11.2 The Long View

While all of this automation designed around making our home lives easier is truly awesome, the one key dependency to making it all work is electricity. But you can imagine the demands placed on our planet’s resources if everyone had the luxury of fully automated homes. Hopefully the next generation of entrepreneurs will do for energy collection and distribution what my generation did for computers and global communications. Smart grids, sustainable energy sources, and respect for the environment will be just as important as the inexpensive sensors, standard protocols, and ubiquitous secure wireless communication that automation products of the future will need to support.

Assuming the energy problem is accounted for, the likelihood of low-power sensors and hardware messaging systems will mushroom. How many computers, monitors, clocks, radios, phones, tablets, and entertainment consoles do you have plugged into your home’s power outlets? Forty years ago, besides lighting and refrigeration, there might have been one or two TVs, an LP turntable, a few radios, and maybe an electric clock. Forty years from now, it’s possible that there will be half a dozen electronic devices networked in every room and in constant chatter with their peers. Centralized services will monitor messages for events and reacting accordingly. So what will this look like?

The Home Is the Computer

Imagine taking the projects in this book and expanding them in various ways for every room in your home. Automation is everywhere and the air is busy with messages being sent to your server for processing. Perhaps this server is a virtual private server in the cloud, or maybe the message bus is being managed by a third-party provider. Your home will be able to immediately inform you of any alerts and will also be able to sense your presence and react accordingly. Image and voice recognition systems will know who you are and orient the home’s services to your preferences. You will live in a sensor-filled environment and it will be just as natural and effortless as tweeting from your phone is today. The data collected will be analyzed and refined to fit your lifestyle. Your home will be capable of predicting your lifestyle activities based on external factors like the season and time of day, local weather, package deliveries, type of visitors, duration of presence, preferred mode and style of digital entertainment, and the frequency and filtering of alerts.

The Embedded Mattress

Electronic components are getting less expensive by the day. Considering how much computing power there is in a thirty-dollar Arduino board compared to the cost of the same level of computing ten years ago, it’s not too difficult to imagine how even more computing capacity will be available for even less expense in the future. Combine these microcontrollers with inexpensive embedded sensors, and the home will be abuzz with information interaction. When you leave for the day, your home will power down to sleep mode, ensuring that gas and electricity consumption are kept to an operating minimum. When you nod off to sleep, pressure sensors in your bed will know if you had a restful or restless night and accommodate the alarm in the morning. Each door could be wired so your house will know your traversal patterns and preemptively turn on lights and appliances accordingly.

For example, the house will know you wake up for work every morning at six o’clock, take a shower, and head to the kitchen for a cup of coffee thirty minutes later. After triggering your alarm clock, the shower will turn on and the water will be warm just as you enter. While you’re getting dressed, coffee will be freshly brewing and ready by the time you reach the kitchen. The house will also know that you sleep in until eight o’clock on Saturdays and don’t follow the same routine, so it will toggle to manual mode for the daily waking ritual. Not surprisingly, this scenario can be programmed and implemented today with the tools and technologies we used in the book’s projects. But when the electronics get cheap enough, the cloud gets robust enough, and the interfaces are standardized enough, a greater number of people will come to expect this type of scenario.