SMART HOME THE SMART 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 remain so perhaps forever more: 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