My building has replaced our keys with an app
I've been doing home automation for a long time. I just got a house that I own that I'm excited to jazz out.<p>That said, I built up an ideology that any automation added should never replace physical items. All automation should have physical kill switches. Any occupants of the home should have appropriate access to things that you would normally give them physical access to.<p>I implemented walking lights successfully in my old house by replacing switches and doing some neat presence detection (near-field and general) tricks. That mode could be turned off at the front of the house, and frankly I found myself using it because it'd get old sometimes, and other times you really <i>do</i> want all the lights on.<p>My garage door opener was another. With near 100% accuracy my garage door would open when I was coming down my alley way. It never <i>false opened</i> though, even if I stopped at the grocery store in front of my house. It sometimes failed to open and I actually had to push a button in my car.<p>Another note, not mentioned here from my skimming, is to never rely on cloud devices. Anything worth doing is worth doing off-line. If your home automation and security can be killed by chopping fiber or coax, then you have neither reliable automation or security. There's infinite options for off-line applications and liquidated DC servers are stupidly cheap to purchase.<p>Last, if you're going to do home automation, make sure you start by building it on a separate network from your browsing network (preferably air gapped) - especially if you intend on using WiFi devices. They <i>will</i> crowd and slow down your network. Vary your solutions. Put some on LoRa, some on WiFi, some on Ethernet, some on ZWave, etc...