Home automation refers to any device – or group of devices – which allow parts of your home to be automated.
Examples include automatically closing all your windows and doors, controlling the thermostat and heating in your home and having smart light bulbs which adapt to the environment and time of day.
Rolling your own customized home automation with the Raspberry Pi is also a common solution nowadays.
Back in 2013, a small company appeared on Shark Tank: a company called DoorBot, who later rebranded as “Ring”. In their appearance, Ring outlined their smart doorbell – one of the first smart doorbells on the market. Since then, Ring have released smart cameras, an alarm system, a range of smart lights – along with … Read more
The Philips Hue indoor motion sensor is quite a useful device: when it detects motion, it allows you to automatically turn your lights on to pre-set colors and brightness levels, configurable for different times of the day. However if it’s positioned or installed in the wrong position, it can either miss people walking past, or … Read more
Picture the scene: you arrive home after a long day’s work, and as you walk through the front door, your Hue Lightstrips automatically illuminate – as do your hallway Hue ceiling lights – gently welcoming you into your home. Bliss. That’s one of the benefits of Philips Hue’s motion sensors. But picture another scene: all … Read more
Whilst looking at smart doorbells for my house, I came across the Ring Doorbell Elite – which is powered by an Ethernet cable. This reduces the need for running electrical cable to power it, whilst also guaranteeing interruption-free video uploads. Power over Ethernet therefore seems like the perfect fit for smart homes… right? Ethernet cable … Read more
If you want to take your smart home to the next level, learning a programming language can be a crucial next step. After all, mass-market smart devices can only do so much. If you want to do more with it, you need to extend them – or buy a more general device (like a Raspberry … Read more
Home automation can be achieved in a range of ways. With so much smart tech available nowadays, you can pretty much look around your house and find ways of automation everything you see. But having loads of choice is both a blessing and a curse: it’s easy to never automate anything around your house because … Read more
“Home automation is the future”, they say. But what exactly is ‘home automation’? We might think of a coffee maker that automatically brews your coffee when your alarm goes off, or a light bulb that emits different color light depending on the time of day. Home automation does include these things, of course, but it … Read more
History is littered with incorrect predictions of what smart homes of the future would look like. Whether it was the LA Times Magazine predicting in 1988 that we’d all have robot butlers (I wish this had come true!), or Intel scientist Dean Pomerleau predicting in 2009 that we’d soon be controlling computer systems with our … Read more