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Not-Too-Smart Smart Home

The term smart home gets thrown around a lot, because companies love marketing. The truth is, smart home just means your gadgets can network—so they can talk to each other and the Internet if you want. This means there’s a spectrum of functionality that can fall under the smart home umbrella. Today we’re going to…

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7 years ago

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The term smart home gets thrown around a lot, because companies love marketing. The truth is, smart home just means your gadgets can network—so they can talk to each other and the Internet if you want. This means there’s a spectrum of functionality that can fall under the smart home umbrella. Today we’re going to talk about a pretty dumb smart home.

This is the kind of home you’re not going to have a conversation with, but you’ll be able do things like control it with your phone remotely. That’s what we’re looking at here, and it comprises three things:

1. A really good router. You can hook your house up to whatever the cable company gives you, but it’s not ideal. If you’re going to spend on one aspect of your connected home, buy a really good router setup: this allows your gadgets to talk to each other, which is the whole point.

2. A hub, a central control center. This could be a smart speaker or a purpose-built smart home hub. We’re going to use the Google Home app, because it’s really flexible—i.e., you can decide to add more functionality to it pretty easily—and because it’s incredibly simple to use.

3.Your smart gadgets. We’re going to keep it pretty simple: we’re hooking up a smart thermostat and some lights. This is a baseline smart home, and almost anyone can set one of these up in an evening or a weekend day.

* * *

VIDEO BY
Joe Brown & Tom McNamara

For more not too smart home explainers, go to

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8 Comments

8 Comments

  1. Amy Schellenbaum

    January 3, 2019 at 3:52 pm

    This is cool! More of this!!

    Reply

  2. Kurt Palmer

    January 3, 2019 at 10:46 pm

    did you say DSL !!!?? drop you phone company as soon as residential 5G is available (I assume there are no other offers for faster uplink)

    Reply

  3. John Huynh

    January 4, 2019 at 2:24 am

    Great videography

    Reply

    • Popular Science

      January 4, 2019 at 3:31 pm

      Thanks!

      Reply

  4. Ziyad Yamut

    January 4, 2019 at 8:08 am

    I guess it’s paving the way for IoT or internet of things !

    Reply

  5. jamie cooper

    January 5, 2019 at 7:46 pm

    next you should get a roomba, and consider phillips hue for your lights, I found they are more reliable as you add more lights than just wifi bulbs, hue uses a dock instead of just filling up your open wifi slots.

    Reply

  6. jingles8302

    January 8, 2019 at 9:13 am

    LIFX bulbs are great! You got to check out the color ones!

    Reply

  7. do be

    January 21, 2019 at 4:57 pm

    the wi-fi is a DUMP of your life !

    Reply

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