Just One Thing Will Make Your Smart Home Stupid
It all works great, until it doesn’t.
My wife and I bought a new home, and during some remodeling, I thought it would be a great opportunity to add smart home devices.
I thought the tech was ready. I was wrong.
The brains of the outfit we decided on is from a company called Brilliant (not an affiliate link). They pass themselves off as a master controller that you put in place of your light switches. We bought several. They have a nifty touchscreen that’s intended to control your lights, your music system, your thermostat, and more from a variety of manufacturers. They have cameras (that you can cover, if needed), and also work with other camera systems like Ring to show you who’s at the door.
It accepts voice control. It works with Sonos, it works with Philips Hue lights. It sounded like, well, a Brilliant idea.
My mistake may be that I was hoping to take the best of each IoT ecosystem and get them to cooperate. Should be easy, right? Instead, I can barely get everything to talk to each other. Every system uses its own app with its own setup, and then you link them, say, to Alexa. Then you struggle with the Alexa app to name devices, get them in groups, and set timers and schedules, only to find that sometimes they work, and sometimes…
