Gadgetory

when we talk about the Internet of Things what we're really talking about is this group of items things that traditionally never been digital and we're connecting them to the Internet doors and windows it's coffee pots it's slow cookers these are all real examples but the thing is with the Internet of Things is right now we're in a phase where it's a kind of a Wild West not everything is talking to each other we have so many internet thing items so many connected devices but we're really not asking ourselves what should these do more importantly what shouldn't these things do how do we interact with them this is Matt a co-founder of one button it's a company that specializes in home technology and automation but his ideas about the home of the future are a little more practical and down-to-earth and you might think to me what a smart home is is a home that's controllable and well designed but you don't like that being called smart because the other thing it's a little more or less human friendly is also considered a smart home right smart home would typically imply that there's some degree of intelligence going on we really like to think the intelligence comes into the design so what are we looking at here this is a future automations male ok the mounts designed to work specifically with this TV and that was just the controller like there's no iPhone app this time it's just the but this is a standard Harmony remote standard harmony remote so why go with a physical piece of hardware a physical remote versus a phone ultimately convenience factor it's tough to beat something you pick up press a button pulling out your phone unlocking it it's going to the right app launching the app waiting brick to load pressing the volume down far more steps there than just having something tangible in front of you what does the internet things mean to you in many ways it's a whole bunch of solutions looking for a problem so there's a whole lot of neat things that you can do out there but not certainly a lot of compelling use cases yet so most of our clients when they come to us they don't want all the things they've been experiencing the drawbacks and all the technology creeping into things that might not provide all the benefits so we have a full music system in here we've got six sono zones also we've automated all the shades and lights in the space so this is all based on the Lutron radio Ratu system both for lighting and shade control so both shades and lights can be fully controlled from the iPad for the most part we don't like to rely on the iPad for day-to-day control people are going to use the keypads on the wall which are also mirrored here so the keypads we put them in the entry thresholds and that's what you're going to use most of the time so you come into your house and you're gonna press a button entry and it's going to turn on a path of lights to the space we're gonna occupy is there an element of these companies just throwing smart devices out there just because they can they look at people thing that has a chip or maybe does have a computer chip and go let's connect it to the internet let's see what happens yeah and I think that's currently the hazard of the Internet of Things and that's the state that we're in right now every time you add technology to something you're adding complexity so our consumers asking for a more complex coffee machine maybe not it's got to have some sort of compelling value it's got to do something that it doesn't already do this compelling enough to offset the extra complexity format this philosophy bleeds over into his own home we don't always have to have the newest flashiest technology at our disposal sometimes we have to work with what we've got matt has added new systems and retrofitted old ones to improve his own apartment this is the August lock that's remotely or locally lock and unlock the door so right now it's just communicating via bluetooth so I press that and it'll give us a lot now the big thing here of course is like what does this talk to you is there this is connected anything else in the house at this point right so it'll connect to a couple of things so I've got an S login and that allows me to see my temperature just right on that main screen so I can see that seventy-two degrees in the house okay so no hub or device needed it's just going directly to the nest login so the nest is talking to the cloud pulling that information down and then giving it to the nest as well when I lock the door it will ask me if it wants to set the nest to away so it'll conveniently let me right now say set to away and now the nest will become in a more conservative temperature mode so from the smart lock and it's actually talking to nest and this is one of the units is talking to you right here right so this is this seems like a hack job to me because I know this is like what came in with the apartment right it did just occur to me that just like a wall thermostat the PTAC unit here was using an identical device to a wall thermostat and then you could just as easily replace that with a nest as it could if it were in the wall so August is talking to nest one over there the nest of the bedroom is there a central hub are they talking directly to each other so we're seeing this shift in IOT from devices that are talking to a hub and kind of like a hub spoke model it's kind of more of a mesh network so for instance we're seeing things like the nest and the August lock talking to one another but not necessarily to my door sensor unless it needs to from lights to shades it turns out a smarter home is actually within reach for us and non-professionals let's give it a shot this is Sean okay he's a reporter and photographer at the verge and that's me in his apartment I brought along a lot of consumer level toys to make life in his house fully better so here's the plan we're going to try to improve three aspects of Sean's apartment music lighting and security I brought along a few options for each one first step music we chose the Sonos play three it's a standalone speaker and it doesn't require a Sonos hub box posts one button setup but it didn't tell you how many taps were required the Wi-Fi setup through the Sonos app seemed like it would never end we press the button again our already recognized in fact we couldn't get the Sonos to work at all without being hardwired to the router so it lives here now it sounds great and works solidly with many mini online audio services but they need to be controlled from so Knossos own proprietary app in fact you need to sign in to each service within the Sonos app even if you have that services app we're on your phone it's a great option for people who want the simplicity of a single destination for everything audio but I'm looking for a little more flexibility amazon's echo promises the same stand-alone wireless speaker experience but via standard bluetooth and as a Bluetooth speaker it sounds well pretty bad Alexa play no scrubs no scrubs by TLC from prime music that's not the only reason you want to buy an echo by saying Alexa followed by what you want the echo to do the speaker can surface music from Amazon streaming library read the news set timers and more Alexa how much time is left on the timer about 1 minute and 10 seconds like a lot of voice recognition in AI services it's hit or miss but when it works it actually feels like magic and I really liked having it in my kitchen so music is taken care of but there's another reason I brought along the echo - it's got hooks into lighting systems with philips hue and Belkin Wemo hue is a system of Wi-Fi enabled LED light bulbs that can change their color and brightness based on input from mobile apps web services and more the setup for the hue also took a very long time and involved waiting for the philips app to find the hardwired hue hub so that's one more break attached to the router but once it finally locked in the system works great from within the hue app and because it's got an open API things like the echo can hook into their abilities I can shout Alexa turn the living room light on and the echo will ping the hue service on the internet and that service will find the bulbs and turn them on this worked equally well with the Belkin Wemo system and in fact that could be even more powerful since we most switches are just on off wall outlets with some clever setup saying Alexa turn on the coffee pot could do just that we live in the future like guess so let's lock all this down I'm away from my apartment most of the day but my dog moose is not so I want to know if something goes wrong while I'm gone in case there's an emergency the nest Protect's smoke and carbon monoxide detector can alert my phone if something is amiss it's super loud to testing damnit and while I'm away I also want to make sure moose doesn't get into too much trouble that's where Dropcam also by nest comes in it's a small internet connected surveillance camera setting up the Dropcam was actually much easier than anything else we tried today we just connected an iphone to the cameras own Wi-Fi taught it about the apartments Wi-Fi and we were off the Dropcam app - some pretty cool things like alerting you when there are loud noises or when there's motion in the scene you can even set it so that you're only alerted when there's motion in part of the scene which is good because the Dropcam has a pretty wide view so where does this all leave us there's something fun and novel and maybe even useful about being able to control lights with your voice but it's hard to justify minor convenience when there's so much time spent setting up and troubleshooting and as a cost of each device start to add up it really is true that less is more the Internet of Things is just a sea of experiments and toys but the big question is how do all these toys actually talk to each other that's where projects like apple's homekit and google's brillo and weave come into play finding a common language among smart appliances is the next great platform war and there's really no clear winner yet but until then I'll just enjoy the simple jury-rigged pleasures of automatically hearing the sounds of Kaiser every time I open my back door me