Castle is a project I've been working on with my friend Vatsal since we graduated high school in 2013 - it's something I actually tried to develop while I took my gap year and traveled through Europe, Asia and Australia. We even applied for the Thiel Fellowship during that year with this idea, but we weren't accepted. Since then, several virtual assistants and hubs has appeared in that time, notably Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Cortana, etc.
It's still something I feel strongly about, although it's gone through many false starts it's ultimately a project I do feel would be exceedingly beneficial - if done right.
Our initial vision for CASTLE was a modular smart home hub that would connect to, and manage, the devices and appliances of your home. We felt that - and still feel, in some cases - most home automation hubs weren't missing the actual home automation point; we don't really want data dashboards on how much energy our area lamps are using, but instead we want total peace of mind that our home is secure and chore-free. Lots of products had bells and whistles like colored lighting that were cool for, y'know, raves or freshman dorm rooms but not really much use else.
So we set out to build a robot butler of sorts, that would be able to interface with electronics and appliances like light bulbs, TVs, microwaves, toasters, etc.
Unfortunately, we've gone through many false starts since 2013 and have little to show besides some circuit boards we designed and ordered from dirty pcbs and a random assortment of code. Thus, we decided to scope our operation down to just lights, to get started, and thus, Socket was born.
An overall, unified system is still our end goal, but we want to start small with Socket and build something we can really be sure of before we focus on other parts of the house. However, I will still post build logs on other smart home/hub related builds here, so check back!