conesus

Most advice we give is advice we want to give ourselves.

I built a complementary product called the pedestal which does exactly this. You can either mount it on the wall (it has magnets to hold it in place) or place it on a nightstand (as I do) where it lives in the same place every time when I reach for it.

It tells me which features I should invest more time in getting right and handled edge cases and which features nobody but me uses and so it’s not worth the extra effort. I only have so much time!

What you do with the remote is between you and what you control. I store anonymous metrics that I use to gauge usage levels but you can turn that off. Sonos undoubtedly takes your listening habits and profits off that data but Turn Touch does not, even though it has access to that data.

Check it out, 100% open source: https://github.com/samuelclay/turntouch-ios. The Mac app, the firmware, and even the CAD and CAM designs are also there. And I documented everything so you can get a peek into how it was built if you want to change the designs for yourself. http://ofbrooklyn.com/2019/01/3/building-turntouch/

Everything I build I want to last beyond myself. So beyond the source code I also write about the why for everything. That it improves sales is a nice bonus.

I kinda agree in that I also dislike it. But I just disabled the exit intent pop up so you won’t see it again.

Yikes! It's part of a hidden video that shouldn't play until you explicitly open it. What's your browser/OS? I tested on Chrome, Safari, and FF on mac as well as iOS.

I also just added a muted attribute to the `video` tag so it should no longer do that even if I messed up the JS for some browser somewhere. I encourage you to try it once again to confirm.

If you're interested, I sell a dedicated Sonos music controller (built out of wood no less). It's available at https://turntouch.com and it's entirely open source so you don't have to worry about me taking your data and selling it. Earning money based on the initial sale is all that I want out of my users. That and props.

I designed and built a wooden remote control[1] so I know a bit about why this is.

My iOS app asks the user for location permissions because without it the remote control app won't know when to attempt to connect when you walk in the door with your iPhone but your remote is sitting at home, waiting for you to hit it to turn on your lights or play music on your Sonos. If you hit the button and nothing happens, that's a horrible user experience!

I used to have location set to Always even though I don't store the location (and I'm explicit about that, even going so far as to open source the entire app ecosystem[2]) but then Apple pushed back and said that always having a location was against their ToS for remotes. I then switched to a geofence, which is still a location based permission but takes less battery life.

For Apple the tradeoff was not privacy but battery life. If I were to store your geofence information on my servers (which, ick) that would be OK as long as it was in teeny tiny text in my privacy policy. So while other remote control products are happy to take that information and sell it I decided to not double dip since you already pay once for the product. This is similar to my news reader which also has competitors that sell users' data. The tradeoff for me is that I earn a lot less than I theoretically could, but again, I don't double dip. Benefits of indie technology vs. venture-backed technology.

[1] Turn Touch: https://turntouch.com

[2] iOS source code: https://github.com/samuelclay/turntouch-ios

Check the links on the stories, it doesn’t yet work. Also, why truncate the feed?

Oh I saw that! I just started grad school so I’m batching low priority emails for the end of the month.

Hey, this is a great contribution. Thank you for making it.

I run one of the more popular readers and I have to ask why wasn't NewsBlur included in your list. It's the oldest on that list for one. It's also got its own native client on all of the platforms. Plus, I'm a HNer and NewsBlur launched on HN as well.

As somebody who has been introducing people, in person, to the concept of RSS for exactly a decade now, I'll mention that for those who really haven't heard of it, which is 10% of folks in tech and 90% of everybody else, my strategy has been to compare it to an inbox for websites with filtering and sharing. Really hits home on the idea that every story shows up unlike the dominant competitor to RSS which is FB/twitter.

95% of the people who leave RSS, and I ask everybody who cancels why they're canceling, leave it because they get their news from social media. Social filtering provides a higher signal than the manual process. I don't blame them.

Personally I built in that serendipity into my reader because I think it belongs in a news reader, but as its own feed among many.

I recently learned that on a single sided pcb you can use a zero ohm resistor to effectively cross over a trace, netting you half the benefit of a 2nd layer without having one.

I have 3D Touch and use this handy cursor all the time but I would welcome a transition to a hold down on the spacebar. 3D Touch doesn’t always fire when I press down hard and I wish it was more reliable to enable. Using the hard press always makes me worry I’m going to either drop my phone or crack the glass.

Because it doesn’t always fire my muscle memory has evolved to just press down harder to increase reliability. And it’s still only sees 90% of my hard presses.

Stay curious and well read and ideas will come to you. Well read, to me, implies reading about advances in tech, in culture, and in environment. Reading a lot of books is great for synthesizing crossovers.

And no light switch in the world is as versatile as this remote is.

It's Apple only for now. Once that market shows it's worthwhile I'll expand into Android. As for Sengled hubs, if there's IFTTT support or custom URL support, then it's in there.

Yep, you're completely right. I've already replaced a poor remote that was chewed up by a user's dog. Luckily I give free replacements if the user can provide a photo.

Unlike 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.

I 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.

It's not baked in. I can select it just fine in Safari. Also, "Bluetooth" is mentioned in How It Works.

What happens when your fingernail goes into the wood? Mahogany and Rosewood are both hard enough that these remotes will never show any wear unless you abuse them on concrete.

In that case you'd be better off connecting it to a communal iPad or to a Mac that lives at home.

Oh 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

I'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.

It'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.

Yep, 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) so you can extend it in ways that I haven't built natively.

I would hope not, that certificate is powered by Shopify. The other certificate on turntouch.com proper is a Let's Encrypt cert.

Don'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.

Don'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.