Home Automation – 5 years of experience

It was 5 years ago when I wrote about my home automation efforts: Home Automation – Choosing Bulbs

Back then, I was enthusiastic about replacing the myriad halogen bulbs in my house with LED based bulbs, and while I was at it, ‘automating’ them as well. I installed Philips Hue, some Lutron dimmers, and hooked it all up to Alexa so I could say “downstairs lights on!”. So, 5 years on, how has it gone?

Well, aside from doing the occasional demo of turning the lights on and off by talking to the ever present speaker, we really don’t use the automation at all. Why not? It’s far easier to just flick the light switch on or off when you enter/exit a room, and we never really got into ‘automation’, like setting up on/off patterns when on vacation.

These past few days, I decided to have another go at it. Throughout the house, I’ve been retiring various consumer electronics related to TVs, lights, computers, and the like. I won’t say that I’m an Apple fan boi, but they have a lot of kit in their ecosystem that “just works”. So, what have I done?

Lighting

Well, I’ve replaced the Philips Hue lights with those from Nanoleaf. Beyond just basic light bulbs, they have lots of panels, strips, shapes, to play with. I just bought a 3 pack of Matter A19 bulbs from the Apple store.

Simple, wifi enabled, you add them to the Apple Home app, and then you can control them in all the usual ways. I’ve re-purposed an older iPad to play the role of “home control” tablet, so I can change light values and whatnot.

We’re not walking through the house saying “Siri, lights on”, but I can set their color/temperature, so that when they do come on, they’ll be a certain value.

This is easy enough, and allows me to eliminate one bit of kit from the house, the Phillips controller, which was located in my office, which is not actually ideal because lights that are far from that spot might have trouble connecting.

Video Streaming

Over the years, we’ve used all manner of video streaming device. Way back in the day, it was ripping DVDs to the Synology NAS, and streaming through plex on the laptop. Then streaming from the same on the advanced DVD player. Commercial stuff was first streamed on various incarnations of roku, then along came Amazon fire sticks, then along came google tv, then finally Apple tv.

Given current prices of cheap LED tvs in the 55″ category, these apple tv boxes are not cheap ($130-$150), but, they are pretty darned good. Currently capable of 4K video. With the right HDMI cable, and a 4K screen, such a super sharp picture. I know that technology continues an invevitable mark of progress, but I’m ok with 4K output on the streaming box for a while. The only 4K screens we have in the house right now are in my office, and not even our main viewing screens. Upgrading our main screen to 4K will be a big upgrade, so these things will have life for a few years now that they are installed. The other benefit is they tie into the same Apple Home app that the lights do, so I can control them from one place also.

The last part is ‘smart speaker’. We’ve had the Echo Dot from Amazon from as early as they were available. We bought the dot, the cylinder, and even the one with a display (short lived experiment). What we’ve found through the years is the only real use case for us has been playing music at bed time. Other than that one hour of the day, and the occasional kids session on the weekends, we leave this thing unplugged, not wanting to allow Amazon to snoop in our conversations, and make purchasing suggestions based on what it heard.

Nope. Instead, I’m going to plug in the Apple HomePod mini I bought a couple years back.

I’m already paying for Apple music anyway (for listening on my bike rides), so why not use it more. It will sit in my office, not out in the house. I trust Apple more than Amazon, when it comes to not selling me to advertisers.

This all seems like a hard core Apple commercial, and until now I hadn’t realized how much Apple kit has replaced a bunch of other stuff. But, I guess they’re the largest consumer electronics company in the world for a reason (by stock value). I’ve gotta admit, when you’re not wanting to get into the guts of how it works, and tweak to the nth degree, it just works, and provides a coherent ecosystem.

So, 5 years on, what’s happened? We’ve replaced all the random experimental stuff from companies that have varying degrees of support, to be a full on apple home, and I have no regrets. We’re still not turning lights on with our voices, but it’s a relief to just de-commission random bits of tech that served half purposes. We’ll see what things look like in the next 5 years.

I am thinking I want a whole home “virtual assistant”, I mean, given the march of AI and all. So, I’m curious who will be the purveyor of that. As far as the home is concerned, Apple might just take that crown. Until then though, I’m sure I’ll be experimenting with a lot of stuff to shake out the winner that works for us.

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