking woodwork all over the place, and big, fancy chandeliers and all.

There is definitely a market for this…even in the SmartThings world. However, I think the market (at least for now) may be in the implementers and/or on-going service providers, and maybe not necessarily the home owners themselves.

i.e. regardless of whether or not the customer ends up liking the idea enough to pay me for it, I’d certainly love to have this kind of thing while building out their system for them (both helpful for the implementer as well as an impressive way of demonstrating one’s work to their customers).

Although, I do agree that ‘definitely a market’ is relative…no idea if there is ‘enough’ of a market to make development worth it. I just really like the concept.

Being low in coding skills so far, I will just watch this and other related threads for now to see what comes of it.

By the way, my level of excitement for something like this doesn’t take away at all from the coolness that is SmartTiles. Big fan, and I think these things compliment each other and could work very well together.

22

[quote=“jodyalbritton, post:2, topic:9178, full:true”]
…my dashboard site https://thinglayer.net [/quote]

Do you have a link to more info about it? I only see where to sign up, but I’d like to know more about it first.

23

Definitely, I’m all for DIY (that’s why we’re here isn’t it) but at the same time, there are plenty of things that I would like to do but at the same time, don’t have the knowledge/skill, time or inclination to do it myself. I’ll happy substitute well earned money to those that do.

In fact it has always been my desire to ‘navigate’ my smart home in this way, ideally on wall tablets per the Kindle Fire thread.

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24

@sgnihttrams Maybe this will help? ThingLayer: An open source real-time web interface for IoT

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25

Doh! Thanks :smile:

20202020

26

I secretly hope Zuckerberg is lurking in the forums here, just waiting to assemble his automation dream team, so that he can resurrect this project :wink:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/03/mark-zuckerberg-2016-artificial-intelligence-butler

27

Hey guys,

I have employed some developers to build something for me and something that can be built on over time, work starts next week. The system will be similar to that of smarttiles where users can signup, OAuth their devices and then upload a floor plan and move devices around on the floorplan to view and manage your house.

I’ve written all the documentation for what I want but am just testing the best method to use to obtain the data from the API etc. One issue I’m running into is as follows:

I’ve come across two API’s, https://github.com/tmaiaroto/smartthings-unofficial-docs/blob/master/Documentation.md & http://docs.smartthings.com/en/latest/smartapp-web-services-developers-guide/overview.html , the latter being the official I believe.

The problem I have is the un-offical API works well, with maybe 3 or 4 queries I can obtain a list of all devices & there current states, I.e. Open/closed, motion active/inactive, humidity, temp, etc.

With the official API documentation I have to auth with clientID/secret and obtain a token, I then have to check endpoints, from there I need to query each device type, I.e. Switches/humidity/temp/locks/etc. Once I have the ID’s of all the devices in the specific category, I need to query each device for the values, but in each category, so a device that has 6 sensors would require 12 queries (6 to get the device ID and 6 to get the values). From what I can tell, with the official API, I can’t query a device ID once and obtain everything about it.

The un-offical API, I query https://graph.api.smartthings.com/api/hubs/idHashString/devices and it lists every device and every attribute which would make things so easy.

Am I correct with my assumption or am I doing something wrong?

5 Likes
28

Hi
So any new news on this?

29

What news are you looking for?

SmartTiles “V6” which uses an event driven engine is going through late-stage testing now, and that will lay the foundation for non-Tile based layouts, perhaps… It all depends on how our customers decide we ought to allocate development resources…

30

updates on this ?

31

I’d like to hear some updates on this as well please.

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32

2018 and Smarthings still have a UI that look like the old 90s :frowning:

Why is there no 3D/2D user panel ?
Why should that be so hard…

33

What other products in SmartThings’s price range offer this?

ActionTiles is very popular and growing. Our Customers appreciate the efficiency of a Tile / Grid layout, though our app is constantly evolving and we’re learning what usage patterns and ideas will define the future.

34

I’m glad to help to make this possible but my coding skills are somewhat basic, so I’m most useful at the graphical side of things.

35

Ah sorry, I`m a VERY active user of ActionTiles :slight_smile:
I have many panels around my house, for monitoring motion, temperatur, and to control my home.
Your ActionTiles is what make SmartThings useful for the house (and not only me on my phone) so thank you :slight_smile:

But I want to evolve my system, give it a higher design level.
A floorplan or a 3D view of my house is what I want next.

I know (Because I have seen everything you write) that it`s a hard work to maintain and hold ActionTiles up2date everyday!
And I understand how much work there must be to first design something new, then program it, test it, make it error free and so on… before any users can have it.

I really hope some company would make a floor plan design some day, but I really wish it had been you guys :slight_smile:

I have absolutely NO idea how ActionTiles is programmed, and how it does work.
But imagine the Not Active Tile is a 3D picture of my room, and the Active Tile is a picture of the same room, but only with the “light” icon ON. :
:thinking: i can understand it must sound stupid for the people that know how this works, but for me it sounds like an idea :smiley:

anyway, keep up the good work with AT

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36

Thanks for your love and compliments of ActionTiles.

The main reason we haven’t done this type of design is that it is extremely complex to develop a “floor plan Panel builder” and folks in the DIY market aren’t willing to pay for what this type of software would be worth. We don’t have money to waste developing a product that won’t sell.

The luxury “certified dealer only” systems (Crestron, Control4, Savant, …) offer variations on floor plan views, but at a cost of $2000 to $10,000 or more per household.

Given SmartThings’s target market is the very low end (folks around here get excited about saving $5 or $10 on a sensor or switch), it would be impossible for us to charge even a few hundred dollars for a license.

You can get the floor plan view you desire: Switch to a luxury brand smart home platform.

37

I agree, building a floor plan designer would be a nightmare but what about just importing a background image created in a third-party software (Photoshop) and then you can add each device as buttons. Of course this would be 2D only.

38

Wellllll…I’m not so sure.
Granted, the rest of your comments tell me this is irrelevant, but I would gladly pay a few hundred dollars for a license for such a setup. :slight_smile:

Ya, …and if we could move the ‘things’ around on the screen, free-hand, just drag them around to wherever we’d want them, that would be really, really cool too.

Having the ability to import our own image (whether a photo of the room, or a floorplan image, or both), as well as have the Panel divided into sections so we could have a section with the image as background, AND a section with the way it is now would be amazing.

Ya, I’d pay something more substantial for that.

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39

We appreciate the sentiment.

Unfortunately: 1 person… or even 100 isn’t going to cut it. We’re targeted at thousands of customers; even if that is a fraction of SmartThings’s market size.

More unfortunate is that Kickstarter & IndieGoGo projects for software are seldom successful.

So this concept is definitely not “off the table”; but if/when it happens, it’s going to be the result of a combination of product evolution and various market price tests to ask potential customers to “show us the money” - either that, or we receive funding from a generous benefactor, angel, or venture capitalist.

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40

This may be a feasible “MVP” (Minimum Viable Product) design; but determining if it is “viable” is non-trivial while we avoid being distracted from a hundred Feature Requests (of varying popularity) that are ahead in the queue.

The biggest design challenge, I think, to a floor-plan layout; is space efficiency for objects. Our current Tiles are not practical if a half-dozen have to fit on the map of a “room”. And adding zoom-in/zoom-out is suddenly a big leap in complexity beyond MVP.

ActionTiles is all about Tiles!

While our underlying engine lends itself to lots of possibilities for the future, we are avoiding the pitfall of losing focus. ActionTiles has our dashboard design model right in its name: Tiles.

Because of this firm focus, we don’t have a Feature Request open for floor-plan layout.

This Feature Request, below, is one possible step in the relevant evolutionary path, perhaps. You’re welcome to allocate some of your Topic Votes.