The X3 has finally arrived at the dealer after spending a week at a rail yard.  Who wants to bet that we might even get it on Saturday or will it be January 2nd?

I was told, this morning, that the vehicle was on rail.  Well now, it’s off the rails because… It’s been picked up by Hansen’s!

Now to get it to Policaro and PDIed and delivered.  I admit, I have asked if we could have a Saturday delivery but I suspect it’ll be Wednesday next week.

Well it looks like the X3 is ready to be shipped from South Carolina!  Talking to my dealer this morning, the vehicle is in 182 status which means, “Scheduled for Carrier”.  Sweet!  Let’s hope it gets picked up in the next day or two!  Which hopefully means one week of transport?  Maybe it gets to Brampton next Tuesday, maybe for a pickup by next Friday?

We can hope!

Thankfully, robots don’t drink on Mondays.  The good news is, production day was on Tuesday.  The vehicle was in assembly in the morning, so we’ll see.  I’m hoping that tomorrow, Friday, it’s starting to be shipped, so maybe in status 190?  One can hope!

I have no idea what status the car is in, and in many respects I don’t want to jinx it.

Here is a guide to BMW production status codes:
0 Order deleted by NA
17 Order not Specified
37 Order is at BMW NA
87 Production Week Assigned
97 Order sent to AG
100 Order deleted by AG
101 Error in data transmitted
102 Special Order (no Prod Week)
105 Order out of Prod. Period
111 Order Accepted at AG
112 Order scheduled for Production
**** Up to this point you can still make changes to the car such as options, colors, etc. However, once the car goes to status 150, you cannot make any changes since the car is now in production!
150 Production Started
151 Body Shop Started
152 Paint Shop Started
153 Assembly Started
155 Production Completed
160 Released to Distribution
168 AG Stock
170 Waiting Workshop
172 Planned for Workshop
174 Workshop Entry
176 Workshop Complete
180 Waiting for Export Dispatch
181 Waiting for Domestic Dispatch
182 Schedule for Carrier
190 In transit to port of exit
191 Returned to BMW AG
193 Arrived at Port of Exit
194 Selected for Shipment
195 Shipped from Port of Exit
196 Shipment Arrival at destination port?

So, despite the fact that the car went into ‘Production’ as in BMW’s code 150, that didn’t mean it was being built at Plant Spartanburg – yet.  It more or less means that the just-in-time components are in the process of being built

Talking to BMW directly, it turns out that the X3 is scheduled for actual production, meaning assembly at Plant Spartanburg, during week 49.

The week of December 4th to 9th – assuming a 6 day week, with Sunday being a shutdown.

It’s pretty much in line with what I said in my last post on November 22nd. I figure the car will be a mid-week build with assembly being completed on December 6th as a guess.

This means the car is shipped by Friday, taking two weeks means arriving December 22nd, just in time for Christmas.

Interestingly, talking to the business manager, she actually said that she was going to put a rush on the vehicle because she wanted us to have it before Christmas.  Mainly because she’s on holiday from the evening of the 22nd through to January 2nd.  This wasn’t my specific request, but it’s appreciated.

So we’ll see.  I have no idea what a rush delivery actually means.  Does that mean we could have it by the 18th because rush means one week delivery?  We’ll see what happens.

True to form at BMW/MINI, six days after ordering we are in production! We only found this out as, this morning we were going to make a change to the order (BMW is making the 21in rims available as a free upgrade)

So let’s see what the schedule could be:

• Thursday and Fridays are shutdowns at Plant Spartanburg for Thanksgiving.  It normally takes 1-2 weeks for the car to be assembled, so I’m going to say December 4th will probably be the Production Date.
• One or two days later it should be loaded on a train, so lets’s say December 6th.
• Two weeks to get to Toronto, December 20th.
• Preparation at the dealer and delivery, December 23rd.  Merry Christmas!

I think that’s an aggressive timeline though inline with other people’s experiences.

From that thread:

• When you get your VIN number or production number from your CA
  (little tip, when you get your VIN number go to www.bmwvin.com and get the full spec of your car to make sure nothing is missing from your custom order)
• Call BMW Canada 1-800-567-2691
• Give the the last 6 digits of your VIN or production number.
• You will get your production date.
• You can keep calling everyday to find out which stage the car is at.
• When the car leaves the manufacturing plant, they can no longer track it.
• You call your dealer to get the rail car number.
• Then you call a company called CSX that allows a person to track a rail car number.
• Their phone number is 800-235-2352. When you call and the automated voice answers, say location. it will then ask you for the rail car’s initials which will be “TTGX” or something like that. It will then ask you for the rail car number and that is when you speak the numeric digits. The next step is to say done and it will tell you where the rail car is or was today.
• Once the car arrives, you visit the Hansen’s site at
  www.lhf.com Type in the VIN number in the vehicle tracking field.
• When the car is in their system, you will see the pick up date and delivery date.The status starts with active, dispatch, en route, to delivered or on hold just like my case. That is when you call your dealer and get a priority on it. Which I did and they picked up the car at the train yard which is 5 minutes away from the dealership.

So in the end it took a little over 2 weeks from production to delivery, if all goes well.

So in Part 1 and Part 2 

I covered

• Setting up Hue and some of the cool automations we’ve got running with remotes and motion detectors
• Working with other applications such as Logitech Harmony to control the lights, adding an August lock and triggering automations such as turning on the lights when the door is unlocked or turning them off when the door is locked.

Since then we greatly expanded the system bringing it all together.  If you have the products on their own –

• Harmony talks to Hue and August
• Hue talks to Nest
• Nest talks to Hue
• August talks to Nest, but since we don’t use Nest Cams and Thermostats, there isn’t much on offer here.

You can use tools like IFTTT and HomeKit to bring some automation to all of this.  For example, IFTTT can setup rules, such as if I unlock the door, turn certain lights on.  IFTTT can take a few seconds to take action since you have a round trip to some company’s servers to then trigger IFTTT to then take action on someone else’s servers.  It’s alright, but you know at some point, support for products is going to go away.  That’s the unfortunately nature of our throw away society.

Enter the home hub –

HomeKit, since we have a fourth generation Apple TV will act as the hub for Hue and August but with varying degrees of  success both in-house and remotely.  The grouping functionality and automation is not great.

We looked at two options – the Wink Home Hub and Samsung’s SmartThings.  SmartThings is pretty cool, and quite expandable.  It’s definitely the geekier of the two.  For example, August locks are not supported.  Well, they are if you sort of hack it with Yonomi or IFTTT, but I want to be off the cloud solution as much as possible.

Also SmartThings doesn’t support the products that we had already purchased and in all honesty, doesn’t support a lot of products – unless you program it.  So in many respects, if you know you want a home hub, check the home hubs out prior to buying the add on devices.

As far as I can tell, there isn’t a perfect home hub.  For example, if you’re looking at add motorized shades in your home, Wink covers all the major brands except Hunter Douglas. SmartThings supports Hunter Douglas with some programming.

Wink Home Hub

We added a Wink Home Hub to bring everything together, otherwise you’re using different apps in different rooms.with varying degrees of success.

• Wink allowed us to add a connected fan and light in our bedroom – This is actually available in Canada at the Home Depot in Etobicoke on Queensway, it’s just not on Home Depot Canada’s website.
• We have three sets of lights that we are not planning on switching to connected bulbs – our dining room and three sets of lights in our kitchen – over our peninsula, the LED potlights and the LED strip under our cabinets.  We can actually use Lutron Connected Dimmers to provide some control there through the switch directly, a Pico remote and through the Wink App – No Lutron hub required.
• At a later date, if we wanted to add Lutron shades, support is already there!
• We could add power plugs that also connect to the WInk, which we did – We added two iHome iSP6X plugs to control two lights we actually never use.  Sadly despite advertising their support for Wink, they are not currently supported by Wink – Who states they are working on adding support.
• The Wink hub will allow us control Hue and August as well, naturally.
• We can add Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa if we wanted, sadly no support for HomeKit or Siri.

Voice Assistant

Between HomeKit, Google Home, Alexa, IFTTT and home hubs like Wink, there’s a mish mash of ways to connect to your devices.  Some technology works well, some technology still needs to mature.

HomeKit

Apple HomeKit, to me, still needs to mature as does Siri.  I have no doubt that Apple is trying to perfect Siri with their HomePod which is projected to be available in Q3 2017.  A fourth generation Apple TV is required which acts as the gateway between the internet, HomeKit and all of your devices.

HomeKit has the typical accessories available for it – switches, lightbulbs, thermostats, cameras,  entertainment centre remote controls, locks, sensors for motion, temperature and humidity.  It covers the basics – If you want to use Siri from your iPhone or iPad.

For some reason I’ve always found Siri a bit challenging to use voice-wise though that is more for dictation purposes.  As a result, I admit, I am not confident in Siri’s ability.  Also you can’t seem to add skills, which is pretty lame.  And you know Apple is going to be more of a closed system.

Google Home

I have an Android phone lying about that I got free when I switched carriers at work, so I’ve played a bit with Android Assistant with IFTTT.   I found Google Assistant’s voice recognition to be considerably better than Siri and quicker responding, I think.

That said, given we’re more of an Apple household, I’m not going to switch to Google mobile phones just to get Assistant.

The question is, do we get a Google Home?  Sure, that would work and works with iOS, but relatively speaking, at CAD$179/USD$129 it is a bit expensive if you’re wanting to put one in every room.  But that said, I liked features such as asking Google Assistant about my day, and she’s kind of sassy.

Amazon Echo

Enter Amazon Echo – Amazon Echo, having been around for two years, has a considerable number of skills – over 16,000 to Google Home’s less than 500.  Skills are, essentially, plug-ins you can add to add functionality to your Amazon Echo.

An Echo setup can be quite cheap too – US$49 for an Echo Dot and you can get a three pack for US$20 off the regular price.  Not bad and the speaker on the device sounds good, and supports Bluetooth out of the box.

That said, you know Google is opening up with their Google Assistant API being made available for third parties to add more capabilities.

However an interesting thing is, you can add Google Assistant to Amazon Echo and it works well!  You don’t get the hardware integration, but that’s fine – That’s what Alexa is for.

The drawback with Amazon Echo is that it does not support Canada for things like asking about the weather.  You have to either be very specific “Alexa, how is the weather in Toronto?” or use the Google Assistant integration.  There is a good site on “Making the Amazon Echo work in Canada” which involves either using the US app store to download the Alexa app for iOS, or side loading an APK for Android.

So needless to say, we went with Amazon Echo with Google Assistant integration.  It’s worked well in our condo with an Echo speaker in the bathroom and dots throughout the condo.

Hardware-wise, Alexa works with EVERYTHING and I mean EVERYTHING. Actually, the only thing she doesn’t do is turn the guest bedroom fan to Thermonuclear (yes, I have a shortcut in Wink for that) because the Wink/Alexa integration doesn’t support fans yet.  Pretty much everything else, I can control.

IFTTT

For everything else that is not mission critical, I am happy to use IFTTT, such as

• I can ask Alexa to
  • trigger self destruct and the living room lights will flash
  • start the party and it puts the lights in a colour loop
• When playing music through Amazon Prime Music, I can track a all the songs that are played.
• If the temperature goes above 25C it turns on the master bedroom fan, and below 25C, the fan is turned off.
• Remember that Thermonuclear Winter command I wanted?  IFTTT can trigger fan shortcuts from Wink.  It turns the fan on to maximum and turns off the light.
• When I weigh myself on my FitBit Aria scale, it blinks the lights in the bathroom to say the weight registered with their server.
• I could use IFTTT to turn on the light when I come through the door, or turn off the lights in the front hall when the door is locked; but I now leave that to Wink.

What about security?

The good thing is, the only device that can unlock my front door is my Harmony remote (through my iPhone or the remote), Siri through HomeKit, or the August app.

• Alexa and Google Home do not unlock doors, but will lock doors.
• IFTTT will take action on lock or unlock, but will not unlock doors either.
• Wink will not allow an unlock action, only lock

As for the rest – someone changing my lights, turning on my fan, etc… I am not that worried about.  Sure, it would be a pain to be woken up in the middle of the night due to someone hacking the lights.  Specifically, Philips, I know takes security seriously, so I am not that concerned.

What about your WiFi speeds?  You have to have a lot of data flying around

We did actually have slow speeds on our network, but not because of all the hubs and such – which all wire into one of my WiFI extenders – but due to the distance, the way WiFi extenders work, the lack of WiFi channels available in the condo and the fact that Apple WiFi routers don’t automatically change channels.

So we decided to upgrade to a mesh system that provides considerably better coverage, speed, constantly monitors for busy channels and automatically updates accordingly.   The changes have been pretty amazing.  It then also speeds up the effects of IFTTT and external triggers.

Today I brought the KUMAKART to the dealership to get it’s summer tires put on and to get a software upgrade for a rattle on cold engine start.  Gotta love that a software update now fixes stuff like that!

That said, I decided to retry the Countryman.  My review was somewhat scathing, for me, and I really wanted to see – was it the car or was it me?

Turns out it was me.  Well, maybe the person who sat in the vehicle before me.  See, the back seats are adjustable.  Super adjustable, and well, I didn’t adjust the seats.  I didn’t think of that because, well, I’ve never been in a car where the back seats are adjustable.

So there you have it – The Countryman IS back on our list for vehicles to consider in the future.

Want to add some sparkle to the ornament?  Use this:

 random_pixel = random(0,41);
 color = matrix.getPixelColor(random_pixel); 
 matrix.setPixelColor(random_pixel, 255, 255, 255);
 matrix.show();
 delay(5);
 matrix.setPixelColor(random_pixel, color);
 matrix.show();