Creative Smart Home Ideas Anyone can Replicate

There are a lot of arguments for turning your house into a smart home. You can save on energy consumption, automate irritating daily tasks, and make life a little bit easier for everyone.Smart homes can go far beyond the basics, though. With a little effort and creativity, and using the same common devices you may already own, smart homes can also be innovative, interesting, and beautiful.

Here you’ll learn more about creative ways that experienced smart home owners use popular home products. These products include Amazon Alexa, Nanoleaf Aurora, Google Home, Philips Hue, and CleverPet.

Amazon Alexa

First launched in late 2014, the $180 Amazon Echo is a 9.25-inch hands-free wireless speaker you control with your voice. Thanks to the voice command technology called “Alexa,” what’s inside Amazon Echo is now available on other devices too, including the Amazon Fire TV, Amazon Echo Dot, and Amazon Tap.

With an Alexa-enabled device in your home, you can perform many tasks. The following real-world examples showcase some original ways you can integrate Alexa into your lifestyle.

Alexa seems to get smarter with each new software update. It can now respond to thousands of questions and commands, big and small. YouTuber PhoneBuff showcases 50 random questions Alexa has answers for, including how many calories are in a slice of pizza, whether aliens are real, and more.

Nanoleaf Aurora

The $200 Nanoleaf Aurora is one of those smart products that you have to see to believe. It’s a modular LED panel lighting system that lets you experiment with light in fun, imaginative ways.

The Aurora Smarter Kit comes with nine triangular panels, which you can connect to form different designs either on a wall or another surface in your home. You can connect up to 30 panels to the same power kit, as demonstrated in the following examples.

From Switzerland comes this playful post from Dom~Domenico. As you can see, his Aurora is both sophisticated and colourful, acting as an interactive art installation. Even his monochromic furry friend appears to love the new lighting artwork!

Google Home

First introduced in late 2016, the $129 Google Home is Alphabet Inc’s answer to the Amazon Echo. The oddly shaped device looks a lot like a two-toned air freshener. Like Alexa, Google Home offers a voice assistant to answer your questions. Aptly named Google Assistant, the speaker uses natural language processing, intended to improve reliability.

Google Home is certainly chatty, and it also likes to play music, as it’s compatible with Google Music, YouTube Red, Spotify, Pandora, and TuneIn. Here are some interesting ways that others are using the device.

On the integration side, Google Home loves playing with Samsung’s SmartThings and other smart products. In the following video, Keith Credendino demonstrates how his Google Home works with SmartThings, IFTTT, and Harmony Hub.

CleverPet

Finally, we’ll round out your smart home tour with a smart home device that will keep your pets happy and you smiling. It’s the CleverPet, an automatic dog feeder that also acts as a toy. To get started, all you have to do is connect the CleverPet hub to your home network, fill the bowl with your pup’s favorite food, then step back and enjoy.

The following are two hilarious examples of how your smart home can be set up not only to benefit its human occupants, but also your pets.

First up are Athena Angelic’s Devo and Lucy, who only started using CleverPet in February  2017. As you can see, both dogs are having a lot of fun:

It’s All About Automation and Having Fun

There’s a lot of smart home devices on the market, but the way you use them can vary greatly. Think of the devices themselves like building blocks — they have a lot of potential, but the look of the final product is entirely up to you! In this article, you learned a little bit more about five of those products from the people who use them every day in different ways.