Like many kids my age, growing up Saturday mornings meant getting up early and watching cartoons on television until my parents would get up. We had the channel line-up memorized and could tell you exactly what was on every channel for a given time slot until noon when kids programming would give way usually to the Baseball Game of the Week (another program I would never miss).
Our Saturday morning ritual would be to quietly get up so we didn't wake our parents. We would go into the kitchen and pull out our favorite sugar filled cereal and pour a big bowl. Sometimes we would pour milk but most of the time we would just eat it dry (I seriously cannot be the only kid that ate cereal without milk). After getting the cereal we would go into the living room and turn on the television with the volume turned down (again, don't wake the parents otherwise they may make you put milk on your cereal). We all had our favorite cartoons that we would look forward to every week. It didn't matter if we had seen a particular episode a hundred times, you didn't miss your favorite show.
My favorite was the Jetsons. I mean who wouldn't like that program. The writing was first class (at least for a kid my age), and they always had the coolest gadgets. Oh sure, everyone was gaga over the flying car and we all looked forward to the future when we had one of those so we didn't have to deal with traffic but my favorite part was the Jetson house.
First they had a robot maid named Rosie that had all kinds of buttons and dials. She was always so helpful around the house and it was amazing how she could clear the dining room table by putting the dirty dishes inside of her and they would come out spotless. Added benefits was Rosie was always available for Elroy no matter what he needed and she could even provide sound advice to George and Jane Jetson if she were called upon. Rosie definitely ran that house.
And what an amazing house. They had a television screen that acted as a video telephone. You could make a call simply by telling the house who you wanted to call. The video telephone would follow you around from room-to-room so you were not tied to a single place and there were no cords and it never needed to be recharged. The house itself was all connected. Lights, doors, windows, even access to the parking garage under the house so you could fly to work or take Judy to whatever teen concert she had electronic tickets to. The only problem I could find with that house was that Astro always seemed to be smarter than the electronic dog-walking treadmill. The house showed that you didn't need a lot of technical skill to make it work. Perhaps the only thing it could have used was a digital assistant like Siri so George could stop that crazy treadmill when Astro got it going too fast. With a role model like the Jetson house, I grew up just waiting for the future when we could have a house like that.
After buying a house ourselves I realized how far away from the Jetson model we actually were. None of the bells and whistles I had dreamed of were possible especially not in rural Idaho where we were living at the time. Things were slightly better when we moved to Arizona. The intersection of infrastructure and technology finally provide a minimal amount of automation. In the early testing days it included DIY products such as X-10 which could accomplish some rudimentary functions like automating lights going on and off but that was about it.
So when smart home technology suddenly started to become more mainstream with companies such as Nest and Ring, the time was right to begin to create the ultimate smart home. The going has not been easy. There have been many starts and stops and a lot of dead ends but I am starting to finally realize my dream. As someone who has a fairly large Apple ecosystem with all the devices my family owns, it made sense to standardize on HomeKit.
This section will be a place to read about some of my adventures in home automation to hopefully help you to not repeat the problems I caused myself. I am far from complete and I have now been doing this long enough to realize I will probably never be done because as soon as I think I have everything I need, something new comes around and I replace whole pieces that were previously thought to be complete.
Back
