Smart Home
The term smart home covers the networking of home technology and household appliances as well as consumer electronics and their data storage. The networking of the devices can be equipped with logic that allows functions to be carried out depending on certain device states. The focus is on increasing the quality of living and life, efficient energy use and security.
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Prerequisite for use
The requirements for using smart home technologies are very low. All that is needed to access the networked devices from outside the home network is an internet connection. A smart home can also be retrofitted at low cost. The IoT devices can be operated in various ways, for example via a smartphone app or a voice assistant such as Alexa, Google or Siri.
Scenarios
If you would like to execute several functionalities through one command, the smart home systems offer the possibility of using scenarios. In this case, several executable commands, such as opening the blinds and reading out the messages, as well as preparing a coffee, for example, can be executed with the command "Good morning". Setting up such scenarios is child's play in provided apps.
Since the IoT devices often also have sensors , the execution of a command can also be carried out automatically on the basis of the sensor values. One example is watering the lawn in the garden. By measuring the soil moisture, the time of day and the sunlight, the lawn can be automatically watered whenever the lawn is dry, it is evening and the sun is not shining strongly. In this way, the lawn always receives the necessary watering at the optimal time, without burning in the midday sun, for example.
Some manufacturers design their IoT devices to be open to interfaces so that these data can be accessed and their own conditions can be defined. In this case, the user is already in the programming area. However, many suppliers provide software in which the customised scenarios can be set up through visual programming (low code) without having to set them up with classic manual programming.