Home Automation: A Getting Started Guide
It’s super hard to have a getting started guide at this point since everything is wicked fragmented. It is also really difficult to automate everything in the home because there simply are not applications to automate everything.
One of the main problems that we have today is that there is no one standard to rule them all, so if you pick one standard chances are your garage opener won’t connect to it, nor your thermostat for example. There are almost an overwhelming number of options on the market right now. I am going to try and give you a little bit of a overall getting started post.
Next you have a decision to make, which is more important to you? Which do you use more in your household? Apple? Or Google? Right now these are the two companies poised to massively take over the home automation market. Now they will not necessarily be producing their own devices, they have massive money hungry developers for that (No offense to the developers, I love you all dearly.) Then why is this an important decision? We want them to be able to talk to our phones that’s why. You want to walk up to your front door and have your phone tell your automation system I’m home!! triggering your lights, heat/ac, music, and wo/man cave to all come alive in anticipation. You want your home to not just be smart, but to be intelligent.
Next comes the Hub. Oh yes each competing standard has its own hub. Further evidence of crazy fragmentation goes a step further, some hubs/devices communicate via your wifi network, and others use zigbee or zwave radio frequencies to communicate. This adds another potential issue into your smart home, if you try to connect something too far away from your network (wifi or zigbee) then your devices won’t work. Most Zigbee/zwave devices work as a mesh network, meaning each device acts as both a receiver and a repeater. Your device (light bulb, camera, garage door opener, etc) will be taking your zigbee/zwave network it receives from the previous device and passes it along to any others around it. Anyway, I digress, back to the hubs. There are a few main affordable competitors right now, (seeing as how I am writing this while CES is happening, this part will likely be outdated as I type it.) * SmartThings *Philips Hue *Logitech Harmony *Wink Beyond these, you are talking a much more extensive system and a much higher price tag. Personally as of now I only have experience with the SmartThings and Philips Hue systems. I will therefore go into more detail on those from my own experiences.
SmartThings — Connect to as many things as possible even if it doesn’t always work SmartThings started out as a Kickstarter Link Here and were later purchased by Samsung. The best products that work with the SmartThings system is obviously going to be Samsung products. This is the platform to go for if you want to connect to as many things on one platform, in my opinion. Be aware however, that sometimes there will be issues and things that will not work exactly as you would expect. Since you are making the smart home jump i’m going to guess you are an early adopter like me and will be ok with some glitches. Additionally this system works best with unsanctioned devices and has a large awesome community working to hack everything into it.
Philips Hue — Do one thing, and do it really well Philips set out to make connected lighting awesome. They have all kinds of color changing bulbs that are programmed to change your room’s lighting color to that of your sports team when they score. (Yay!) Personally I find that is a gimmick but that’t just me. The Hue system does do lighting really well. I have it set to automatically turn on and off at different times of day, scenes setup to trigger different types of environments (movie mode, bed time dimmed lights for reading, dinner time full brightness) AND I can even control it with Siri. There’s that Homekit decision I was talking about before. I can activate Siri on my Apple watch and say Turn on the lights and all my lights come up! Dude the future is here.
Logitech Harmony — That’s some good looking Marketing there As mentioned above, I personally have no experience with the Harmony system. Their marketing looks amazing and promises all sorts of things. However, I have heard that the dream simply isn’t true. I’m not saying don’t buy this system, rather do some serious homework beforehand.
Wink Ahh Darling, out of money, in limbo Wink Purchased by their original manufacturer — Wait and see what happens Wink started out as a project of Quirky and quickly grew into an independently recognizable brand. Their marketing is also quite good, they connect to a vast array of devices, and looks too good to be true, all at a decent price point. There are 2 glaring issues here. One, every time there is a firmware update you have to re-add everything and friends of mine who own it have been very frustrated with having to do this over and over. The second issue is that Quirky has admitted they “Ran out of money weeks ago.” Yikes. The Wink system is for sale folks! (Know any investors? We should totally buy it!) Wink has been sold, Stay tuned to see how it will evolve under new leadership!
Bonus Round! It Talks to Me! If you follow tech news you may have noticed a bunch of cylinder shaped devices hitting the market. This is the new cool guys, i’m calling it now. Anyway, The Amazon Echo is this very cool device which sits on your counter and takes commands from you by voice. I walk into my house and say “Alexa (The wake word) play pandora” and she responds “Ok playing your last listened to station on Pandora. All without touching it. This magic is able to control your house as well. The Echo can control your smarthome by connecting to a bunch of hubs. Not every hub has that ability yet but give it time. Also as mentioned before, anything that is Homekit enabled (Apple) can also theoretically be controlled by Siri, on your phone or watch or iPad etc. So that’s the gist of it, a bit more long winded than I thought it would be, but like I said it’s complicated. I hope you’ve gained a better understanding of the SmartHome world.
