When I was a child, I was told to put on a jersey whenever my parents were cold. Today my child is told when to put on a jersey by a small army of arduinos. This is better, and far more accurate.

Can the oven just tell me when it's hot enough to make cookies? Does the feijoa tree want water? Is there wet laundry left in the machine? Where is the cat? Why? Who unloads the most dishes? Did I leave the garage door open? Is the CO2 level super high in the bus? How do I help the aloevera plant send thoughts to twitter?

It's 2016, and all these things can be fetched, stored, average, and acted on. Not just at $300 a device, but homebrew gadgets for much less. Mostly using the ESP8266, but there's a few other nifty inventions, of varying level of easiness and openness.

This talk will explain how to start covering your life with items that can tell you about themselves, act on your instructions, and be iteratively improved to naturally automate much of your life, and make decisions based on real data.

This talk should be interesting and accessible to novices, but you'll need to know some programming to actually use the info afterwards