When I speak to people about getting into home automation, one of their first responses is that they don’t want to go through all the expense to buy smart devices. Maybe they rent their home and don’t want the hassle of setting things up to only have to tear it out later.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could try out some automation functionality before you take the plunge on a new expensive product? SwitchBoard was built with the idea that automation should not be expensive. If you have a working computer, you can spend exactly $0 and still get some great functionality. Although it was built for low-performance machines to run on their own, there’s no reason it cannot be run in the background of your current computer. With just a running instance of SwitchBoard, there’s a chance that some of your existing products can already be used - even if they’re not thought of as particularly “smart”. Take a look at the Supported Devices List and you may spot your TV or stereo. You may also see different services that you could get some use of. If you care about weather, sports, news, Travis CI etc - you can grab that data and do “stuff” with it. What that “stuff” is depends on your needs. Your actions they trigger may be desktop notifications, text to speech, push notifications even text messages. With those tools alone, you can build up a pretty compelling piece of functionality.

I’d considered building a multi-user, Internet-based equivalent for a lot of these services so you could abstract as many non-physical IoT pseudo-devices into a single cloud service with it’s own API and interface. Someday, maybe.