GET STARTED WITH… SMART HOME SMART WAY

As smart home advocates we’re spoiled for choice, in both a good and a bad way. Good because the market is exploding: more and more products are rolling out with smart support, there’s a long list of kit getting a smart upgrade, and the protocols which drive our kit in the background are only getting smarter. But it’s that latter plural — "protocols" — which continues to be frustrating, and will perhaps remain so forever because there are multiple platforms with multiple levels of support. One device may never talk to another, at least without some serious (and potentially flaky) middleware. And there’s even some smart kit that does its own thing entirely, using its own protocols that play with nothing else.

Let’s draw a quick comparison between today’s smart landscape and the computing platforms