Out in the Open: Automate Your Home With Your Own Personal SkyNet

Photo: HeatSync Labs

HeatSync Labs sits just off Main Street in Mesa, Arizona. This public hacker space offers a workshop where engineers and programmers can build whatever they like, and as you might expect, it’s littered with clever little gadgets that can talk to the internet.

In the front window, there’s a tiny doll standing next to a bitcoin address, and if you wire some money to the address via your smartphone, the doll dances the hula. When the first hacker arrives each morning, unlocking the doors and deactivating the security alarm, the HeatSync website tells the world the lab is open. And on a table inside the workshop — beside a 3D printer, a laser cutter, and other hacker gear — you’ll find an LED display that shows you what people are saying about HeatSync on Twitter.

“Every day, we come up with a new thing we want to automate,” explains HeatSync Labs board member Luis Montes.

The trouble is that each little gadget makes life more complicated for the lab. In addition to writing new code and piecing together new hardware for each gadget, hackers must setup and maintain the servers that keep the gadgets running. If they create enough them, these automated tools become more of a hassle than a convenience.

That’s why Montes wants to move all of them under the control of a single open source system created by one of the hackers who hangs out at HeatSync. The system is called SkyNet, a nod to a certain early-80s sci-fi flick. “Yes,” says the tool’s creator, Chris Matthieu. “I’m trying to build SkyNet from The Terminator.”

That’s not to say Matthieu is bent on creating an artificially intelligent network that will eventually destroy the human race. In The Terminator, SkyNet was originally designed as a system for controlling missile silos and other weapons, and Matthieu aims to create a similar command and control network for internet-connected gadgets, including everything from bitcoin-powered hula dancers to the smart thermostats offered by Nest, the home automation outfit recently purchased by Google. This SkyNet is one more step toward what is now called The Internet of Things.

If you can connect a device or application to the internet, you can connect it to SkyNet. The first time a device connects, your SkyNet server assigns the device a unique token it can use to authenticate itself on the network at any time. The server then updates its searchable directory of connected things, and you’re ready to start sending messages to and from the device.

As Matthieu explains, you could use it to control a fleet of flying drones. “You could then tell SkyNet: ‘Let me see all the drones in Portland that are online and not active,’” he says. “Then you can start messaging individual drones, or broadcast to all of them. The message could be: ‘Here’s your flight plan.’”

But not all possibilities sound so sinister. You could also use SkyNet to manage a collection of virtual servers running on a cloud service across the internet. After connecting all your virtual servers to SkyNet, you could use the system to find a group of virtual machines with enough resources to run the software application you just built.

Chris Matthieu. Photo: Chris Matthieu

But Matthieu sees home automation as one of the most viable uses for the system. There are other tools out that let you manage home automation systems, such as the Revolv hub or IFTTT. But since SkyNet is open source, it provides more control over your data, and you have more freedom to shape it according to your needs. It’s pretty geeky, the sort of thing that’s best used by experienced hackers. But it can integrate with IBM’s NodeRed, a visual tool for connecting different Internet of Things devices, and that can make it a bit easier to use.

Meanwhile, at least one company is already thinking about using SkyNey in commercial applications: Matthieu’s former employer, Tropo, a company that runs an online telephony service. Tropo’s service includes a speech recognition system, and using SkyNet, the company aims to let people use their phones to send voice commands to devices across their homes, according to Johnny Diggz, the chief technology evangelist at Tropo. For example, you could use your voice to send commands such as “turn on light” or “set the hot tub to 104 degrees”.

At the moment, Matthieu is more concerned with building SkyNet than with commercializing the project, but he says that if companies like Tropo end up making money from the system, he’ll think about how to turn it into a business. He might put a limit to the number of devices the free version can keep track of, and charge for a commercial version that can support more.

In the meantime, he’s hard at work on a new project called SkyNet Firmware, which will run on the open source Arduino circuit boards, devices you can use to build all sorts of computerized gadgets. “The idea is that you can load SkyNet Firmware on any Arduino compatible device or board,” he says. “The Arduino connects to SkyNet and just waits for commands.” This would let you attach almost anything to SkyNet.

There’s only one thing to worry about, Matthieu says. “We just can’t let it become self-aware.”