What’s New in v18

Hi Everyone, and Happy New Year!

We’re very excited about this update, and have been working on in it for a long time, so thanks for your patience. We have made a number of improvements centered around device details and detection, and are starting to leverage the crowdsourced work you in the community have done to make device identification better. You can view a video demonstration of these new features here.

Community Names
Using data we’ve gathered from customers like you who have identified and renamed devices in their homes, we’ve built a powerful new feature that displays names that other Sense users have given to a similar device.

Each name is accompanied by a percentage that roughly represents how many other Sense users have picked that name. You can rename the device quickly by selecting from this list. You can also choose the “Custom” option if you’d like to give it a different name. We hope this will be especially helpful in helping you identify mysterious motor and heating devices throughout your home.

Device Updates
When a new device is detected by Sense, you will now get an in-app notification informing you about it the next time you open the Sense app.

We have also completely redesigned the Devices screen. As part of this, you’ll notice a new “Device Settings” view that can be accessed by clicking the gear icon in the top right of this screen. Inside the Device Settings view, we’ve moved the functionality for device editing into the “Details” tab. The “Manage” tab includes all the options for notifications, as well as merging, unmerging, and deleting devices. Note that “Device is not on” is now accessed by tapping “Report a Problem” in this screen, and is only available when the device is displayed as on.

Other Improvements
You may notice some other small changes throughout the app, including some new icons, small UI tweaks, and location information for devices added to the bubbles in the Now screen and the device listing in the Trends screen. We’ve also made improvements to the experience on iPhone X.

We have also temporarily removed the “Currently Learning” and “Up Next” sections in the Settings screen. As many of you had noted, these were inaccurate and caused a lot of confusion and annoyance. We thought it best to remove these until we have a better way of reporting this type of information.


One quick note on the numbering of these releases. In the past, we would have referred to this release as “v1.18.0”. We’re simplifying this to v18. Patches to this release would be v18.1, v18.2,… Our next major release to the iOS and Android apps will be v19.0.

It’s worth noting that these features are not yet in the web app; these notes are just for the iOS and Android v18 app releases. However, we have lots of improvements to the web app in the works, and will post release notes for major updates there when they become available.

This is a big update, and we owe a huge “thank you” to the beta team that has been helping us with this over the past month. With any release of this size, we do expect some bugs and feedback to fall out, so please help us by downloading this update right away, and let us know of any issues you find. You can follow up in this thread, use the “feedback” option inside the app, or by submitting a ticket with the support team through our website. We’re always listening.

Thanks again for all your support, and best wishes for your 2018!

7 Likes

The new “Community Names” output looks strangely like the output of a softmax activation function for classification… Any chance that’s what it is ???

Hey @kevin1 - very perceptive of you!

We are indeed driving it from n-best classification with confidence scores, and yes, based on a neural net trained on user labels!

2 Likes

Hello, I am noticing an issue on the Andriod app since the last update where selecting the Power Meter on a specific device shows the entire current wattage usage for the whole house, whereas iOS app correctly reports just the device itself.

Pics below are from selecting the same device (i didnt zoom them the same before taking the screenshot), but they are both a hot water circulator for my boiler which is typically in the 100~150w range, so the iOS app here is correct, android is not.

THe device powered off shorty after i gathered that info… here are shots with it off. iOS reports 0w again as it should, android not reporting correctly.

Anyone else seeing this, or jsut me?

1 Like

Thanks for reporting this @russ. We’re working to reproduce on our end now and will get back to you as soon as we know more. If anybody else is encountering this as well, please chime in!

Gold star for @russ! We’ve reproduced the bug on our end and are working on a solution. It does seem to be isolated to Android users.

I’ll be sure to let you know when we have a patch together for you. Sorry about that!

2 Likes

Just had a lecture on softmax activation for classification a week after v18 came out. Nice to see coursework in action.

1 Like

I’m pretty sure I pointed out this bug a few months ago :slight_smile:

1 Like

Uh oh…sorry about that @NJHaley, you’ll get the platinum star then.

This will help us narrow down when the issue may have presented itself. Thank you!

1 Like

I noticed it on the overall power meter… shows current usage as I scroll back, and changes to previous usage when I get to a spike or something, but if I leave it there it goes back to overall current usage.

1 Like

I had the same problem under iOS which I reported back in December. It didn’t happen all the time so I don’t know for sure if it was fixed. But maybe iOS has the same issue? Below are screen shots of one of my devices. When I’d go to the power meter for that device, the plot showed the entire house usage instead of just the individual device. But, as the plot updated with the current data, the update was just the individual device as it should have been. If I went out of the device’s power meter then back in, the old data would again be the whole house and just the stuff since I went into the power meter would be the actual device.

Oh yes now that you say that i notice it there too. Highlighting a point in the histogram shows that wattage value in time very briefly, but since usage is continuously reading, display very quickly reverts to the current wattage and not where the line is.

I like the Community Names feature; just used it to identify our coffee grinder. I’d give Sense a gold star for accurately picking up an 85-watt motor that runs for a few seconds once a day. Still definitely biased towards motors and big heaters though; has yet to find any of our electronics or LED lighting.

I’ve found one bug in the new version (Android) that was not present before:
In Trends view, it always lists the highest (hour, day, etc.) of TOTAL USAGE, even when Solar or an individual device is selected.

3 Likes

I have a question about the community names. Are the suggestions based on data gathered when detecting the devices to help narrow it down? For instance, I have two unknown heat devices, but the list of suggested names is totally different. Does that mean it is more likely to be something in that list based on the data already collected? One of the two mystery devices has not come on since it was detected over a month ago, which is why I was wondering if I should look at things in the list, like coffee pot (although my coffee pot was already discovered).

Hey @Mcraeh - so sorry I missed this last month! Let me see if I can help with your question.

The suggestions are based on the data collected for that particular device, so two devices labeled as “unknown heat” may have very different patterns when they turn on, run, and turn off. Each respective list would collect names that other customers have used for unknown devices with similar patterns, thus the variation in each list.

I don’t believe that the names listed under Community Names currently take into account other labeled devices in your own, but I’ll try and find out.

As for that mystery device that hasn’t reappeared, it’s possible that this was a misidentification of your coffee pot or some other device that had been previously discovered. You might want to delete that unknown device for now. If that device has a strong pattern, Sense will likely pick it back up again.

Hope that’s helpful. Sorry again for the delay!

Hey everyone!

We have a new app demo that shows these changes in detail!

1 Like