You have a smart home when you own at least one smart device. Let us say you have a smart speaker and a smart television. By the dictionary definition, your home is smart. But what if you could turn a typical smart home into a veritable genius of convenience and efficiency? You can with automations.
Automations are the smart home’s secret sauce. They are what turn an average smart home into the residential equivalent of Albert Einstein. Learning how to create them takes things to the next level. It takes them into a whole new world of technological capabilities.
A Basic Definition
The experts at Vivint explain that automations are the brains of the system. They are more or less if-then loops that trigger devices to do certain things. They are also just one of four components that make home automation work. The other three are:
- Scripts – Scripts are written sets of instructions that control devices, forcing them to do certain things in a certain order.
- Scenes – Scenes are parameters that determine the state of one or more devices. You could create a simple scene that sets the state of all your smart light switches to ‘off’.
- Helpers – Helpers are virtual switches or variables that can be used to set conditions for any device in a system. Helpers act as memory for automations and scripts.
For the purposes of this post, automation is the most important of the four. It is what tells the devices in your system to behave the way you want them to, when you want them to.
Simple Automations (Time and State)
The simplest automations are based on time or device state. They tend to be single-trigger automations as well. Here are two examples:
- If the time is 6 PM, turn on the exterior lights around the patio.
- At 7 AM, activate the smart plug that powers the coffeemaker.
Each of these basic automations relies on a single trigger. As such, they are easy to program. They are the types of automation through which most people get their feet wet.
Intermediate Automations (Sensor-Based)
Next up is intermediate automation. They go beyond simple conditions or triggers to accommodate real-world conditions. More importantly, they are sensor-based. They make your smart home more aware, so to speak. Here are some examples:
- Installing motion sensors and then programming lights to turn on or off depending on motion and occupancy.
- Installing a context sensor on the garage door and programming your system to alert you if it is left open.
The fundamental difference here is that you can program your system to react to sensors in different ways. For example, you could program the garage door sensor to only alert you after 4 PM.
Complex Automations (Multiple Devices)
The crown jewel is the complex automation that engages multiple devices. Imagine an automation that turns out all the lights, arms your security system, locks the front door, and checks to make sure the garage door is closed – all as you drive away from your home. You only issue a single verbal command to start the automation going.
Complex automations make it possible to integrate just about any device in a smart home system with any other. They can be especially useful in customizing smart home automation in ways that apply to your home and no one’s. That’s one of the things that makes them so intriguing.
If you are new to home automation, do yourself a favor and learn how to create automation. They can turn your basic smart home into a home automation genius.