Most of BeeHive is about shaving cents off the power bill. This week we built two things that will never save us a dollar. They might be my favourite things so far.
Dog TV
Blue and Bear are home alone for perhaps two hours a year. As business cases go, that is not a strong one.
We built Dog TV anyway. Now “Buzz, put Dog TV on” wakes up the big TV, finds PetClub TV on Samsung TV Plus, turns the volume down to something gentle, and switches itself off again after four hours. It is free. We did look at a paid dog-TV app, and my review was brief: it will never be worth paying for.
The reviews came in immediately. One critic climbed onto the piano bench for a closer look. The other settled in on the floor and did not move for the whole episode.
In fairness to the dogs, the first version was not flawless. It said “Done!” to a black screen three times. Asked to put the art on, it switched the TV off and then cheerfully reported that Art Mode was on. Confidence is not the same thing as competence. Buzz now checks that the TV has actually woken up, and says so plainly when it hasn’t.
A tip if you have a Samsung TV: switch on Power On with Mobile (Settings, General, Network, Expert Settings). Without it, nothing on your network can wake the TV from fully off, no matter how nicely it asks.
A gallery that changes every week
Our TV is a Frame, which means it spends most of its life pretending to be a painting. Samsung will happily rent you art by subscription. Meanwhile, some of the world’s great museums give their public-domain masterpieces away.
So every week BeeHive picks about a dozen paintings for us: some landscapes, a couple of seascapes, flowers, something abstract, a pair of Australian impressionists, and one wildcard. They come from The Met’s open-access collection and Wikimedia Commons, and each one gets hung on a soft gallery-wall background and shuffled through Art Mode every hour. Next week they make way for a new set. Our own family photos stay put.
The curating took a little tuning. The first search for “landscape” returned a martyrdom. A “Mondrian” turned out to be a 1940s Dutch newspaper page about Mondrian. And a reclining nude briefly qualified as “flowers.” The gallery now has house rules: nothing grim, nothing that isn’t actually a painting, and nothing you would have to explain to the kids over breakfast.
Ask “Buzz, what’s this painting?” and it tells you the title, the artist and where it lives. The kitchen iPad has a new Gallery tile too, with a gold palette icon I made to match the rest. This week’s wall includes Winslow Homer’s Coast of Maine, Van Gogh’s sunflowers and McCubbin. Not bad for a Wednesday.
Not everything has to pay for itself
Most home-automation writing, ours included, is about money: spare sunshine, cheaper loads of washing, payback periods. Those things matter, and we will keep doing them.
But “what does it save?” has a sibling question that deserves equal time: what does it make better? A house is where you live. Some automations should simply make it a nicer place to be, for the people and for the dogs.
Total savings from this week’s work: $0.00. Payback period: about four seconds, which is how long it took two dogs to notice there was a dog on the telly.
Measured in wagging, it is our best-performing project yet.