Category: Gadgets

Review: Filtrete 3M-50 Wifi Thermostat

I came across this particular wifi enabled thermostat a year or so ago, unfortunately they are not available in Canada. I’d guess this is simply the additional headache of bringing an electronic device to market in Canada (yes, different hoops than what is needed in the USA) and the market size. On my last trip to the states I took the opportunity to drop into a HomeDepot and pick one up. There was only 1 unit in the entire city I was in (I had to go to both HomeDepot stores!) – so you may have trouble getting one even if you live in the US, I suggest you call ahead.

The sales pitch on having your home thermostat wifi enabled is to make it simpler to program, and easier to adjust from anywhere in the house or out of the house. When we leave on vacation, turning down the heat and reprogramming the 7 day schedule is pretty low on the priority list. Being able to do so from the hotel over the internet would be handy. I’m looking forward to the ability to pull out more statistics from the device and surface them in graphs, for example yesterday my furnace was on for 4hrs 47mins and today it ran 2hrs 46mins (it was much warmer today).

Most of this post will discuss the installation process, as this is primarily my experience with it so far. Some of this will be specific to my particular install but I’ll try to walk you through the process I used to arrive at a successful result. If you want to stop reading here the short version is that it’s pretty cool, you probably want one.

The first step is to read (or at least flip quickly) through the manuals included. The packaging strongly indicates you need a C wire, the manual lists it as optional. The C wire is required, don’t get confused by the manual. Next take a look the wiring for your existing thermostat.

The good news is that the wire coming out of the wall has more than enough conductors to carry a C wire if I need to add one. The bad news is that I’m standing there scratching my head because I don’t really understand the current wiring.  My existing thermostat is a Honeywell MagicStat CT 3300 for which I was able to easily find a manual online. This helped me identify the wiring that was connected.

Next stop is to go take a look at the furnace, to map the other end of the wires. Unfortunately between the furnace and the thermostat I found this, something I’ll call the mess-o-wires.

The mess-o-wires ties in my A/C unit to the furnace and the thermostat. Opening up the furnace I get to the control board where the wiring starts.

So basically I have my furnace, connected to a wire A, this in turn heads to the mess-o-wires, then connects to wire B, this runs upstairs to the thermostat. Mapping the wire colors and connections results in the following table. The last column is the CT3300 hook ups. I also found a helpful reference to understand what the wiring names were.

Color Wire A Wire B CT 3300
Y orange yellow Y
R red red + black Rh + Rc
W1 white white W
G green green G
C black

This lead to an ah-hah moment. So I’m basically running in a 4 wire mode at the thermostat W Y RH G. The RH and RC are bridged back in that mess-o-wires. Knowing this helped me map to the 3M-50 manual for how to properly hook things up. The solution is that I need to fix the mess-o-wires to allow the C wire to run up to the thermostat using the black wire. Let me stress that this is unlikely to be your solution, but the process of wire tracing and mapping should help you understand your current setup and how to perform the install. If this is over your head, call your furnace service folks to do this part.

Once I was past this part, the actual installation went very smoothly – just follow the manual. The wifi unit ships along with the unit, but is not installed and the manuals don’t seem to reference it beyond providing a URL: www.radiothermostat.com/wifi. I inserted the wifi module while the thermostat was on and running, it seemed to handle that just fine. When you do visit www.radiothermostat.com/wifi you’ll find a friendly 3 step process:

  1. Register for an account on the web
  2. Verify Thermostat Installation
  3. Use laptop to connect your thermostat to your local wifi, and then to the internet

It’s not really three steps since step three contains more sub steps. My notes are a bit sketchy here, but it didn’t seem to provide much in the way of hand holding – they assume you know what you’re doing when it comes to wireless setup. At this point I’ll deviate from how I did the setup and talk about the iOS app. If you have an iDevice, then you should do step 3 above entirely using it. I’m not sure how smoothly a second iOS device will work out as it seemed that I was forced to re-setup the wifi connection (step 3) on the iPad even though it seemed to be working fine over a web browser. (again my notes are a bit rough as to what happened) I’m certain you can have multiple iOS devices, you just might have to go through the setup phase more than once.

There is also an Android app. This seems to be poorly advertised as I only found it while writing this post, they should really add it to the website. Adding the app to my phone and logging in, I’m able to view my thermostat without any network re-setup required. So my iOS app experience above of needing to re-setup the wifi must have been due to some other issue I was having.

I will say that I really like the wireless configuration approach. Much better than the Logitech HarmonyLink mess with a USB cable and browser plugins. The HarmonyLink could easily adopt this style of setup – creating an ad-hoc network to do the wireless configuration. The thermostat generates a 5 digit verification code to ensure that it’s really you, the HarmonyLink could simply flash the led to give you a verification pattern.

For some reason Chrome didn’t seem to work to create an account. Switching to Firefox solved this. After I had created the account, Chrome worked just fine. In fact, the website has a reasonable mobile layout as well. So a strike against them for doing something odd with account sign ups, but kudos for getting it mostly right no matter what device you visit the website with.

The iOS app is very simple, it lets you control the basic functions: temperature up/down; home/away; fan on/off/auto; heat/cool. You cannot set a schedule with the app it seems. The schedule can be set on the device (but who would do that?) and via a full web browser. The mobile version of the website is limited in a similar manner as the iOS app. The Android app appears to offer the same functions as the iOS app.

Configuration of Celcius vs. Fahrenheit is supported by the web/iOS/Android app in a single setting. The physical display on the thermostat requires you configure this as is shown on this youtube video. This had me puzzled for a bit until I found the video link, it is also mentioned in the FAQ.

There is a developer API available and folks who’ve created impressive private versions of a web UI. Interesting that temperatures are all Fahrenheit in the developer API, so I assume that’s how it is stored internally. I’ll certainly be experimenting in this direction when I have some time. The forums seems to be fairly active and have some good content in them from the quick browsing I’ve done.

Review: Harmony Link

When it was announced back in September 2011 I was quite excited about the HarmonyLink. I got one as a gift this Christmas and after some initial efforts with it, my enthusiasm is a little dampened, but I still think the device has a lot of promise. There are some serious flaws that need to be addressed by Logitech before it can replace my Pronto TSU 2000.

I was surprised that it didn’t use the same Harmony Desktop software that worked with the 659, then I got excited because it appeared to be web based. The model is log into website, configure your Devices and Activities on the web and sync to your device – nice. Sadly if you try to log into your account on myharmony.com from a non supported platform you get this message:

The following platforms are supported:

Microsoft® Windows XP or Vista with Internet Explorer 7+, or Firefox 3+

Microsoft® Windows 7 with Internet Explorer 8+ or Firefox 3+

Intel Mac OS® 10.4.8+ with Firefox 3+ or Safari 4+

The reason for this is they use a custom browser plug-in to do the initial setup of the device. This sort of makes sense, as the HarmonyLink is a wifi device that needs to be told how to connect to your wireless network. The initial setup seems to be the only time you’ll need the USB cable provided. I also found it a bit uncomfortable being asked by a website to enter my WPA2 password.

Logitech could have made things much simpler. Provided a very simple utility on Windows and Mac OSX to do the device initialization. Of course you need to program the device to enable it for your wireless network, they have all the code they need to do this in a reasonable manner so it seems like just a dumb design decision to include it as part of the browser plugin.

Security fail: The website myharmony.com also wasn’t able to accept a < character in my password. It gets better, the Android app (and apparently the iOS app too) doesn’t remember your password. So you need to type it in from time to time. Strike two for password security. They do require at least 4 characters, I can think of some great four letter words that might fit. So the user is torn between using a strong password or a convenient one. Everyone who might want to use the remote may need to know the password, that’d be strike three on their security story.

Setting up the devices was pretty reasonable, it does require that you know the model numbers of your equipment but will provide suggestions if you’re close to the right name. I had trouble locating the IR4PS3 device (for control of the PS3) in the device database, I ended up succeeding by entering Sony as the manufacturer and IR4PS3 as the model – then the correction offered by the website (IR4PS3/IR4PS3) worked.

The remote is setup around the idea of Activities, such as “Watch TV”. This is a bit different than the flow I have setup with my Pronto so it’ll take some getting used to. They have three basic activities: Watch TV, Watch Movie, Listen to Music. You can have multiples of one type of activity and give them unique names, but they provide only 4 icons – which is very silly given how easy it should be to have many different icons.

They very first time you connect to the HarmonyLink using your Android or iOS device running the remote control app, you’ll likely have a firmware update and a sync of your data from the web. The Android app hung on me during the firmware update leaving me waiting and waiting. It required a reboot of my Android tablet and I was back in business.

I haven’t warmed up to the Android version of the app yet. The power off path wasn’t immediately obvious to me, I’ll have to see how others that get a chance to use the remote once I shake out all the major issues react to it. Responsiveness to button presses is pretty good, there doesn’t feel like there is any appreciable lag. You can edit the button layout, with the exception of the 4 way navigation pad which seems fixed (this is unfortunate as the IR4PS3 mapping for ‘ok’ doesn’t map to X).

I was disappointed to discover that there wasn’t a web UI on the HarmonyLink itself. You must use a supported device (Android, iOS) and run the app. I’ll need to break out Wireshark and take a look at what needs to be done to fix that.

As I started with, I’m still optimistic this is going to be a nice addition to my home theatre – but only once they address some of the shortcomings. Engadget gathered a long list of great comments which felt pretty much on target. There is also a suggestion thread in the Logitech forums. I hope Logitech is listening.

Review: CitiGeeks.com screen protectors

I used to be one of those that strongly believed screen protectors were not worth the money. Over time I had a series a devices which I carried with me daily with no screen protection, sure after a year or two I’d inevitably end up with a small scratch but at that point the value of the device had dropped significantly anyways. The cost of screen protectors seemed outrageous, you could buy from a brand name and pay a big price – or opt for the super cheap knock offs from eBay. I assumed the cheap ones were not worth the money as the name brand ones were 10x more expensive.

The first phone I had with a screen protector was the NexusOne. It came to me with a Zagg invisibleshield installed. The invisibleshield model was one of the ones with the self healing property and had a slightly mottled surface. This felt a little different than a naked screen, your finger had a little drag. It was easy to get used to this. I never bothered to remove the screen protector during the time I had that phone.

Readers of this blog will know that the next phone I had was an HTC Desire. This came with no screen protector. The screen showed a few tiny (nearly invisible) scratches in the Gorilla Glass screen. The scratches were not enough to bother me in day to day use. When I bought a case for the phone from eBay, a cheap screen protector came along with it. I wrote back then that I was pretty impressed with the screen protector as it felt exactly like the screen.

My current phone is a well used Samsung Galaxy S Vibrant (i9000m). It’s got a few nicks and dings, and a handful of fairly deep scratches on the screen. Honestly you don’t notice them in normal use, but you can see them if you look up close as should be evident in the picture below. This is the lower part of the phone close up, a lamp is reflected off the screen but hopefully the scratch marks are clear (a deep one is centered, about 1/4 down from the top).

While I liked the case, it added a lot of bulk to the HTC Desire. This round I decided against a case but thought a couple of bucks was worth getting some screen protection. A screen protector can also help hide some of the existing scratches on a screen (true from my experience).

After looking around a little, I decided on an anti-glare screen. The cost was a little bit more than the clear ones, but less than a cup of coffee more. The youtube video demonstrating it also looked pretty cool. I made the purchase from eBay, but it turns out CitiGeeks has a web store and is based in Canada.

The packaging looked professional and included their logo. What was inside is pictured below.

You get the screen protector, a small card that you use to prevent air bubbles when installing, and a cleaning cloth. They have very good installation instructions on their website, and a youtube video which is very helpful.

The resulting installed anti-glare screen looks very good on the phone, turning it into a matte black surface when off. You can see the anti-glare properties in the photo below giving a soft halo reflection of the light. It also does a reasonable job hiding some of the small scratches, but not the deeper ones. Again, during normal use you don’t see any of the scratches.

I wouldn’t recommend the anti-glare screen having used it for a while. It does cut down on glare, but I find it adds a strange sparkle effect to images. If you look at the picture at the top of this post the right side of the image shows some of this as a multi-color graininess. This is difficult to capture in a picture, but is quite distracting in some situations.

I will recommend CitiGeeks. They provided a 20% discount coupon for my next order (if you search for this coupon online you should be able to find it easily). They also have pretty good email support, even at off hours. When I got my Galaxy Tab, I bought a crystal clear protector for it using the coupon and was able to get a better price than eBay. The clear screen protector is completely invisible, I had two Galaxy Tabs next to each other – one with a protector and one without – you could not tell the difference.

Low cost screen protectors do work well, and pay for themselves with the peace of mind they provide you when you accidentally toss your car keys into the same pocket as your phone. Should you get one? I think it’s still personal preference, I’m sold on them but only if I can get them at very low cost.