Home - mozilla/project_haiku.iot GitHub Wiki

Welcome to the project_haiku.iot wiki!

This page is a chronological history of our progress. We'll create more pages as we need them.

Week of Jan 9, 2017

Since August we have pivoted and our product concept focused on connecting grandparents and grandchildren and progress was followed on CD Project Haiku Wiki. The current status of the project due to resource constraints is On Hold. We are archiving and keeping [log of the work here] (https://github.com/mozilla/project_haiku.iot/wiki/Useful-Links-and-Work-Log).

Week of Aug 01, 2016

Our current product idea assumes the girls have a limited set of "most important" people they want to know about. A large number of "most important" people would have a big impact on the design of the bracelet, as well as how we designed the software. So we needed to test this assumption as quickly as possible.

We've also been thinking about the possibility of "auto-replies," so that if a friend sent a "need attention now" message, you could respond with a 1-button press on the device to say "Sorry, I'm busy." So we used the same survey to ask the girls some questions about that.

Last week we conducted a short survey with the girls. The findings are in our read-only update to the PIB. Summary below:

How many people will the device support? 5 + Me

Auto-replies

The girls submitted many ways of saying the same "auto-reply." So we've generalized to the following 3 options:

  • Indefinite/Long-term: Can’t talk
  • Short-term: Get back to you later
  • Acknowledgement/Sentiment: Rainbows

Week of July 25, 2016

We've been fleshing out and refining the MVP product and features using the insights gained from the exercise to document our assumptions. We're moving forward to test Idea 1

  • We formalized the ad-hoc tech meetings we've been having and are now doing 2 standup-style meetings each week. Notes and status are recorded in the Haiku Engineering Standup doc
  • Work has been on-going on the Bluetooth app and device, to send data from the device to the app, and get data from the app to the device.
  • We're developing a simple Status Service and test (HTML) client as a way to visualize some of the product interactions and iterate quickly. Sam recorded a short walkthrough on Vidyo (requires Flash)

Week of July 17, 2016

A few of the team attended the Lean Startup training last week. Based on that, this week we

  • Described the product idea we're moving forward with
  • Described our assumptions about that product idea
  • We've identified the most important ones to test first and are now thinking about the fastest way to test those assumptions.

Week of July 11, 2016

We checked in with the PIB on Friday (slides here). We've decided to focus more narrowly on improving communications between close friends by helping girls know the status and availability of their close friends.

  • Continue with the 12-15 year old girls.
  • Uncover other “desires to know information about my friends” that could be supported by an ambient device.
  • Focus on small group of close friends - about 5.

Week of JuL 4, 2016

After a productive time at the London work week and vacation for much of the team, this week we are back to the analysis of the 2nd user research study.

  • We've completed our Research Findings for our latest research study (UR #2).
  • We've also made some decisions about what we'll be doing next.
  • Meanwhile, we are exploring the technology options for smaller/wearable devices and different interaction models.

Week of Jun 13, 2016

This was our twice-yearly company-wide workweek - this time we met in London. Our team worked on a few things together and talked to lots of people about our project. We also checked in with the PIB (slides here). Our MVP was approved using the following criteria:

  • Clear problem statement / hypothesis
  • Minimum viable product (MVP) and user validation testing

Week of Jun 6, 2016

Our project has changed its named from Project Smart Home to Project Haiku. During the following days we'll be replacing the references to the old name in the Wiki, GitHub... The name change is announced in this blog post.

Week of May 23, 2016

We launched our first live user research study! You can read more details here about the prototype devices and how we're conducting this study.

We checked in with the board on Friday and received positive feedback. Slides here.

Week of May 16, 2016

This week we're getting ready for our user research study!

We checked in with the board on Monday. Slides here

Week of May 9, 2016

This week has been all about prototyping and preparing for our upcoming user research study

  • Working code now to facilitate Photon devices connecting to individual's Wifi networks using a soft access point
  • Devices can be paired so that clicks on one show up as light animations on the other.
  • Click, double-click and long-click are implemented, with corresponding LED animations
  • Real-time logs of these interactions are available on Particle's dashboard, and are working on persisting and visualizing this data.
  • Started modelling the enclosure for the prototype, false-start on the 3d printer which was DOA. A replacement is on the way and we can start printing and iterating through next week
  • Working with legal team on the details for our consent forms and compatibility of 3rd party service's privacy policies
  • Preparing for London and the all-hands video segment for this project
  • Some images

Week of May 2, 2016

This week we are heads-down preparing for our next round of user research, as well as planning how we'll use our time together for the work week in London. On the tech side, we're prototyping the test device we'll hand to participants.

  • We filed a bunch of issues and are collectively working down the list
  • Prototype code is showing up in our repo
  • We've got a quick status video showing explorations on the hardware side, where we are starting to look at batter power and charging, and putting together all the components into a portable and hopefully robust enclosure
  • We've begun specifying the LED animations we want to show
  • Here's some photos of Sam "prototyping" the kind of enclosure we'll need to 3D print:

Week of Apr 25, 2016

A lot happened this week!

Week of Apr 18, 2016

This week the UX+Product teams met in Portland to meet each other, learn new things, and refine the hypothesis of each train. Note: because we were in Portland, we put our work to document the user research findings on hold until next week.

Updating Our Hypothesis

In Portland the team's goal was for each train to target a specific audience with a specific hypothesis that we would work towards proving/disproving in the next 2 months. This required some trains to commit to smaller audience segment than they were initially considering (win!). And required some trains to narrow the scope of their value proposition and/or technology explorations (win!).

Working with other product managers, we developed this hypothesis for the SmartHome project.

Our new hypothesis is based on our recent user research study. In the study we observed a need/desire for passive, background communication, e.g., two people connecting via Skype while they were doing something else like homework. This theme resonated with the whole SmartHome team as something we'd like to work on. We chose to target 12-15 year old girls because this audience showed the most need/desire for this type of communication. But the team also can see how a solution for this audience might serve a broader audience as well.

Our next step is to design a way to "test" this hypothesis in the lowest-fidelity way possible. Stay tuned!

Technical Exploration

  • Ongoing NFC exploration, using both Arduino and the ESP8266. See this short demo video Details will be posted in the NFC page.
  • Explore Bluetooth as communication mode using BlueFruit LE SPI and HC-05 bluetooth modules for our project needs.

Week of Apr 12, 2016

This week we're continuing with some activities/exercises to go deeper into our research findings and help us focus our next set of research. We checked-in with the innovation board on Friday and shared our progress.

Technical Exploration

Week of Apr 04, 2016

This week, the team is together in Portland to review the data we got from the user interviews, chew on it and plan our next steps.

Sam published a short blog post about the research/interview experience, coming at this as a developer

Technical Exploration

Week of Mar 28, 2016

The whole team is doing user research this week!

Background

Babysitting age kids and independent elderly both have caregivers who question the independence of the 2 audiences. E.g., Adult children are worried that elderly parents are no longer capable of keeping track of things like taking medication on time. And parents are worried that babysitting age kids aren’t yet capable of making the right decisions. So both groups of caregivers want some sort of ability to monitor/control these audiences.

Audience

We'll be talking to 10-20 people in two audiences. Both audiences are currently underserved by the IoT market.

  • Babysitting Age (12-15 years old)
  • Independent Elderly (people who are aging in place)

We recruited people from our friends/family networks. One team member also used Craigslist to recruit people. Another team member used [NextDoor] (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L9W_CvzvNDEFelNLoLMB7lC4Paxk1zLF6PpAIZFrQIQ) to recruit people from her neighborhood.

Hypothesis

Our hypothesis is that Babysitting Age and Independent Elderly desire different products than their caregivers, because the needs of the audience and the caregiver are not the same. To uncover the needs of these 2 audiences, we'll be using these [two Interview Guides] (https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0By5ZvBZQRgjRVjFuTHNTOXBEVUU&usp=drive_web&tid=0ByeF_fkExK_BQXhqUUtXdFExQWM).

Next Steps

We're meeting in Portland next week (week of Apr 4) to analyze the research and plan our next 2-week sprint based on the research outcomes. We'll post links to our research findings next week as well.

Technical Exploration

  • Continue updating Inventory list of household items, their behaviours and our interactions with them
  • Tried out MQTT services and SDKs from AWS and Adafruit

Week of Mar 14, 2016

Technical Exploration

  • Arduino IDE to program ESP8266s (WiFi) and RFDunio (over Bluetooth)
  • Apache Cordova and Android SDK: Used Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Central plugin inside a sample Apache Cordov Android app to discover nearby bluetooth devices
  • RFD77801 - Simblee Starter Kit, uses Simblee development environment. Not all code is open source, provides interface to easily create and control RFDuino using mobile apps