being there, without being there: Good Night Lamp

Isn’t technology great when it brings families closer together, even when they are thousand miles apart?

Home automation does not only mean that you are going to flip some switches and sensor away in every imaginable way. It also means creativity. And being creative with the functionalities at hand is really what makes home automation so interesting.

It’s those creative ways that adds use to the nerdy home automation switches and sensors. It’s what adds practicality.

Good Night Lamp is such a creative solution that makes use of home automation hardware and the internet. To understand the concept, watch a video:

“The Good Night Lamp is a family of connected lamps that lets you communicate the act of coming back home to your loved ones, remotely.”

Well I don’t know if it really needs specialized hardware like those Good Night Lamp products. But certainly if you have some sensory and the ability to flip switches it is fairly easy to come up with workflows and things that should happen when the circumstances are right. In fact I do not believe in highly specialized products like a single-purpose lamp. But I do believe, if those lamps are connected to a network and if you can access them through some sort of API, that those types of products will pave the way to a connected world we only know from science fiction yet.

Another good solution to this is the long promised IP capable light bulb. Engineers were using the “light bulb with an ip adress” as an example for IPv6 for years now. And it seems that the time has come when we really want to assign an ip adress to every lightbulb in our home.

LIFX is a good start concept and in a couple of months there will be more manufacturers who are offering networked light bulb solutions.

 

Source 1: http://goodnightlamp.com/
Source 2: http://lifx.co/