Home.ly

Inspiration

Our inspiration was simply taking different technologies and combining them in new and exciting ways to make daily life a little more interesting.

How it works

Gestures captured by the Myo Armband are used to communicate with SmartThings devices such as Smart Temperature Sensors, Smart Motion Sensors, Smart Locks, Switches..etc, through a local hub, a simple web page, which allows one to effectively control their smart home.

Challenges We ran into

Getting the Myo Armband to communicate with the SmartThings: We ran into a lot of trouble when it came to carrying out OAuth2 authentication through HTTP. We tried C++ and Lua solutions but unfortunately we made no progress until we came across Myo.js, which enabled us to leverage Myo's gesture control in the browser and ultimately simplified the whole process.
OAuth2: As mentioned before, OAuth2 was a major challenge but the guys at SmartThings pointed us in a direction that didn't require OAuth2 when we built SmartApps.

Accomplishments that We're proud of

We actually got it to work
When we first got the Myo Armband to control an HTML element on the local hub
When we further extended the functionality to control a virtual SmartThing
We made something cool, got to work with great hardware, and we learned a lot!

What We learned

C++ doesn't play nice with OAuth2
We learned how to integrate software with real-world devices, which was exciting!
We learned that motion control has a lot more potential that will be tapped in the years to come.

What's next for Home.ly

Integrating multiple SmartThings into the hub in an actual home environment
Getting other people to try it out, get feedback, work on it further, rinse/repeat