User story: It's 3AM. Your home confirmed with you yesterday that you want to wake up early for a flight whose confirmation it found in your email. The lights are gradually brightened and blue-shifted through till 4AM. While that's happening, at 3:50AM your coffee maker is preheated. An audio alarm gets you up at 4AM, and motion-activated baseboard lights guide you to the kitchen as you stumble around in your groggy state. A glow emanates from the cupboard door hiding your favorite mug. After your coffee is done, as you're rushing out the door you realize you can't find your keys -- panicking for a moment you ask your home where it last saw you carrying them, and it tells you they're on your bedside table. You head out the door and catch your flight.
Everything mentioned above is pretty straightforward to rig together with off-the-shelf hardware and software, even if a little time consuming.
> Everything mentioned above is pretty straightforward to rig together with off-the-shelf hardware and software, even if a little time consuming.
Sorry, but it's not. There's a reason why you won't find any useful smart coffee machine on the market. And your house knowing where your keys are is either so specific a scenario that it's useless or contents of fantasy science fiction.
The one thing on your list that could be made today is the lighting going on at the right time, and migrating from yellow to blue. You will probably need to assemble your own lamps, because even high-end stuff don't have enough quality for that use-case, and proprietary software will get on your way on every step. But it's possible.
> There's a reason why you won't find any useful smart coffee machine on the market.
Sure! It's expensive to shove a bunch of smart technology into every single device, especially given that everyone wants something a little different so your interface would need to be feature-rich to support those use cases. Note that we don't really care about having a smart coffee machine in the outlined scenario; we need a coffee machine that can be preheated, which doesn't have to be any more complicated than a switch on the power supply on the right dumb machine.
> And your house knowing where your keys are is either so specific a scenario that it's useless or contents of fantasy science fiction.
With off-the-shelf software it's a mix between the two. The hard bit wouldn't be the location of simple objects like keys (throw a few sensors around the house, customize the final layer on a pre-trained model, and pick your favorite approximate inverse-3d mapper to get a rough location in space of the object); it would be the location of complicated objects (house, where's my Lang's Algebra?), cases where you don't have enough information but would hope that the house might figure it out (e.g., boxes of things), and the humanistic output (rather than saying they're on the bedside table, you might have to resort to a screen that can show locations of things on a heatmap).
> You will probably need to assemble your own lamps
That was a communication error on my part. "Off-the-shelf" included things like off-the-shelf microcontrollers, wiring, ....
> and proprietary software will get on your way on every step
And is best avoided. I'd be tempted to hook into Google Calendar or something for upcoming trips since they've already implemented models to find that kind of thing, at least starting out, but otherwise I see no reason you'd want to use proprietary software in a project like that.
Sure it does. There's a setup cost, and it's fully possible that it's not worth messing with something like that unless you enjoy tinkering (and the way I see the market moving it seems likely that smart homes will stay that way for awhile). The user story definitely exists though.
> What if you feel like oversleeping and now your coffee is cold?
In the outlined scenario, your snooze function would want to also turn off the lights, the motion-activated baseboard lights going to your coffee maker would work fine, and your coffee maker would still be preheated and have wasted a bit of power if you didn't have some kind of a timed cutoff or similar.
Everything mentioned above is pretty straightforward to rig together with off-the-shelf hardware and software, even if a little time consuming.