Gadgetory

getting smart home technology for a home of the future has never been easier there are a smart versions of just about every household item smart lights smart speakers even a smart refrigerator but connecting them all together to make a truly smarter home can be a nightmare so how do we connect the home of the future well you need a serious brain like this thing and to integrate it requires some serious brain power Pete Sanford is the owner of smarter homes a company that helps to customize and maintain home automation systems he's what's known as an integrator and his role is to bring all the smart devices of the home together which is essential for the home of the future we're building here in Austin Texas because we got a truckload of cutting-edge technology to install this is probably 25% of what's gonna come and make the home of the future you're kiddin me no but the future has a lot of stuff in it takes a lot of parts and pieces and everything's got to speak the same language wow that's a lot of languages oh yeah someday these devices might be fluent right out of the box but for now we need an integrator like Pete to give the different dialects universal language and even a tech-savvy guy like me who's more than capable installing his own smart devices what I have is hands full trying to unify everything over the next month or so Pete and his team will work to wire the home to handle all the smart technology were packing into it now maybe you're thinking wires shouldn't our future be more Wireless while there are some promising developments in wireless power we're still years away from having anything reliably enough to even consider installing in our home so instead for Pete and his team their goal is to make these wires invisible so Peter this is the moment of truth I mean last time I was here this was just a whole wall with a bunch of wires coming out of it and now we have the super computer brain of our house I mean when I think of a supercomputer I think of war games and the Whopper computer that but this is gorgeous what's inside here everything this is as good as it gets when we're talking smart home technology so here we've got our two Sonos players for feeding the indoor and outdoor audio our wat box which is acting as a cutoff for power to each individual piece of equipment we've got our luck so switch which is feeding network to all the individual pieces of of components we've also got our AT&T modem that's feeding the internet from the street into our system here and then out throughout the house our Denon surround sound receiver which is handling all of the surround sound in this room and the video and audio in the next room we've got our Lutron communicator which is wirelessly communicating with all the light switches our to Roku players for both this room and the bedroom our amplifier here which is powering all of the landscape speakers and subterranean subwoofer we've got our PlayStation 4 for gaming and finally probably the most important part in here is the brain which is the RTI XP a processor and this really helps us bring all of these individual items together and integrate them onto one easy-to-use interface you don't have a million remote yeah or a million apps that RT Isis and the peat mentioned you can think of it as the operating system for the entire house and it's highly customizable based on the user's needs so this is the whole interface for everything that's in that rack yep this is remote Technologies Inc sitting with us as Matt he is our wizard or RTI programmer and he's the one who makes the system easy to use and function organically with a family so through this interface you're controlling everything in the house of the future pretty much everything some devices don't connect into automation systems they or they might have a closed or a partially closed API API or application programming interface is the key part of how you integrate products and for the home devices with very open ap is allow us to integrate their controls in a deep way with the home system whereas devices with closed api's block our ability to link their features with the rest of the home for example our anest security camera on the front door has a closed API so we couldn't get that camera feed into the RTI system in contrast the IP cameras around the home are completely able to be integrated with RTI which allows us to pull up a feed of what's going on around the home directly from the RTI system so this is the dashboard for the entire home got our controls and activities for the living room our patio audio our nest climate control for the whole house normally in most systems you'll just see it'll say Apple TV here we've dialed it into specific apps so I know I've watched Netflix i watch hulu everything that needs to happen to watch netflix then happens at the push of that one button without navigating anything okay so let's say I got a new gaming system I guess you got a ps4 what if I got an Xbox we could just grab an Xbox icon and then program it to where it'll switch to that that gaming input for the Xbox just at the single push of a button RTI is also able to plug into a LexA which opens up the entire system to voice control however it introduces an extra step instead of saying Alexa turn on Netflix I'll say Alexa tell a home Butler to turn on Netflix it's a little more awkward and frustrating if you forget but soon we're told that the system will be upgraded to avoid having to do this additional step but that's kind of the easy side of the programming Matt gets into more of the advanced side where you'll have shortcuts you know for things that you do everyday so like good morning or good night or welcome home or away so show me what welcome home does so to come in here open up that function you'll see right now we've got that program to set living R into Netflix playing some music in the landscape we're altering the thermostat temperature to 70 then we've turn on some lights in the kitchen living room but only if it's dark so if you're coming home in the day the rest of the functions will still happen but the lots will stay off to conserve energy and that level of house what control of our devices is really the strength of a system like RTI the ability to string together so many devices to function as one home is the goal of the home future the downside to the smart integration well besides the upfront fees there's a $30 monthly service charge for tech support and a twice a year visit from a programmer to make any changes so Matt I'm look I'm getting really excited because I'm an engineer is this something that I could take this software and run with it myself no the end-user doesn't actually typically program this system we do that just for the sake that we can make sure we get everything in the right order you're saying now to prevent me from being a danger to myself correct and what would take a lot of work to attempt this kind of high level integration ourselves a low-cost workaround is to use only smart devices that already speak the same language for example if you got Google home chromecast and hue lights you could probably get most the features that we have in our home for under 200 bucks but for the home of the future having a bunch of smart devices alone isn't good enough all this technology needs to function together seamlessly my job as the integrators to take all of these things and make them all communicate together on one system that's easy to use we might not be all the way there yet but we're closer than ever for now our home of the future is as unified as it gets making life more convenient and enjoyable with the push of a button thank you so much for watching now that you know what it takes to connect the devices inside of our home of the future how do you integrate the devices inside of your home let us know in the comments below and we'll see you next week with a new episode