Also known as: smart home
Home automation is the control and coordination of household devices — lights, locks, thermostats, sensors — so they run on schedules or react to conditions instead of being operated by hand.1
Overview
A typical setup ties together many Internet of Things devices through a central hub that holds the rules and state. That hub is often a small, always-on single-board computer such as a Raspberry Pi running software like Home Assistant — cheap, low-power, and able to keep everything working locally even when the internet is down.
Where it fits
Home automation is one of the most common reasons people pick up their first SBC, because the workload — talking to sensors and devices over GPIO, Wi-Fi, and other links, around the clock — fits the board’s strengths. The same always-on, low-power profile makes such a board a natural host for other field roles, like running GopherTrunk as a quiet capture node beside the antenna.
Sources
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Home automation — Wikipedia, on automating and coordinating household devices. ↩