Making the Smart Dumb Thing Smart
I wanted one simple thing: access to the data from my own electricity meter. What followed was a journey through low-level Bluetooth, awkward pairing, undocumented behaviour, failed approaches and a bit of reverse engineering to make a supposedly “smart” device actually useful to me. But the meter is only one example. Our homes are full of devices and services that collect useful data about us while giving us little practical, programmable access to it. This talk is about making one proprietary thing work for me and the questions that journey raised about openness, interoperability and whether the smart things around us really work for the people who use them.
Andrew Fletcher
Andrew is a Senior Software Engineer at Intapp and a lifelong hobbyist, builder and dabbler in technology. Over the past 13 years he’s worked across both the public and private sectors, as an employee and freelancer, building everything from startup products to large government systems. Outside work, he’s always enjoyed experimenting with technology and is finally making more time for the “I must check that out” list that has been growing for far too long.