Match moods indoors and out
Bring the outdoors in with a clever lighting tweak
Use smart bulbs to link the conditions outside to a certain colour
There’s nothing worse than starting your day in a warm and fuzzy mood and then meeting a great outdoors that hasn’t had the same idea. Creating equilibrium between a smart home and the dumb outdoors isn’t impossible, even if it would be easy to take this too far. Linking your thermostat to the temperature outside would be a little crazy – though, perhaps, tweaking your home’s temperature within a certain range might work without freezing you solid in your bed.
But that’s a project for another day. Rather than dealing with the physical – firing up a smart plug-connected fan when your home hits a certain heat level, for example, is a trivial task – let’s look instead at the mental aspect of the daily departure. Getting a morning weather report delivered is straightforward enough, given that it’s baked into the Alexa Flash Briefing, although you can do slightly better if you’re on an Amazon device: try using the Big Sky skill to pull in a hyperlocal and, most importantly, polite weather forecast. If you’re often angry in the morning, the phone app WTForecast will be more your slice of toast, given that it delivers the bad news with a liberal dose of vitriol and wanton cursing.
Let’s not talk to anyone, though. Let’s not even look at a screen with bleary eyes. Using IFTTT and a smart bulb or three, you can link the conditions outside to a certain colour light – a miserable purple for rain and a cold blue for cloud. The key to making this work is the crowdsourced and data-friendly Weather Underground service, though you could also use the outdoor portion of the Netatmo Weather Station if you were so inclined.