“A whole new world opens up when you get these various systems all talking to each other” Paul looks at the various ways to join home automation, IoT and other connected systems together
As I sit here at my desk, I can see an electronic radiator valve that’s part of my Evohome setup, an Arlo camera just outside the window and a Wi-Fi controllable aircon unit on the wall. Naturally, me being me, there’s loads more stuff like this all around my home and back at my office.
These pieces of tech work just fine in a standalone manner. Some need internet access (such as my Arlo cameras), while some will continue to work without external connectivity (thankfully, my Evohome heating fits into that category; if the internet goes down, my radiators stay toasty). But none of these systems need to be interfaced with anything else to work properly. You can just treat them as individual, unrelated products.
I’m sure that many people who buy these things are perfectly happy using them in a discrete manner too. Perhaps they interact with an app on their phone, but nothing really beyond that.
The thing is: there’s a whole new world that opens up when you get these various systems all talking to each other, and also to other bits of kit around your home or office. For example, sitting here I can say “Alexa, show me the side gate” and the Echo Show on my desk will fire up an integration between the Alexa system and the cloud-based back-end to my Arlo cameras. Within a second or so, up pops a live image of what’s going on at the side of the house – although it’s usually a spider crawling across the camera lens.
Likewise, I have routines running in Domoticz that monitor how much electricity I’m currently exporting to the grid from my solar panels. If it’s more than a kilowatt or so, and if I have my heating on, the routine turns down the heating and uses the aircon units in heating mode instead – it’s much cheaper to use effectively free electricity than my gas-fired boiler to heat the house. It’s greener too, as any surplus generation from my solar panels has a zero carbon footprint.
There are numerous options for persuading these systems to talk to each other. Sometimes they will communicate directly, such as the Echo Show and Arlo example I gave above. There’s also an Alexa skill that links directly from Amazon’s cloud infrastructure to Arlo’s (which is hosted on Amazon’s AWS so there’s not much of a journey involved for any data!).
Other times, when there’s no direct connection available between two systems, you’ll need some kind of glue – a third-party system or product that sits in the middle and passes messages and data between the products and systems.
Probably the bestknown glue out there is IFTTT (If This Then That). It’s a simple trigger and action service, and the most basic version is free. But when I say basic I mean basic – there’s no “If This Then That Then Whatever” or similarly complex facilities available in the free version. There’s also a limit to the number of routines you can set up on a free account (although there’s nothing to stop you