Pi of things

Home Automation

In the past few years Home Automation has made progress in leaps and bounds and our sci-fi fantasies of speaking to a computer to do various mundane day to day tasks have become real.

You no longer need to be the captain of a starship to turn on/off the lights or play our favourite music, by just ordering a computer to do so.

While cloud computing heralded this revolution, it very soon became an ugly ground of who can grab how much data from an unassuming user, and use it for ads or training their algorithms or something hidden away in corporate offices.

Privacy

Pi of Things saw this coming and has been around in the periphery for the last 10 odd years. However as they say - If you are working from someone else's dreams, someone else is working on yours.

Luckily enough, loads of like minded people have already come together and started on the drive to take "Home Automation" off the cloud. Primary among them is Home Assistant (HA) Project . HA is an awesome project if you are a tinkerer and not afraid to roll your sleeves up to do minor hacking to put your automation together.

HA obviously supports all the traditional cloud based automations too.

Pi of Things will strive to make HA more accessible and usable to the regular user. Users whose choose not to care about how a light turns on as they enter room as long as it turns on reliably on a dim dark day. More importantly, Pi of Things will show you how to keep your data private.

Data Visualisation

Home Automation can collect tons and tons of data. Big companies simply gobble this data up without giving end users a chance to derive benefits out of it.

Being able to see data visually helps us make informed choices, be it why our electricity bill is higher this month, or how far can we push ourselves to not turn that thermostat up to save gas, to something trivial as, how often do our plants need watering.