#automation

Robots in the routine — Roomba + Braava choreography

“The Roomba doesn't make the floor cleaner than I would. It makes the floor cleaner more often. Frequency beats thoroughness for whole-house hygiene.”

Frame TV + kitchen appliance sync — when the kitchen talks

“A connected oven by itself is a gimmick. The thing worth paying for is the collective behavior: the kitchen knowing what's cooking and putting that on whatever screen you're nearest to.”

Humidity-triggered bathroom fans — the daily automation

“Most bathroom fan switches are dumb timers. The fan needs to run until humidity is below the bedroom's level — not for a fixed 15 minutes. Dewpoint-targeting beats time-based by every measure.”

Water leak sensors + automatic shutoff

“Every other piece of smart-home gear is a quality-of-life argument. Leak detection plus main-valve shutoff is an insurance argument — and that makes it the one piece I'd hand a non-enthusiast first.”

Node-RED for the automations YAML couldn't handle

“YAML describes state well and logic badly. The moment an automation has to remember what happened five minutes ago, you want a flow you can watch execute — not a nested template you read like assembly.”

Cool robot farmers — agribots in the field

“The dashboard tells you the weeds are there. The robot pulls the weed. Guess which one the farmer is going to pay for.”

New: Microsoft Flow — Code-less Automated Workflows

“Flow makes it easy to ship automation. It does not make it easy to *maintain* automation. This course is the second part.”

Open-Source Mobile Test Automation Tools

“Mobile applications have become increasingly important for businesses these days, and consumers are demanding higher quality apps for their mobile devices. Adapting to this new demand, testing…”

Hue scenes and the local REST API — first Python automation

“The bridge's local REST API has no authentication beyond one button-press token. That's fine on a trusted LAN today. The day Philips puts the bridge on the public internet, that same unhardened endpoint stops being fine.”