Home Automation – The Basic
Creating a smart home, with connected devices have been gaining popularity over the recent years. This applies to both residential and commercial fields.
Over the past 2 years, I’ve managed to play around with this at home, and managed to introduced a number of smartness into my home.
What is Smart Home? What is Automation? What’s connected devices? At a very high level, connected devices allows some level of smartness into your home (depending on what you have), and if you can introduce further logic/triggers into your environment, which launches or “do” something, then you’ll have an automated smart home.
This is actually a very interesting and fun topic to explore. Depending on the type of device that you have, some may require some form of “hub”, which is like the “brain” of devices connected through it, or you might have some devices that doesn’t require a “hub”. You can then have software/apps that connects to those “hub” or directly to the device to control them. A very simple example is to turn on/off your light, whether you are at home or elsewhere. That’s the interesting bit, you can control it even when you are not at home (** but think –security–**, more to come). You can have connected devices from as simple as light globe, to switches, air conditioner, TV, irrigation system, security system etc.
Once you have that, you might want to think about, hey, I don’t want to launch an app to do it, I was to use voice control. Then you can use something like Google Home (variants), or Amazon Echo (variants), or products many other brands, including Apple. Then you can simply say, “Hey Google, turn on dining light”.
Hang on, is that all? No. There is a lot more that you can do. Why don’t you set the air con to turn on when outside temperature is above, say 30 degree Celsius? Turn on my irrigation system if the ground is too dry? or perhaps turn on my multi-cooker once I’m 30 minutes away from home, when I’m travelling towards home? What you can do is limitless. The only limit is your imagination.
In the future, I’m going to share more about what I’ve done in this space, to make my home more “interesting” :), stay tune.
