Home Automation! What You Need To Know To Not Be Dumb
Every tech freak, rich man and lazy boy wants to be able to control their house like a Bond nemesis controls his volcano. But… where do you start? Right. Here.
What can I even do with home automation?
The phrase “home automation” has been used encompass so much stuff that it’s hard for experts to explain exactly what you can do without starting into an hour-long rant that goes off into crazy stuff you don’t care about. So here is a short and simple list of what home automation can do.
- Control your air conditioning and heating
- Access video cameras inside and outside your house
- Control your home theatre system
- Control your lights
- Pipe music, your TV’s audio or your voice into different rooms
- Interface with your home’s security system
- Turn on and off any appliance
- Open doors, windows, blinds, curtains and other motorised entry/exit components, like your garage door
..and you can do this all…
- From your phone
- From a computer
- From touchscreen panels or fancy light switches or iPads
- From outside your house
- Automatically, based on a schedule
- Automatically, based on other “events” that happen, like doors opening or motion sensors being set off
- One at a time or all together
So how does it work?
The basics of home automation is that one thing needs to tell another thing to do something, usually without you physically standing up and going over to that second thing. Also, the closer you are to the first thing, the better and more “automated” it is. Eventually, you’ll just be yelling out random commands in your home and a system of microphones will pick them up and translate that into actions. But not today.
Today, these pieces need to talk over some kind of network, using some kind of protocol. It can be Bluetooth, it can be through your electrical system (Power Line), over your home’s Wi-Fi network or the cell network for communications while you’re outside. It can also be through proprietary protocols that equipment manufacturers have established so that their stuff can talk with other companies’ stuff.