STACK #209 Mar 2022

LIFE TECH FEATURE

visit stack.com.au

THE SMART HOME

FEATURE

continued

Assistant, Apple Home Kit and Samsung SmartThings. As you'd expect, these four management systems offer fairly similar experiences, but being different brands in the free market means they all kinda deliberately don't play nice with each other. Whenever picking up a new piece to add to your ecosystem, always double check to see if it's compatible with your “smart home sports team” of choice. Obviously, if you favour all things i-device, then looking into an Apple Home Kit would be the natural choice. It's also worth mentioning that a ton of third-party devices will fall into either the Google Assistant category or Alexa's. Lastly, you can pick up devices that are centric to Samsung Smart Things and have them connect through your bog-standard Wi-Fi, not to mention Z-Wave and ZigBee. What on earth are those last two? They're widely popular automation systems that operate on different

ROCKING ROUTINES If you've got a bit of a creative streak, the good news is that singular cause and singular effect scenes are just the gateway to cooler things. Routines enable you to conflate multiple, disparate devices into one simple command. From the comfort of your chair and with a sole voice command – maybe “lounge lizard mode: engage” – you might tell your house to lock every door, dim the lights, fire up the next episode of your current TV series, put all phones on do not disturb and make your cat feeder cough up some chow (to ensure it has no cause to meow at you, mid-watch). Alternatively, you can even set routines to start without voice commands at a certain time, like your morning alarm time. For example, imagine waking up to freshly brewed

coffee, a pre-warmed house, a morning news summary tailored to your interest and then a calendar schedule review that wraps with a quick weather and projected traffic report. And hey – when it's time to leave, why not a separate routine that switches everything off and locks everything up as you

wireless frequencies to Bluetooth and Wireless (which is great for keeping data traffic issues to a minimum). They also play nice with an impressive range of non-proprietary devices, which is always a plus. SCENE TO BE BELIEVED With an ecosystem selected, it's time to move into common terms and concepts that are pretty much universally used. The first is a 'scene', a set of instructions you've set up for a device or devices connected to your ecosystem. Think of it as a simple bit of causality you've set up via an app on your smartphone — “if you ever see/hear this thing happen” then “do this thing in response.” Frankly, the possibilities are both endless and incredibly easy to make happen. A few personal examples from our own home setups: for an instant amp up, you could have Eye of the Tiger start to play whenever you approach your home gym. On the other end of the emotional spectrum, we know a guy who returns from work everyday to be serenaded with a mournful saxophone theme when he opens his front door. Yep, it's the same refrain that accompanies Danny Glover when he has an “I'm too old for this...” moment in Lethal Weapon . Creative!

schedule it for certain hours of the evening). Speaking of sensors, security is also of paramount concern, and the stress of remembering to lock up and monitor potential points of burglar ingress really shouldn't have to be on your mind all the time. A thief-deterring lighting array is easy to set up, and a camera system that sends its footage to the safety of the cloud isn't much more difficult to rig up, either. On the topic of being the all- powerful master of thy own domain, you can effectively be a control

sprint out the door? WHY BOTHER BEING SMART?

Convenience is certainly a big positive of the smart home experience, but what other important benefits can they offer? Well, in the

current age that has a much higher percentage of us working from home, energy efficiency and the need to keep running costs down is well worth considering. Having a smart system that knows when you're active and when you're not can be quite the boon if you're determined to not spend needless bucks. A simple solution here would be a smart sensor hooked to engage a smart light (or you could simply pre-

freak from afar. With everything neatly tied to your mobile phone, if you have an internet connection, your house is still at your fingertips. That's great news if you want to either change something while you're at work or keep an eye on things / pets when you're vacationing. It also presents amazing opportunities to prank any housesitters you've hired. This last one could just be an us thing.

34 MARCH 2022

jbhifi.com.au