The Essentials: Living in IoT Hell (Premium)

Earlier this year, I wrote about my adventures in building a smart home in an attempt to make my life a little bit easier. The idea is that by allowing devices to be operated from a central control point, it should allow you to automate tasks that were previously only accomplished by physically interacting with the hardware.

In my house, I have a Nest thermostat, 10 iHome plugs, several Phillips Hue lights, and Sonos speakers that are all operated by an Echo (and sometimes my Invoke). For the most part, everything has gone well and connecting 'dumb' devices to the Internet does offer real value...that is, until it breaks.

In the world of Windows, we know that roughly on the second Tuesday of the month we will get patches and typically there is no issue. Of course, there are bad patches that can cause havoc but when you receive a bad update with IoT devices, the outcome is hilariously frustrating.

I say hilarious because why wouldn't you want your lights to turn on at 3 A.M. or even better, having your Sonos speakers start playing music from Alexa at near full volume while eating dinner.

Why did my studio lights turn off in the middle of a podcast?
With so many different systems working across several different apps that are all integrated into my Echo, there are many points of failure. Since I wrote my first post, here are some of the issues that I have encountered that can be painfully frustrating.

For starters, on occasion when Phillips updates their Hue app, I am required to re-link my Hue hub to the lights which require physically tapping the button on top of the hub to reestablish the link. This may not seem like a big deal but when you have no idea when this will be required until you try to turn on your lights and they don't work, it's highly annoying; especially since the hub is on the opposite side of the house as my office.

A similar issue happens with my iHome plugs, occasionally they will be updated and when this happens, you must manually re-connect them all to the Alexa app. It's a huge pain when you have 10 of them placed throughout the house which means they need to be unplugged as you have to scan the Homekit logo on the side of the device to create the link.

The other fun issue I am experiencing with a bad iHome update is that some plugs will randomly turn off. I don't know why this is happening and why only 3 of the 10 are doing it but here I am, slowly going insane as lights now have a mind of their own.

And then there is my favorite issue, where Alexa for reasons only known to the cosmos, can't connect to a device on the first try. This doesn't happen all that often but when you mix it into the other potential issues, it creates an environment that feels like it is held together with a few pieces of tape rather than a solid foundation to add more hardware.

The real point here is that when you build out an IoT home, you will begin to fear app updates. Unlike updates for Windows that typical...

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