[coldtea]

>Smart homes are not a thing of the future anymore. Right now, 100 “things” per second are connecting to the internet. By 2020, more than 250 things will connect each second.

Probably unpopular in a programming forum, but, aside for people with physical difficulties, did anyone (e.g. more than a few outliers, not literally anyone as in > 0) ever asked for a "smart home"?

And before someone replies with the quote about "faster horsers", did anyone, AFTER shown one, went anything but "meh"?

Anybody that show not just as "nice to have, ok, move on", on the level of battery powered toothbrushes, but as something that really impacts your life.

Seems more to me, like a few other things in tech, like a solution in search of a problem. In the say way nobody asked or wanted those "if you want to talk about your credit card, press 3", etc, automated speech recognition call services.

[vitaflo]

Depends how you phrase the question. Do I want a water sensor by my sump pump that will alert me if it overflows? Yes. Do I want to have my garage door close automatically if I forget to close it? Yeah that makes me feel safer. Do I want to be able to set the thermostat when I'm not at home? Yeah, that's handy.

Do I want to turn on lights, lock the doors, or raise the temp when I'm actually at home with a smartphone? No, that's just silly.

[prawn]

I think the meh comes from poor implementation. I have LIFX globes I can control with my phone but they're a pain - takes too long to open my phone, open the app, wait for it to connect, etc.

Done well, I would be very keen for home automation. The two rooms at the front of my house have six privacy blinds and six blackout blinds. They are a huge pain to deal with and so I would find very useful a solution that automatically opened the blackout blinds in the morning and closed them in the evening.

Or tracked soil moisture and controlled irrigation around the various areas of my garden. Or handled home security/monitoring.

I thought Microsoft's original Surface (the projection table) was going to end up being a hub for this sort of thing to control a home, store media, browse media schedules, etc but it seems to have fizzled weakly.