Or I could get off my fat ass and go do it myself…
Or, you could put the switch by the front door so you can turn on a lamp when coming home late at night.
I’ll wait for reasonably priced surgical implants. #TooManyRemotes
But I do think about automating parts of the house since lots of it needs tearing up and rebuilding anyway… an app tho, not a buncha remotes, is what would do me.
What about switches that could connect to e.g. a MQTT broker, and be able to map any switch to any command?
Voice or gesture control, I’d suggest. The kind without cloud.
Some sort of message broker to which the sensors and control buttons and control apps and switches are connected to
I am currently experimenting, with decent success, with ESP8266 based modules flashed with NodeMCU firmware. The available RAM is rather tight and limits the code complexity but otherwise it seems to be working A-OK.
I used a dingus like this for switching on a light in an attic space above my garage in a previous house. There was an unswitched outlet up there, and I didn’t feel like bothering with wiring an actual wired switch to it. So it was handy being able to turn on the light from below before I crawled up there to grope around in the dark.
My ass, while lazy at times, ain’t all that fat, and neither condition necessarily informs when I want or need to wire a switch.
Rawhide: Dr. Banzai is using a laser to vaporize a pineal tumor without damaging
the parthogenital plate. A subcutaneous microphone will allow the
patient to transmit verbal instructions to his own brain.
Observer: Like, "raise my left arm"?
Rawhide: Or "throw the harpoon." People are gonna come from all over. This boy's an Eskimo.
Have you taken a look at The Thing System before? It’s not actively being developed any more, but it could still provide a solid foundation for that sort of functionality.
I could swear in the early 90s we had a mechanical, no-battery solution for controlling <9 lights. Each device to be controlled had a separate power brick.
I’ve been hoping to find something like that again, but don’t even know where to start looking.
That’s probably a series of X10 home automation modules, which have been around for decades, and which still work pretty well. They use your residence’s electrical system to connect and a series of switches to determine which item gets turned on and off.
You can find them on Amazon pretty easily, and wire an entire house for a few hundred dollars at most.
Thank you! Those modules haven’t changed much over the years.
In addition to X10, you might also want to take a look at ZigBee, Z-Wave and Insteon, which are more recent home-automation networking technologies that are becoming increasingly popular.
(I’m not making any recommendations here, as I have only very limited experience with any of these. But these are the ones that came up on my radar here in California about six months ago when we were researching remotely-controllable color-changing LED illumination.)
We have a few of these in our house.
Living room: there is no ceiling light. We stuck a floor lamp in the far corner and one of these by the door where you’d normally expect to find a light switch.
Master bedroom: inexplicably, there is no ceiling light there either. We have a floor lamp with a pair of momentary switch remotes, one mounted on the wall by the door and one near the bed so we can kill the light without getting up (and risking stepping on the cat on the way back in the dark).
Kitchen: I installed a recirculating pump under the sink, to flow lukearm water from the hot water supply back through the cold water pipe in winter to keep both from freezing. It works great, but the only available outlet was the one the sink disposal uses, and it has a wall switch. So now there’s a separate remote for the disposal so the pump can stay on without having to mess with plugging and unplugging things under the sink more than twice a year.
A good trick is to put the light switch button next to the door handle, so you can operate the door and the light in the same operation.
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