Andy's Blog

I had mentioned a long time ago that I was working on some solutions for light switches. At that time there were not a lot of out of the box solutions that weren't Z-Wave or Zigbee based. Additionally, my old home mostly relied on lamps rather than ceiling lights leaving a few popular options at that time - Sonoff, commercial WiFi switches, or WiFi light-bulbs.

So, you're building a new home and want it to be ready for the Smart Home Revolution. Well, not to burst your bubble but, it won't be - not entirely. Until there are standards in place for that future home, you'll just have to make your home as standardized as is currently possible and probable.

This is an interesting read that is supposed to be a product launch announcement but wound up being more of an indictment of cloud requirements by hardware providers.

https://blog.ui.com/2019/01/09/introducing-unifi-protect/

Ok, the secret to having a reliable, certified, inexpensive smoke detector may be in overlooked option that exists in some industrial smoke detectors - A/C relays. What do you really need in a "smart" smoke detector? For me, knowing which smoke detector went off is what I care about the most. Second is the ability for that information to be used in automation and notification. So, what I really need is a signal wire that tells my system that this particular unit detected something.