Holiday Season (Christmas) in our Smart Home
So what does a smart home do at Christmas time?
Well, obviously it controls the Christmas lights, both the ones on the exterior and the ones on the Christmas tree and around the house. The indoor lights come on automatically at dusk and stay on provided the room they are in is occupied. Leave the house and they go off automatically. Walk back in and a strain-gauge under the living room floor detects your arrival and the tree lights and rope lights come right back on. Why waste energy lighting your Christmas tree if nobody can see it and why press light switches if you don't need to?
The exterior lights come on at dusk and go off around 9PM. During holiday seasons the permanent Christmas lights along the eaves of the house come on automatically too. But the house also understands whether it has visitors. This isn't something you need to tell it, it just figures it out by counting cars arriving and people coming in through the front door. If the house thinks it has visitors it will leave all the outside and Christmas lights on until the visitors have left. Again, there's nothing you need to tell it, this is a 'smart' home not a 'dumb' home, and this is real 'home automation' not 'home control'.
Another change that happens automatically during the holiday season is that the alert for a car coming down the drive changes to a subtle jingle bells sound. Normally the sound is the distant tweeting of birds and it's played quietly so that visitors don't even notice it. The residents of course know that there isn't some bird tweeting outside but that a car is approaching the house. The dogs know the sound too and go running to the door barking. With the change to jingle bells sound the dogs quickly figure that one out too. The only problem is that now, when jingle bells are heard on TV they both run off barking to the front door! If only home automation systems were as easy to train as dogs! The driveway sensor by the way is one of those magnetic detectors buried about 120' away to the side of the drive. It gives sufficient warning to prepare for a visitor before they even get to the front door.
One final change that happens automatically at this time of year concerns the music system in our house. My home automation software includes multi-channel audio playback through a zoned-audio switch. This allows any one of three sound cards to be connected to any set of speakers in the home. This means you can have exactly the same music playing across a whole floor, or indeed throughout the house, without any lag between rooms. In effect this is a poor man's Sonos as the cost of each additional source is about $7.50 for a USB sound card plus about $150 for a single zone amplifier. You instruct the music system to play back music either by chatting to it on Instant Messenger (it has its own XMPP address), by emailing it, or by putting an entry on the house's own Google calendar telling it when to start playback. For example, 'play songs added this week in office' would begin playback of any new music added to the system this week. And, the change that happens at this time of year is that the music playback subsystem allows Christmas music to play. That's right, for the rest of the year, no matter what random selection of music you ask it to play (e.g. every song with the word 'Bing' in the title, artist or album) you will not hear any Christmas music. This is one feature iTunes and every other music player should adopt!
