Home automation has come to the iPhone with sophisticated tools that let you automatically turn lights on at sunset, receive a text if the front door opens at night, or turn on airconditioning when your cat goes to the litter.
This capacity - where you put together a list of events and decide how connected home appliances respond - comes courtesy of Belkin's WeMo home automation system, which quietly went on sale in Australia about two weeks ago.
WeMo switches fit in wall sockets and control devices plugged into their backs.
The system isn't cheap if you want to wire up a lot of appliances and control them all remotely from your iPhone. But for $59.95 for a single WeMo switch, which lets you connect a single appliance or power board, and $119.95 for the WeMo switch and a separate motion sensor, it's not expensive to buy one unit and try WeMo out.
ExecTech first saw WeMo at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last year, so it's taken time to get here. What was not evident then was the scope of the triggers you can use to switch appliances on and off, with WeMo using a new protocol called IFTTT, which we will explain here.
In our trial, we set up three devices on one home WiFi network - two WeMo switches and one motion sensor.
We started by downloading the WeMo app for iPhone/iPad and plugging in one of the devices to a power socket. It is recommended that you set up one WeMo at a time. The WeMo is a bit fat and took up two sockets' space on a power board.
Next, we fired up the app to get the iPhone and WeMo to talk to each other. Once connected, the WeMo became a member of the home WiFi network. An iPhone can talk to a WeMo over a cellular network, so you can control appliances from kilometres away.
For example, you can turn on your home coffee machine from your iPhone while walking back from a supermarket, so it's ready to pour when you get home. You can remotely switch on an airconditioner, open a WeMo connected garage door from a car with your iPhone, or remotely switch on a lamp in your lounge room to deter burglars.
You can in theory control any plugged-in device: stereos, lights, fans, airconditioners.
The second Belkin package, WeMo switch and motion, is two devices: a motion sensor that you plug in at one location and a regular WeMo switch. Using the WeMo app, you can set up rules that link what WeMo switches do when motion is detected.
For example, if the motion sensor detects someone in your lounge room, a WeMo connected lamp can be set to switch on and stay on until, say, a minute after all motion ceases. If you make a habit of visiting the bathroom in the middle of the night, WeMos can switch lights on as you walk down the hallway half asleep.
The WeMo app lets you set up time rules: you can have home appliances switch on and off at any time, on selected days of the week, weekdays and weekends.
But there's much more to WeMo than being a glorified time switch. Adding motion sensors to a WeMo home network opens a myriad possibilities. One could install a WeMo motion sensor near an odorous cat litter, which then triggers a nearby air WeMo attached to an airconditioner to switch on for, say, 30 minutes, then switch off.
One could have a motion sensor near the bed so that, when you wake up, the coffee pot turns on, toast starts cooking, and the radio, TV and kitchen light all whir into action. You either buy a WeMo for each device or attach several to the same power board. You can set up rules in the WeMo app to ensure these activities happen, say, only after 6am, so that if you get up at 3am, your home doesn't rock into action and completely wake you and the neighbours.
ExecTech discovered these applications are the tip of the iceberg as WeMo is IFTTT compliant. If you know nothing about IFTTT, go to ifttt.com and join up. It is a recently created service that lets people create rules and relationships between all sorts of online entities, including social networks - around 60 in all.
Stocks are an entity, so you can set a rule that when a certain stock price reaches, say, $200, you get an email or SMS. When you are tagged in a Facebook photo, you can have a copy of the photo sent to DropBox. A job posted on Craigslist, for example, that meets certain search criteria can trigger an SMS.
The interesting news is WeMo is IFTTT compliant. You link your WeMos to your IFTTT account using a PIN. That means your WeMos can feature in IFTTT rules.
One IFTTT entity is weather - and its elements include local sunset times. That means you can establish a rule that when it is sunset, certain lights at home turn on. You can receive SMSs or emails whenever doors open, use Siri to operate lights, operate WeMo with tweets, and log appliance usage with your Google calendar. Everything can be linked.
With the WeMo and IFTTT you can turn your life into an avalanche of chained events, with events at certain times of the day and week triggering a flurry of appliance activity. Even if you don't buy an army of WeMos for all devices, having one or two will give you hours of amusement.
I would not connect a WeMo to devices such as heaters or appliances where prolonged use could be a fire risk.
These two WeMo devices are available through Apple stores with more apparently coming. They include baby monitors, light switches that install in walls, and eventually even WeMo globes with WiFi control and switching built into the base of the globe.
