You talk about “Smart Homes” and I think most people jump to the gimmicky stuff. Bill Gates famously built a smart mansion in the 1990s where visitors could wear a special electronic pin that would tell the house how to arrange the rooms you happened to enter. Dim the lights the way you like, play the music you want to hear, put the art you prefer up on the screens. That’s gimmicky and worthless. And I want it.

But I have more practical use cases, most of which center around managing comfort within my home and automating the kind of tasks that make home ownership tedious. It’d be nice to know when something’s wrong and get a proactive heads-up about it. I want to treat my house like a platform. Things that need doing need to get done, so they have to be tracked. The mortgage company didn’t provide a helpdesk so I’ll have to figure it out myself.

That doesn’t mean I won’t put together gimmicky show-off automation toys, too.

Lighting

Lighting is the "Hello World" of smart home automation.

The Alarm

Coming soon.

The ERV

While most homes have an HVAC system, not every home has an ERV (Energy Recovery Ventilation).

The Sprinklers

The grass needs watered, but let's not be wasteful about it.

The Christmas Tree

Oh Xmas tree, Oh Xmas tree, Alexa turns you ah-on.