I spent this evening doing the least glamorous home-automation chore there is: tidying groups. The porch, the hallway, the bedroom - each a fixture with several bulbs that had drifted onto the dashboard as several identical-looking entities. One control per fixture is the goal. So I grouped them, hid the individual bulbs, and moved on.

Except one of those groups isn’t like the others, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Sometimes the interesting part of fixing something isn’t the fix - it’s the moment you realize you were wrong about the problem.

The one-button button

There’s a small smart button on a side table in the bedroom. The aim was simple: one press toggles the lamp plugged in nearby. That part worked fine. But I had a bigger question in mind - if this button proved useful, there’d be more of them around the house, so I wanted to know just how much I could get out of one.