Miscellaneous articles, news, tips and tricks relating to smart home tech and home automation devices.
Various sci-fi and futuristic TV shows and movies cover people controlling technology with their minds. This might be via brain waves being captured by a funny looking hat, or by putting a small implant (chip) near/into the person’s brain. Whilst this sounds like pure fiction, senior Intel researches predicted in 2009 that we would soon … Read more
Smart home tech has exploded in popularity over the past decade, and it’s sometimes hard to keep track of every new product which is available – especially when ‘Google Home’ rebranded to ‘Nest’, or when Amazon Echo are up to their 4th generation of certain devices! So that’s where we come in! We have spent … Read more
As you can probably guess, I am a fan of smart homes. I love the benefits they can provide to people, and how they are often easy to use – even for people who aren’t tech savvy. I mean, saying “Alexa, play classic radio” requires a little bit of initial learning, but then it’s easy … Read more
Whilst looking at smart doorbells for my house, I came across the Ring Doorbell Elite – which is powered devices 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 … Read more
An announcement in December 2019 was welcome news to many in smart home circles: that all the major smart home manufacturers and developers were getting together to produce a standard way for smart devices to speak to each other. This is called Connected Home over IP. Connected Home over IP will see Amazon, Apple, Google, … 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