The holidays are around the corner, and with them comes the chaos of a busy season. Shopping, cooking, work holiday parties, and more will occupy significant parts of the calendar for most people and make it more difficult to entertain visiting guests and family.

With RGB lighting fixtures and smart gaming simulators, you can keep your loved ones entertained during the holidays with added color and fun to your home!

Lights are already an essential part of the seasonal ambiance, and LED technology is making them more customized and intuitive than ever. One of the best features of newer products is RGB color-changing fixtures. By using three LEDs in the bulb – Red, Green, Blue (RGB) – a microcontroller in the bulb can alternate the current through the LED to change the color.

Passing the current through all three LEDs creates white light, and varying the current can produce a broad range of colors in the spectrum. Even better, with smart technology, it's easy to control the LED lights to change color, intensity, and adjust the color temperature of white light.

Smart game simulators like those offered by HD Golf also add unique fun to any holiday season! Known as one of the most realistic golf simulators on the market, this smart home entertainment ensures great fun indoors for all ages and proves as an excellent alternative when the weather outside is frightful.

Be ready for any holiday at any time of year. Let's explore how you can use RGB lighting fixtures and smart game simulators like HD Golf for holiday fun this season in the San Francisco Bay Area.

One of the remarkable things about technology is how quickly it can go from a novelty and convenience to a necessity. How many of us can think of going a day without our smartphone? When something isn't working on it, do you know what to do?

Some technology fixes are easy. With smartphones and computers, sometimes the restart or reboot works magic. Maybe it's just an app that needs an update. Occasionally, a logout and login cure the problem. Beyond those easy fixes, technology issues can sometimes be challenging to diagnose and fix.

We live in the San Francisco Bay area, a hotbed of technological innovation, including smart home automation. Many people work in the technology industry, but that doesn’t guarantee they know what to do when a smart home function goes awry and stubbornly refuses to work. Have you worked on a modern car without the right tools and training? It’s difficult, even if you understand cars. 

That’s why Twilight Solutions believes a high level of service and support makes for a happy smart home automation customer. No technology is perfect, and something invariably will go wrong. The key is how you respond to that. Keep reading to learn more about how Twilight Solutions approaches service and support for smart home automation.

Much of what we call home automation today began in the 1990s. Before the age of the internet and software-driven devices, there were systems to control and program home technology such as lighting and AV systems. In those days, the technology required quite a bit of wiring.

Fast forward a couple of decades, and the internet protocols we depend on every day, as well as a variety of optimized wireless technologies - RF (radio frequency, Bluetooth, Zigbee, etc.) - are powering new communication and control capabilities in a slew of smart home devices. Add to the sauce the intelligence from inexpensive processing power and software that makes the control systems of 20 years ago blush, and you have sophisticated home automation possibilities available today that used to cost tens of thousands of dollars in equipment and custom programming.

What does this all mean? To answer the premise of the blog, yes, you can. You can add smart home features to your property without taking it down to the studs and adding low voltage wiring everywhere. We're not saying you don't need any cables or wires - there are tradeoffs to fully wireless approaches - but there's much you can do with today's wirelessly connected devices and systems.

So if you want to retrofit smart home features to your home in the San Francisco Bay area, we all know that property here is expensive and budgets are not necessarily unlimited for full-scale remodeling. The good news is that you can get sophisticated smart home technology that doesn’t require you to embark on a major rebuilding project.

Read on for some examples of what’s possible. It may be more than you think.

To cut to the chase on our premise, yes, there is a difference, and you should care. Even though the economy here in the San Francisco Bay Area is largely based in technology companies and residents are more than familiar with these terms, it’s still useful to start with some definitions.

Much is written about IoT, which is an acronym for the Internet of Things. The “things” refer to smart devices that have internet connectivity and enough intelligence within them - chips and software - to do “smart things.” Think of your smartphone as one of those smart things, and for that matter, your tablet or laptop. We all know what they do for us every day.

The other side of IoT is how the intelligence being built into devices is changing industries and the way we live. IoT is an all-encompassing term about how smart devices can communicate with each other and take advantage of information over the internet to do things like never before. For example, IoT will make a significant impact on healthcare. Devices that monitor physical data like blood pressure, heart rate, and blood sugar will be able to use that data and the power of cloud computing to warn of a stroke in a diabetes patient - before it happens. Another example is the self-driving automobile. The automobile was once not a particularly smart device needing a human driver. With the power of advanced computing, sensors, sophisticated software, and internet connectivity, cars can drive themselves and navigate to a destination without your input. We may not be to that level yet - but we’ve seen that future and know it’s coming.

So where does home automation fit into this equation? Home automation is but one part of IoT. Smart devices like Nest thermostats, smart lights, video doorbells, and Samsung's smart refrigerators are all part of the Internet of Things. Why? Because they can all share information and offer control of their operation over the internet to other applications. And as IoT devices, that means you can do smart things with them, like adjust your thermostat and lights when you leave the house, automatically. More than that, as part of IoT, these devices can do even smarter things. In some cities, intelligent thermostats can participate in demand-response programs to help curb peak electricity loads and keep the energy grid stable. This is another example of what IoT can do in the future, beyond simple remote control and automation.

Getting closer to home, let's take a more in-depth look at how true home automation is more than a collection of smart IoT devices, and why that's important.