The biggest issue with this stuff at the moment is that it all passes through servers like Google / Amazon / China or whatever. The ideal is to have a local (household) network with a firewalled switch into the net.

Now, a friend of mine who happens to be an electronics engineer has developed a Queue Control System using LoRa on Raspberry PI. When he showed me the system about a week ago I had the exact same thought as IAN in that if he were to adapt his LoRa network for the home automation market he would really be onto a good thing. We didn't speak a lot about home automation per se but we did speak about the issues related to alarm systems. ET transmitters and receivers have the entire market but they are a total pain. The current versions are an absolute pain to use because their interfaces are cryptic. Another issue with the ET system is that there is no feedback. I want a positive feedback that tells me on my remote that the receiver has turned the light on or off - this feedback does not exist at the moment.

Him and his friend (who happens to be wealthy) have a new innovative electronics design / product business here in Cape Town and I wonder whether there would be synergy between IAN and them. With their IT / marketing and electronics skills and IAN's electrical knowledge the three of you could make a great team.

I've done lots of electronic assembly work for him in the past. He would come to me with 5 pc boards to go in a box and I would design the laser cut / cast / 3D printed or whatever brackets to keep everything together. I would then assemble and wire the boxes. I did the button boxes for the Q control system last week and we did 40x Raspberry Pi based systems a while back. He also developed and manages a large national network of Raspberry PI IOT devices - I'm not going to go into the specifics of the market. The remote devices are extremely smart, they communicate realtime with the network via the cell network - the continually report their statuses and have fail safes built in to restart themselves if the lose comms. The guy is a Python / C genius.