Three Month in... Copenhagen Transport

A month and a half on (at least it was when I started writing this 😏) and I feel that I am starting to find my feet. So I thought I would write about my experiences and exploits regarding travel in Copenhagen.

DOT Terminal

First and most important – Never, ever and I mean NEVER get onto the busses from the rear door. Unless of course you enjoy being screamed at by an irate driver in Danish! The front door is for boarding the bus, past the watchful eye of the driver, and the rear doors are for exiting. You either buy a ticket or check-in when entering using your DOT travel card. When exiting you Check Out at the terminal near the exit.

DOT Card

If you are arriving in Copenhagen I would suggest that you buy an anonymous travel card from one of the machines – the machines are easy to use, have English as an option on the front screen and can be found at every station to allow you to also recharge your DOT card. There is also one at the Copenhagen Airport and if you plan to be in Copenhagen for more than a couple of days it may actually be cheaper to get one of these than single tickets or the Copenhagen Card and the machine is generally empty whilst the machines for single tickets and the cashiers can have queues a mile long!

Check In

Check Out

The Anonymous card is basically a non personalised travel card which can be reloaded and used in all public transport around Copenhagen and greater Copenhagen. This is the easiest card to get without a Danish CPR number (Danish Social Security Number). Once you get a CPR, you can get a personalised card which learns your most common travel patterns and gives you discounts on the trips and also allows you to travel with a lower minimum balance on the card.

The key thing to remember with the travel cards is to always check in and out at the end of your journey or when changing mode of transport. If you don’t check out you will get a penalty charged the next time you try to check in. And if you don’t check in you risk getting a heavy fine if caught by random inspections. It’s just not worth the risk so pay and don’t abuse the trust system!

When checking out you only need to do this at the end of your journey on Metro’s so for example if you check in at the airport change at Christianshavn and finally end your journey at say Bella Center, then you only need to check in at the airport and check out at Bella Center. If however at Christianshavn you switch to the Bus or Water Bus, then you will need to check out at Christianshavn and check in again on the Bus or Water Bus and check out again at the end. Same if you change busses. As long as you check out and in again within 30 minutes it appears to treat the journey as one continuous trip and you don’t get charged for two trips. The cost of a trip only seems to be bumped as you move across zones. I still haven’t figured out if there is a standard unified zone system for all public transport, but each has the zone transitions cleared marked for the route you ae taking on maps in the stations, stops and on the metros and busses. Most communication is in Danish and English so not that difficult for us expats and tourists.

Generally public transport is good frequent, clean and reasonably priced. A single trip within a zone is 17 DKK. I generally pay 22 DKK to the airport and from the center that is about a 20-30 minute trip by Metros. The metro system in Copenhagen is fantastic in my view. 24/7/365 with stoppages late at night for maintenance but well planned and communicated generally. They also run between every 2-5 minutes apart and 5-10 minutes apart on Sundays and late at night and on holidays.

So far that is what I can figure out. If anyone has any further advice please feel free to add!

Alexa, how useful are you?

Cool little gadget…. A lot of hype. And not sure how much value it still adds… but at 50 Sterling Pounds it is a cool little gadget. And I do like my gadgets.

So why do I say I’m not sure how much value it adds? Well for one thing, voice recognition is good but still has quite a few faults. Especially if your accent is not quite American or proper English orr one of the dialects they have obviously trained Alexa for. So my accent is a mixture of various accents from all over the world. I enunciate, but sometimes I don’t pronounce certain words exactly as Alexa would expect… and off she goes doing something else.

Another bug bear I have is that Amazon have chosen to use Bing as the search engine of choice and sometimes the simplest things I can ask “Ok Google”, Alexa has trouble finding. This is seriously frustrating knowing that the answer is there from Google and if I was to move away from Alexa it would most likely be for this reason mainly if Googles offering comes to Europe soon.

Saying this Alexa still is a pretty cool toy J

Her integration skills with a lot of home automation gadgets is pretty good though limited for the key ones I use such as Smartthings and the Sonos. For example I would really like to be able to ask Alexa if the front door is closed and for her to check with Smartthings and respond. Or for me to ask “Alexa, are all the windows closed” or “Alexa, are lights in the Living room still on” or “Alexa, is the TV in my sons room still on”. And at the moment all you can do is ask to turn stuff on and off. Sonos integration is also limited and via IFTTT and Smartthings, but I hear this may change soon.

So hopefully in this year there will be more skills added that will make the Echo Dots I have more than just cool toys.

Samsung's Smartthings after eight months

It’s been nearing 8 months now since I first installed Smartthings in my home in the Netherlands. It’s not perfect by any means but it’s been sufficiently good that I’ve bought a second hub and components for my apartment in Copenhagen.

I guess that means it must be reasonable from my perspective.

The biggest positives I have found with the Smartthings system have been the ease of set-up and the fact that it works with a bunch of the most common smart components.

At home in the Netherlands I have almost every light fixture now moved to the Phillips Hue system and Smartthings so far plays well with this. I’ve also integrated open close sensors from Samsung themselves, Fibaro motion and smoke sensors and motion sensors from Aeontec. There’s a smart plug from Belkin and the Sonos system is also attached and connected up and along with a Siren I can hook up a fairly nice alarm system to give any would be intruder quite a fright.

The apartment in Copenhagen is a little smaller and I’ve include Hue here with just a couple of sensors. But what I have started to use more and more in Copenhagen is the Amazon Echo (Alexa) connected to Smartthings.

Alexa, works with Smartthings but probably the most frustrating things with this is that the voice recognition really uses correct and proper enunciation or using standard names for things – which have obviously been provided more input and variety of pronunciations. For example Alexa will understand almost every time if I say “Alexa turn on the living room lights”. However if I say “Alexa, turn on Mr. Skinny” she won’t understand 50% of the time. So giving your lights and appliances fun names is a little tricky.

Saying that though, I still like the combination and possibilities and have started to experiment adding IFTTT to the mix.

I still think there are quite a few things that Smartthings could do to make integration much better. Especially with appliances such as the Sonos or Robot Vacuums. But saying that there are quite a few user created device handlers from the Smartthings Community that add significant amounts of added functionality to some components. So though officially supported these device handlers and the community is on good reason I stay with Smartthings. For those not comfortable with messing around with device handlers and the like it still offers a good core basic solution I feel for automating your home and when you put it together with systems such as Hue and the Echo is really at this stage pretty good.

I’m still continuing to experiment and add to my installation and plan to integrate a Logitech Harmony Hub, Arlo Pro and trying to figure out a way to establish some sort of Miro Presence Detection so I can start including automation rules for such things as I’m up and about but my partner is still in bed so wake her up in 30 minutes :-D

Will try hard to keep everyone updated on progress here…. but I see I am falling behind on various aspects of my blog,… especially on the promised insights into my move to Copenhagen!