ISSUE386|COMPUTER SHOPPER|APRIL2020 95
O
ne of the ways in which you can
really bring asmart home to lifeisby
using automation, making your
house respond to your needs. There are many
systems you can use to automateyourhome,
and we’ll look at the most popular ones over
the next fewpages. Before we get intothem,
automation and control need to be thought
about carefully,sohere are some rules on
what to do and what to avoid when you’re
configuring your home.
DO LOOK AT
AUTOMATIONS IN THE APP
Automating your home doesn’t
mean you have to use athird-party system, as
often thebestautomation comes from inside
adevice’s app.For example,ifyou configure a
Philips Hue motion sensor through the Hue
app,you can make it only turn on lights when
it’s dark in aroom; use the Hue motion sensor
in an Amazon Alexa routine and you can’t take
advantage of the light sensor.
DON’T USE AUTOMATION
WHERE IT MESSES UP
MANUAL ACTIONS
Be careful using automation that can mess up
what you want to do manually.For example,if
you use amotion sensor to turn on lights in
your living room, if you turn the lights off to
watch afilm,the slightest movement will have
your lights come on, ruining everything.DO USEDEVICES IN
MULTIPLE LOCATIONS
Reuse sensors where you can. For
example,you can have aHue motion sensor
control lights, but you can also use that same
sensor in Alexa or Apple HomeKit to do other
things, such as turning asmart plug on or off.DON’T MAKE
AUTOMATIONS THAT
DON’T MAKE SENSE
This maysound obvious, but it’s easy to make
amistake.For example,ifyou have asmart
door lock that can synchronise with an alarm
system, it makes sense to have your alarm turn
off automatically when the door is unlocked.
Youmay thinkitmakes sense to reverse the
logic and have your alarm turn on when the
door is locked, but what happens when you
lock the door at night? In this case,itmakes
more sense to arm your alarm manually.DO USEGEOFENCING
CAREFULLY
Having things happen when you
leave or return home,such as turning yourheating to economy mode,sounds like magic,
but be very careful of geofencing. Using it
assumes that everyone in your home has a
phone that’s being tracked, but if you often
have people to stayoryou have family
members without phones, geofencing can be
anightmare.For example,ifyou have afriend
to stay and you pop around the corner,you
don’t want the heating to turn off.DON’T BE AFRAID
Experiment with different services
and options to see what you can do.
Very often, there’sananswertothe problem
that you want, but you’ll need to experiment
to getthe logic correct. Only through trial and
error can you improve things and get the
interactions you want.DO FIND WORKAROUNDS
There are often plenty of
workarounds you can use,using one
device’s capabilities to trigger something else.
Forexample,ifyou have asmart plug
connected to alight in ahallcupboard that’s
not SmartThings-compatible,you can use
IFTTT with aSmartThings Open/Closed sensor
to detect when adoor has been opened to
turn the plug on; another IFTTT rule can turn
the plug off when the door closes.GETTING
STARTEDWITH
AUTOMATION
You can make your h
ouse respondthe way you want it to
automatically,butbeforeyoustartfind
outwhattodoandwhattoavoid