Some thoughts (and advice) on Smart Homes / Home Automation

As the idea of a connected-home becomes a larger reality for more people, there are some general best practices on how to go about making it a success rather than a frustrating and expensive phase in your life. I've read and researched a lot over the last several years and have been able to witness smart-home devices become commonplace among the general population. In this research, I've seen a lot of different setups, from simple to complex. I've seen a significant amount of what works, common pitfalls, etc. I'd like to pass along some of this advice along to you so you can love your HA (Home Automation) configuration rather than frustrate everyone in your home.

Where we were

For many years, the idea of HA was usually expensive and often involved highly-complex, proprietary systems. Big names in the industry like Control4, Crestron, or Savant will happily build, maintain, and tweak your setup for a downright eye-watering cost (to most people). However, these weren't (and aren't) the kind of configurations that were sought after in most homes. This sort of equipment was much more common in homes that were far higher than the median home value for most areas. Nobody was spending $100k on an HA setup in a 2-300k house. However, if you were building a multi-million dollar home, an extra $100k might not be as large of an obstacle. As with all technology, maturation brings lower costs, simpler integration, and standardization.

In addition to the expensive proprietary setups from the big companies and their professional integrators, the X10 standard came into popularity. X10 is a low-bandwidth communication protocol that primarily worked over powerline networking (using your home's existing power lines for communication between devices. A lot of the same device types we see today were X10-compatible; things like light switches, wall sockets, ceiling fans etc. A more detailed history can be found on wikipedia. While many of the devices utilizing the X10 standard were lower in cost, allowing a wider public adoption, it was still expensive for most people, and still required a significant amount of tech savvy for a DIYer. 

More recent and improved standards include wireless protocols such as Zigbee and Z-Wave, and even Radio Frequency (RF), devices can be found communicating back to a central hub and/or creating their own mesh network sending out broadcasts to every other device that "spoke that language". In fact, even as little as 15 years ago, that is largely where traditional HA technologies were integrated into modern computer networking.

Where we're at now

As technologies from 20, 30, and even 50 years ago continue to be improved (and costs come down, spurring increasing adoption rates, increasing market-share, etc.), this current decade has seen the mix of HA and the internet grow to be widely adopted and seeing exponential growth year over year. While traditional HA systems were expensive and complex, the integration of the modern smartphone has helped spur the idea of the Smart-Home. This idea is that common devices of your home can connect to the internet, allowing it to be controlled either locally or remotely from a standard application framework. This framework can allow users to build workflows like automations (when a thing happens, do this), or scenes (when I say this, make these devices do specific pre-configured actions). 

If traditional HA is the fire, and the Internet is the oxygen, then the improvement of AI allowing for decent voice assistants is the fuel that is helping this fire burn hotter than it ever has. While being tech savvy is certainly helpful in this arena, it's easier than ever before for the average consumer to build their own smart home. However, this increase in technology adoption isn't without it's challenges, which is the point of this post. 

• Start Slow. Don't rush down to your local Best Buy and buy all of the popular items as they may not work together and you may end up making certain things in your home harder to use than they were before, while paying more money to do it. Start with something that is going to add the most value to your life. Figure out something you'd like to automate and start with that one device. You can always branch out from there.

• Keep It Simple. The whole point of HA is to make your home do things for you so you don't have to. Specifically, making something "smart" won't automatically make it better. If you make something as simple as turning on a light harder than it used to be (and the bar is pretty low in terms of how difficult flipping/pressing a wall switch is), then the people you live with or any guests that come into your home will get frustrated. 

• Do Your Research. Unless you're fine trying to wrangle a bunch of disparate systems, try to figure out which devices are compatible with other devices, or platforms. Google Assistant is Google's voice assistant/smart home platform. Amazon has Alexa for both their voice assistant and HA platform. Apple has Siri for their voice assistant and Homekit for their HA platform. Samsung has Bixby for their voice assistant and Smartthings for their HA platform. While this may sound daunting, most smart devices are compatible with multiple platforms, but try to pick devices that are compatible with all 4, or at least the big 3 (Google, Alexa, and Homekit). This way, you're not locked into one platform, should you decide to change course in the future. Which one you go with may be guided by which smartphone ecosystem you're invested in (Apple iOS vs Google Android). As someone who's deep in the Apple ecosystem (with Macs, iOS devices, Apple TVs, etc.), I'm building my smart home around the Homekit platform, but I'm keeping my options open by choosing devices that are compatible with other services. 

• Think about how everyone in your home will interact with the device. It used to be common to have touch-screen controls for everything in an HA setup. For some it was just a common control center. For others, it was the "techyness" of having wall-mounted tablet that tickled their fancy. With the increasing popularity and usability around voice assistants like Alexa and Siri, voice control can be yet another way to interact with your home, or it can just add complexity. Personally, I try to choose devices that, while smart, can be used similarly or identically to the "dumb" way of using them. For example, a smart light switch that you can still turn on like a normal light if you want.  

At the end of the day, this advice is up to you to take it or leave it. If you're fine having an app for your ceiling fans, another for your light switches, another for your vacuum, etc., then you do you. Whether you're going for a pro-level integration or you enjoy the novelty of controlling common household items with an app, it's all about figuring out what works best for you. My hope is that this post helps you think of different perspectives that you may not have thought about when it comes to planning your smart home. Good luck and don't be shy showing off those setups!