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Show HN: Turn Touch wooden smart home remote now shipping
- conesus 9y agoHey HN, I run NewsBlur and am launching my hardware project Turn Touch today. Launched last year as a Kickstarter campaign, it is now available for immediate shipping. Turn Touch is a beautiful wooden smart home remote and pedestal. It’s designed to fit both your home and your hand. Use it to instantly control Hue lights, smart devices, Mac and iOS apps, and more. Turn Touch connects to most smart devices in your home that speak WiFi, including Sonos speakers and Belkin Wemo smart plugs. Turn Touch works with your Mac, iPhone, or iPad to control apps like iTunes, Spotify, and Keynote. Here’s a few more reasons to buy it: * Extraordinary design — This isn't yet another plastic remote. Turn Touch is carved from solid wood and worked to a show-stopping, textured finish. * Well connected — Turn Touch is always on, always connected, and always ready to take your breath away. Once you connect your Turn Touch via Bluetooth it stays connected and always available, even without the Turn Touch app actively running. And there's no delay, when you press a button the result is instant. * Built to last — Not only will Turn Touch stand up to drops and shock, its entire circuit board can be inexpensively replaced with newer, future wireless tech. You won't have to buy a new remote every time Apple comes out with a new phone. And instead of flimsy plastic clasps, a set of 8 strong magnets invisibly hold the remote together. Plus it’s entirely open source. And good open source projects benefit from good documentation. Here is a five part series on how Turn Touch was built: https://medium.com/@samuelclay/everything-you-need-to-build-your-own-turn-touch-smart-remote-1689da664d62 https://medium.com/@samuelclay/everything-you-need-to-build-...
- bpicolo 9y agoIs S12 correct? Edit: ah, Newsblur was S12, that's somewhat confusing
- k1ns 9y agoI was wondering the same, and became even more confused when I couldn't find Turn Touch on the S12 batch list [0]. This founder first started NewsBlur, which can be found on the S12 batch list, and they are now launching their hardware project Turn Touch. Turn Touch has been a year or so in the making, a much nicer timeline that 6+. [0] http://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?batch=s2012 http://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?batch=s2012
- conesus 9y agoSame company, new product. Plus the remote integrates with NewsBlur. I tend to only build productivity tools that use aggregation to get work done.
- conesus 9y agoFive years now. I was researching how to build buttons the day Google announced the Reader sunset (March 13, 2013). That pushed me back a bit as I had to get NewsBlur in shape. It’s a solo project so it took a while to prototype and launch but now here we are. That’s why I wrote the open source documentation. It’s what I would have wanted when I started this project.
- k1ns 9y agoAh, the timing makes much more sense now. I was looking at the "YC S12" descriptor and wondering, "what's been going on the past 6 years for this to be shipping today?" This looks great by the way, well done.
- roel_v 9y agoWhere on the website does it say how it actually works? Because "the it works" page, well, doesn't. It seems it connects to a phone via bluetooth? But also uses Wifi? How does it actually connect to any devices? Does it even do that? Or is it just a bluetooth remote for your phone, and the phone then does the real work? If I put this thing next to my bed, and I use it to control my lights, and I left my phone downstairs - will it work?
- conesus 9y agoThe remote connects to your iphone, iPad, or Mac. The phone/computer uses wifi or the net to talk to your devices. You can also use IFTTT to control hundreds of devices that aren't natively supported by Turn Touch. I have a Turn Touch in a pedestal next to my bed and it controls all of the lights in my home.
- splitbrain 9y agoHuh? It needs my phone to be present to turn on the lights? What if my wife wants to turn on the lights? Why does it need to talk to a phone? Wouldn't a zigbee device compatible with the hue bridge make more sense?
- brk 9y agoYou should make sure to mention this on the Indigo forums (http://www.perceptiveautomation.com/userforum/index.php http://www.perceptiveautomation.com/userforum/index.php) given that it looks like an Apple-centric smarthome device. FWIW, the wood thing does not really seem like a selling point, and also most likely drives the price up more than a plastic case would. I like the concept of it though and plan to research the APIs a bit more and then will likely order a couple.
- conesus 9y agoYou're absolutely right that wood is driving up the price. But if this does well enough in wood then I'll launch a plastic version in a year or two for $49.
- atwebb 9y agoYou seem neat and open, personally, I wouldn't put a future price here unless you expect to really hit it. I've already got that in my head. :)
- conesus 9y agoI'm with you on that but I've had that price in my head for a long, long time. The sub $50 point is what I'm aiming for and having thought enough about the plastic version after having made the wood version, I also have a good handle on what it'll cost me.
- samstave 9y agoPlease don’t ever make a plastic one. An aluminum one would be interesting though.
- masukomi 9y agoagreed. metal could be cool. I'd still buy the wood myself (if i buy it at all) but i can imagine metal would make some people really happy even if it was more expensive (witness the apple watch)
- Fifer82 9y agoCongratulations on shipping the product. I must say that it is a beautiful little thing. Good luck moving forward.
- johns 9y agoI really like how this looks and I bought one to try out. I wish it were standalone and Z-wave (or similar protocol) with Wink (or similar) support. I hate having a different app for every device.
- farrelljohn 9y agoIs there any plan to support Android/Windows devices? From a quick glance over the website, it doesn't seem like they are currently supported. Hopefully I just missed it though, this device is beautifully made!
- conesus 9y agoEventually I'd like to build an Android app. NewsBlur has a native Android app, so I would just divert my Android developers attention to the Turn Touch app. I'm waiting to see if there's sufficient demand for the iOS and macOS apps first.
- heliostatic 9y agoCongratulations on shipping! Turn Touch looks beautiful. Do you plan on extending the platform to other control devices (a larger version that is fixed in place, or a wall control unit) with the same software backing and aesthetic?
- conesus 9y agoThe pedestal (pictured on the site) is exactly that wall control. I built the pedestal because I wanted my remote to live somewhere. The pedestal holds the remote in place with 6 hidden magnets, leaving you free to pull the remote off the wall to use interactivity. The pedestal also works on a table top just as well, which is where I have a remote situated next to my bed on a nightstand.
- heliostatic 9y agoGuess I should check the site and not ask questions based on year old recollections :P Very cool
- wojcikstefan 9y ago“Turn Touch is a perfect match with Philips Hue lights” - I must be missing something in this prominently highlighted scenario. Instead of walking over to the lamp and turning it on, you have to find the remote and press its button to turn on the same lamp. Where’s the value in this? I understand the advantage of voice control, but operating one physical object vs another sounds like a simple substitution.
- conesus 9y agoDon't just count the one lamp. A home will have dozen of bulbs. This remote lets you control all of the bulbs/lamps at once. Use Turn Touch to set scenes or interactively cycle through "random" scenes until you get the lighting you want. Typically when I get home I press a single button and I get a single color for my apartment. If I'm not feeling that color, I press the button again and switch to another color. The other buttons let me adjust brightness and hue. The remote then also lets me control music and smart power plugs. It's really amazing to have everything wired up and controllable with only four buttons.
- flyingcircus3 9y agoAs an embedded developer that has done contracting for people with all of the capital, and none of the misunderstanding of electronics, I'd like to offer a thought experiment. I realize that Amazon has all sorts of guardrails in place, but I can control anything in my house with Alexa today, regardless of Amazon's prior approval, because I can make anything in my house appear to my Alexa as a Hue hub. The internet has already reverse engineered Alexa to make it a weapon, and unsavvy people like shiny things. So how long until an unsavvy wealthy person hires an embedded developer to integrate his entire house to work under the emulated hue model? Because the day its up and running, that unsavvy rich guy is going to throw a party. And that embedded developer might just show up and say "Hey alexa, set a timer for everyone's sleep monitors within your geofence. when they're all asleep, disarm the security system for 1 hour, turn up everyones binaural sleep aids for one hour, and hire me three ubers so I can make a clean getaway with the goldbars in the basement. Oh yeah, Alexa, unlock the vault.
- icoder 9y agoI like the design! Very comprehensive built descriptions too (mainly looked into the firmware part). At first I wasn't too sure about the BTLE choice, but it makes sense in a power consumption context. Zigbee would have been nice for my usecase (I'm using a RaspBee module), but that's not for everyone (I like to try out a lot of different things, interfacing it myself and have everything meet in the middle via MQTT, from there it's up to my imagination, currently trying out Node-RED for instance). Since my house is rather small, I could probably use the BLE on my Pi.
- TeeWEE 9y agoCool, but its way cooler to run OpenHAB2 on a raspberry pi. True home automation system.
- djrogers 9y agoThis is a nice button - openhab is an entire home automation platform. With no buttons. Kinda like saying ‘that’s a nice keyboard, but Linux is cooler’
- syntaxing 9y agoAnyone else getting a HTTPS certificate error?
- conesus 9y agoI would hope not, that certificate is powered by Shopify. The other certificate on turntouch.com proper is a Let's Encrypt cert.
- Hasz 9y agoI'm going to disagree and say I don't like the wood. Personally, I think glass fiber reinforced nylon -- the kind of plastic you see in high end power tools -- would be a much better aesthetic, as well as being far more durable than any hardwood. It's also much easier to scale if you want to make 100,000 of these things. Also not a huge fan of the square body. If it's dark, all I have to orient the remote is those two chevrons. Maybe that works, maybe it doesn't, but I'm still partial to the rectangle.
- conesus 9y agoDon't knock it til you've tried it. It's easier than you think to orient the remote in your hand without looking. That north ridge (the chevron) is quite pronounced by feel and you can feel it through clothing. As for the wood, I agree that different tastes are something I should strive to accommodate. Plastic is next and I also love the feel of glass filled nylon. I'll be looking into it as soon as the wood remotes do well enough.
- Hasz 9y agoFair enough. Looking at an item is no substitute for feel in hand.
- fredley 9y agoI have one of these, and love it. It's so much nicer than the plasticky remotes that come with anything else, and the system support out of the box is great. Sam is very responsive on the forums too. I have written a raspberry pi server component[1] that can be extended to support any smart device (if you've got an API for it). You can, if you wish, use the device completely without any supplied software, it operates via bluetooth only so does not phone home. If you want to class up your own hacked together/secure smart home setup, this is a great device. 1: https://github.com/fredley/raspi-turntouch https://github.com/fredley/raspi-turntouch
- koichirose 9y agoI don't understand, does this replace the need for the iOS/Mac application?
- conesus 9y agoYep, the RaspPi client is instead of the iOS/Mac app. Basically the Turn Touch API and Bluetooth spec is open source (https://shop.turntouch.com/pages/open-source https://shop.turntouch.com/pages/open-source) so you can extend it in ways that I haven't built natively.
- antsar 9y agoThis is wonderful, thanks. I hope to leverage this into a Home Assistant[0] component (assuming someone else doesn't do it first). [0] https://www.home-assistant.io/ https://www.home-assistant.io/
- conesus 9y agoOh yeah, I would love that! And if you do, email me and I'll add it to the open source list, where you can also find the API and my email: https://turntouch.com/api https://turntouch.com/api
- koube 9y agoIs this an intuitive interface for anyone? It looks incredibly frustrating. If I want to turn on a lamp, I want to turn on a lamp, not spend hours configuring the optimal way to navigate to a lamp rpg style (north east north north south).
- conesus 9y agoIt's pretty simple. Four buttons for four devices. Each button can toggle a device. You can also hold a button to switch to that button's app, giving you four apps with four buttons each. So music app has volume controls and play/pause and next track. Lighting controls has scenes and hue/brightness controls. There's no multi-touch or sequences to memorize. Just the four buttons and the four apps.
- gregschlom 9y agoAh I remember meeting Sam in 2015 at TechShop where he was milling one of the early TurnTouch protoypes. Damn, making good hardware takes time. Congrats on the launch Sam, and best of luck with the project. It looks gorgeous!
- syntaxing 9y agoI knew this project sounded familiar! I was following your medium post[1] when I was setting up my old Shapeoko 2. It's a good read for anyone interested in how the parts are manufactured. [1] https://medium.com/@samuelclay/everything-you-need-to-build-your-own-turn-touch-smart-remote-1689da664d62 https://medium.com/@samuelclay/everything-you-need-to-build-...
- jasonmp85 9y agoNot a fan of the text baked into your image on the home page… this is pretty much a solved problem by now… I did a cmd-F to search for certain technologies and didn't find them, before I realized they _were_ mentioned in the big grid image, just not as searchable text.
- nicpottier 9y agoFor those that have a bunch of home automation.. is it actually... good? It strikes me as one of those things that is fun to set up, but probably breaks in weird ways every few months and you have to have a special kind of patience to deal with that. (not to mention a shared sense of patience from spouses etc..) How reliable and stable is all this stuff? Can you really set this up and forget it and have it work reliably, ie, always? How often do these standards change? Am I going to have to reconfigure all my light switches after getting a new router for example? Or base my light purchasing decisions based on this? Just curious, I'm intrigued, but having gone down this path in the past it feels more hobby than utility.
- conesus 9y agoI have remotes setup in my home and office and the only time I need to enter the Turn Touch app is when I add a new device. You would be surprised at how easy the app is to use. I looked at every other home automation app I could find and I made my own app with the simplest interface I could design. It really is a set-it-and-forget-it product.
- nicpottier 9y agoI would hope that it works now, my worry is more will it still work without me buying new stuff in five years?
- conesus 9y agoUnlike very other tech product, the board inside Turn Touch is user replaceable (without tools!). So you can order a new circuit board when the wireless standards improve and get new functionality without having to spend the full amount.
- jd20 8y agoTry to avoid stuff that depends on the Internet, Revolv was one example where customers got burned because Google essentially bricked the service after acquiring it. Logitech did a similar thing to their Harmony Link hub, though were more generous in offering customers an upgrade path.
- 908087 8y agoI remember these other things we used to put on the wall and use to control the lights. We called them "light switches", and they didn't require secondary devices to have apps installed in the middle. They were also incredibly difficult to lose track of.
- conesus 8y agoAnd no light switch in the world is as versatile as this remote is.
- matte_black 8y agoThis is awesome, will there be a Gabon ebony version??
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