Innovative product offerings from our members often amaze us here at the Bluetooth SIG. These companies are pushing the boundaries of Bluetooth® technology to create groundbreaking products every day. It is truly inspiring.

But one space is really starting to stand out—Smart Home. Since visiting my first World’s Fair with the “Home of the Future,” and during every Jetson’s cartoon I watched as a kid, this space has absolutely fascinated me. Now, with Bluetooth Smart technology, we are on the cusp of making those Jetson’s scenarios a reality—not through expensive installers and service providers (although there will be plenty of those options on the market), but through easy to implement, do-it-yourself type solutions. I’m totally excited!

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

David Bowie couldn’t have said it better—“turn and face the strange.” When it comes to Smart Homes, we’re going to see plenty of this when it comes to traditional home appliances and systems. In fact, this particular blog is the first in a series that my team and I will be doing. I want to keep coming back to this topic as new and exciting products start coming to the market, not just for developers but for consumers as well.  Sometimes we’ll do a blog post based on the Smart Home, occasionally a vBlog, or perhaps a webinar.

The series will. Our goal is to provide insight into this changing space and show you some of the cool things that will change the face of your home.

A Series of Smart Home Information Coming Your Way

Like any good implementation, my team is taking a phased approach. Over the next few months, our blogs will focus on things you can easily add to your home to make life easier, then we will expand into ways to automate pieces of the home and then, finally, we will connect the smart home to the Internet of Things. Hopefully, at the end of the series, we’ll show you not only what is possible today and how to do it yourself at home, but also what might be coming down the road in the future.

Get Off Of My Cloud…and Water my Plants

We have seen some cool smart home items come out in the last few years. We want to introduce some that don’t mess with the way you currently run you household. They are stand-alone items that add value to your daily life in and around your home.

One of my favorites is iDevice’s iShower. This water-resistant Bluetooth speaker has an awesome range with great audio quality. For you shower-singers, this is right up your alley. One of its cool features is it has a microphone and speaker for taking calls.

Yes, phone calls! know what you’re thinking, “Steve, why do you take calls in the shower?” I never plan to but it happens, especially during the weekend when my family is all over the place and I am just getting up for the day. The feature works so well I may start doing conference calls from the shower so I don’t have to go into the office so early.

When it’s nice outside, I fancy myself a cook. I LOVE to smoke meat, but one of the things you need to stay on top of is the smoker’s temperature. In my case, when I smoke a good beef brisket, I want to slow cook it over a low temperature for hours. Every time I open the silly smoker up, the heat escapes, and I have to bring the smoker up to the proper heat again and then monitor the timing. With the iDevice iGrill, I never have to worry about opening the smoker. I simply insert the thermometer into the brisket, get the temperature of my smoker up to where I want it, and forget it. The app on my phone monitors the temperature of my brisket, letting me know exactly how it’s coming along and if I need to decrease the heat at all. This has made smoking food even easier for me, which I totally dig.

Another device I tried out is from Parrot. It’s called the Flower Power. I’m not much of a green thumb, in fact I kill most every plant I touch. This device measures the sunlight, temperature, soil moisture, and even the electrical conductivity of the soil to make sure your plants receive the optimal care. The device is mated to an app that delivers all kinds of useful information about the plant, and tells you things like when it needs water or it needs to be moved to a sunnier location. My wife loves this because now she can trust that I won’t kill all of her lovely plants. And if you’re into IFTTT, you can integrate the Flower Power into that service as well.

These are just a few of the many Bluetooth enabled devices that are on the market today. They represent the first phase in making your home smarter, but don’t require any real integration with how you run your home today. They are simple ways to make your life easier, and provide value for what I tend to do around the house. In the next phase, we’ll take a look at Bluetooth products that require a little more ‘integration’ into your existing house. In the meantime, much to my family’s dismay, I’m really starting to get my “Bohemian Rhapsody” down in the morning shower.

If you have something cool or interesting in the Smart Home space, I’d love to give it a try. Shoot me an email at shegenderfer@bluetooth.com. I’d love to include it in this series of posts. Until then, in the immortal words of Freddie Mercury, “Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me, for me, for MEEEEE” (yes, hitting the high note can be dangerous)!

(Credit: Steve Hegenderfer)