I felt pretty bad about it, but my curiosity took over :) It was only the power for their Energy Manager though, not the power to the entire apartment!
In any case, I doubt they were actually using this Energy Manager thing anyway. The number one feature listed on websites selling these things is "Earn two code credits under the code for sustainable homes". I assume you do not need to teach people how to use the thing to earn these credits...
Awesome! I had some instances of "digging so deep into a fascinating problem that I forgot the initial reason I started digging" :)
It actually looks like a reasonable system overall. Maybe a bit bloated on the node.js side (what isn't?), but I wonder if they just had that toolchain already in place/experience with it, even though it's overkill for the system as-is. Or maybe they just googled how to do networking and copy/pasted the top Stack Overflow answer that included Socket.IO.
The launcher with its Holo tabs and the icon style look more like Android 4.something (I to K) to me, by the way. Android 5 (L) was the first Material Design release (the one[1] that had actual coherent principles behind it).
Yeah given the holoyolo look it's almost certainly ICS or jelly bean. I think kitkat's launcher looked a bit different, it didn't have the tabs: by then they had moved from tron blue to white.
Yes! I started taking some notes when I was halfway through, that helped a lot with the thought reconstruction. There is no chance I would find these TCF links organically again
