Skip to main content

Best smart home tech for throwing a party

[ad_1]


Smart homes can make coffee, but do they know how to party? Yes, and no. You can set up a system like this one, which starts a barnburner at the cry “Alexa, let’s party,” but making the connections among bulbs, speakers, and virtual assistants takes some doing. Banding your gadgets together into a raucous gang of party animals requires using the app If This Then That (IFTTT) as glue. Once that’s done, you’re ready to rage on.



1. The host



Amazon’s Alexa-enabled Echo Dot hears your rallying cry and sends the signal to the rest of its party people—er, gadgets. Using IFTTT, your initial voice command can also tweet out the invite to friends and order pizza to keep ‘em fed.



2. The party planner



Alexa relays the shindig-starting message to the Logitech Harmony Hub, which connects to all your devices—from appliances to home theaters—via Wi-Fi. The console is what gets your lights in sync with your speakers, and so on.


3. The mood setter



In party mode, the LIFX bulbs cycle through 16 million colors in a pattern that makes your living room look like a Daft Punk concert. An end-of-night action called “party’s over” can reset the lights to max brightness and whiteness.



4. The DJ



Spread out as many as 32 Sonos One Wi-Fi speakers, and they’ll create a mesh network that kicks out jams in every room. The smartphone-controlled gadgets are also Alexa-friendly, so you can shout to skip a track mid flip-cup battle.



5. The entertainment



Smart fog machines aren’t a thing (yet!), but the D-Link Wi-Fi Plug can fill in. Hooked into an outlet, the socket controls the flow of electricity to whatever it powers. Turn on a bubble machine—or a fan for when it’s “getting hot in herre.”


This article was originally published in the Spring 2018 Intelligence issue of Popular Science.




[ad_2]

Written By Stan Horaczek

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ice technicians are the secret stars of the Winter Olympics

[ad_1] The emphasis of this year's two-week-long Winter Olympic Games has been placed squarely on the Olympians themselves. After all, the stated purpose of the international competition is to bring together the world’s greatest athletes in a nail-biting competition across fifteen different winter sports. But before the curlers, skiers, and skaters even arrived in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the Olympians of the ice technician world were already a few weeks deep in a competition of their own. Mark Callan of the World Curling Federation and Markus Aschauer of the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation both say they’re hoping to make the best ice the Winter Olympics have ever seen. To transform the barren concrete jungle of existing tracks and arenas into an ice- and snow-covered wonderland is an enormous undertaking. And it takes a keen understanding of the physics and chemistry that keeps frozen precipitation pristine. Curling Callan has been making and maintaining ic...
Post a Comment
Read more

With Operation Popeye, the U.S. government made weather an instrument of war

[ad_1] It was a seasonably chilly afternoon in 1974 when Senators Claiborne Pell, a Democrat from Rhode Island, and Clifford Case, a Republican from New Jersey, strode into the chambers of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations for a classified briefing. While the meeting was labeled “top secret,” the topic at hand was rather mundane: They were there to discuss the weather. More specifically, Pell, the chairman of the now-defunct subcommittee for Oceans and International Environment, and his colleague were about to learn the true extent of a secret five-year-old cloud seeding operation meant to lengthen the monsoon season in Vietnam, destabilize the enemy, and allow the United States to win the war. Though it cycled through several names in its history, "Operation Popeye" stuck. Its stated objectives—to ensure Americans won the Vietnam War—were never realized, the revelation that the U.S. government played God with weather-altering warfare changed history. The...
Post a Comment
Read more

University supercomputers are science's unsung heroes, and Texas will get the fastest yet

[ad_1] Supercomputers are powerful machines with great names—Blue Waters, Bridges, Jetstream, Comet. But a new one will soon be joining that list: Frontera. The $60 million machine will live at the University of Texas at Austin and is scheduled to come online next year. “It will be the fastest machine ever deployed at a university in the US,” says Dan Stanzione, the executive director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center. With supercomputers, the title of fastest is a moving target—what’s perhaps more important is not the exact ranking, but that they’re available for researchers to use in the first place. Right now, the fastest supercomputer in the world is called Summit, and it’s at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, part of the Department of Energy (DOE), and is specifically tailored for AI. But supercomputers located not at government labs but at universities—like Frontera and its ilk—play a crucial role in the ever...
Post a Comment
Read more