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Home Automation

Believe it or not, the work required to install the hardware and automation to create these notifications was challenging.

The goal was simple enough: because there are bears in the area, the resort requires all homes to have a separate trash room and on Fridays the trash service collects and returns the bins from each home’s trash room. In preparation the exterior trash room door must be unlocked and the interior door locked. You shouldn’t unlock the exterior trash room door too early (ie the night before) or else the bears, who actively check the doors, will feast. The trash service timing varies between 6 am and 1 pm and getting up at 6 am to unlock/lock the doors isn’t my idea of retirement.

There are plenty of electronic locks on the market but I learned the hard way that Amazon won’t allow an automated routine to unlock a door or disarm an alarm system. You must trigger the routine manually on your phone or issue a voice command with a code word.

So despite using Alexa for the rest of our automation we use Apple HomeKit for the doors because Apple allows automated unlock routines. The Apple feature also unlock the doors with a swipe of an iPhone, using a digital key.

I think this one of the reasons why home automation hasn’t really taken off. There are too many competing standards and too many proprietary relationships. For instance, the My Q Liftmaster garage door skill will open your garage door as part of the Amazon Key delivery service but you must use a 3rd party automation like LiveKey to include garage door opening in an automated Alexa routine. (LiveKey doesn’t integrate with Schlage so it isn’t an option for a door unlock routine.) Similarly, Ring is owned by Amazon so it won’t work directly with Apple HomeKit. To top it all off home automation is expensive and not particularly user friendly.

I read an article a while back about how Amazon is disappointed with Alexa - most people just do a few simple tasks and don’t add new skills after the first week. Our Alexa is like a sad wanna-be friend, constantly asking if we’d like to hear a joke or offering irrelevant and unrequested ‘by the way’ comments.

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