Everyone around me has developed a bug while quarantining in the pandemic. Now I am one of those who get a bug even when they are the busiest. Not having to travel to work and to meetings gave me some extra hours to burn. If you look at my Udemy courses, you’ll probably have a hard time understanding my professional or personal inclinations. I am taking courses in advance statistics, machine learning, blender, project management, Photoshop, history and a million other topics. Some of these courses are complete but majority of them are not. When I get over a bug, I usually get over the course too.

My latest bug is understanding IoT and use my knowledge to automate my home. Mind you, only automate for now. Making a home smart is a totally different ball game. How, you ask? Well, let me explain. Despite a lot of gurus using Home Automation and Smart Home interchangeably, I see them as different steps in evolution. They are as different as foraging and cooking. Home automation, at least in my eyes, is enabling the control of your home appliances without having to get up and manually flicking the switch that controls that appliance. Once you replace all your switches and receptacles with a remote controlled one, you can call your home automation journey complete. Making a home smart, a never ending journey in my opinion, is when your home anticipates a trigger before that trigger happens. Let me explain with some examples because examples are the best way to explain anything.

I am sitting on my couch, watching the season finale of Formula 1, and I ask my digital assistant to lower the blinds and to switch off the lights in my entertainment room. The loyal assistant interacts with my blinds motor, which is connected to my home automation hub, and asks it to lower the blinds. It also asks my light switch, which is again connected to my hub, to turn the lights off. This is the typical making of an automated home.

If my home anticipated my request to lower the blinds and switch off the lights when I switched on my tv, that would have been a smart home. The limit to which a home can be smart is not really a topic that we are even close to addressing. As in the world of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, the current gold standard of smartness for a machine or connected ecosystem is human intelligence. So, in a way, if my home is able to anticipate my needs in the same way another member of my family can, I can call my home smart.

In my research to automate my home, I am going to go over a multitude of topics including devices, software, integration and security. I must admit, it was a little overwhelming when I started researching and reading about all the different offerings from hardware manufacturers and software service providers. I made several mistakes on the way but the more important part is that I learned from them (that is what I tell my wife when I make an expensive mistake). In the end, I think I have figured out a good way to go about automating my home without breaking the bank. There is a lot of DIY involved because I enjoy getting my hands dirty and building stuff.

So, starting in my next post, I am going to go over some key automation that I have done around my home and, hopefully, in the process answer basic questions that someone in the same position as I was about six months ago would have.