This weekend, we took another step in our home automation quest. We have used smart switches (for lamps), smart thermostats, smart music, smart cars, and even smart timers. But until Saturday, we did not have any smart lights, per se. On Saturday, we bought some Philips Hue lights (and the associated hub). That means that we now have Ethernet (i.e., wired) devices, Wifi devices, and now Zigbee devices.
Is this a big deal? The answer to that is somewhat nuanced. We’ve had smart home puzzle pieces for a while. And we almost bought a Z-Wave infrastructure to put smart switches in place. But the age of our house makes this impractical. [We don’t have neutral wires on any switches in the house. And the price to refurbish these switches would be prohibitive.] So our home automation quest stalled. But on Saturday, I could take it no more. When we went out on errands, we stopped and picked up five (5) Hue lights.
Just Add Lights
The installation and setup was simple. It took almost no time to get everything installed and paired. And within a little more than an hour, we had functioning lights in the second floor hallway and in our master bedroom. Over the next year, we can start to populate the various ceiling fans in the house. I figure that we can do this whenever we need to replace the incandescent bulbs that are currently installed. Given our current pace of replacement, I’m figuring that it will take a year or so to retrofit the house.
After getting everything installed, I started to make an inventory of our various smart home investments. As of today, we have the following pieces:
Current “On-Premises” Infrastructure
Today, we have so many physical (and logical) pieces in our home automation puzzle:
- Network: Cisco network switch, Cisco VPN appliance, Netgear router, NordVPN proxy, Raspberry Pi ad blocking, Raspberry Pi DNS
- Print: Hewlett-Packard printer
- Entertainment: Plex media server (on PC desktop), Roku media player, Samsung TV, Silicon Dust HDHomeRun player
- Storage: Synology storage, WD MyCloud storage
- IoT: Amazon Echo Dot speakers, Huawei sensor/camera (on surplus phone), Kia Soul, Personal location / presence (on personal phones), Philips Hue lights, Raspberry Pi home automation appliance, TP-Link Kasa switches, WeightGURUS scale
Current “Off-Premises” Services
While we have lots of smart pieces in the house, we also have more than a few external cloud services providers. In most of these cases, these services allow us to extend “access” beyond the confines of our network. Our current list of services includes:
- Lobostrategies Business: Bluehost, GoDaddy
- Olsen Personal: Amazon Alexa, Dropbox, Google Drive, Google GMail, Home Assistant cloud, IFTTT cloud, Plex cloud, Pushbullet cloud, TP-Link Kasa cloud, WD MyCloud
So after adding yet another home automation “category” to the premises, we learned an important lesson: external access requires a measure of trust – and diligence. If you aren’t willing to secure your devices, then you must accept the consequences of an electronic intrusion.