A doll House for old men (or women): The smart home you can afford in Cuenca

If you ever wondered what happens when a childhood fascination with Meccano and Lego collides with the arrival of tercera edad, then the answer may be called Arduino. The name is Italian, but in Spanish I think it means “something that won’t work until you watch five YouTube videos.”

An Arduino, for the uninitiated, is a small electronic brain that can make lights blink, fans spin, and doors open automatically when it rains or the cat flap stays shut when your cat decides to bring a dead mouse home. It’s a kind of do-it-yourself control system for people who once thought programming was something only done by Harry Potter in the wizardry labs at Hogwarts.

Now, thanks to a company called LAFVIN, you can buy an entire “Smart Home Learning Kit” that lets you assemble a miniature house out of laser-cut plywood, then fill it with sensors, buttons, and a tiny LCD screen that proudly displays Smart Home.

It’s about the size of a toaster, but promises to give renters the full modern experience of home ownership: faulty wiring, incomprehensible instructions, and the sense that your house is collecting data to blackmail you.

The kit arrives with dozens of parts and connectors: soil humidity sensors for your invisible garden, a fan to blow out imaginary fires, and a rain detector to close the windows before your cardboard roof warps. It even includes a digital password door, which might be the only security system in the world that can be defeated by a 10-year-old with a screwdriver.

This, I suspect, is a doll’s house for men. Women have long understood the therapeutic value of rearranging furniture and pretending to host tea. Men, on the other hand, like the sound of relays clicking and LEDs blinking in obedient succession. One man’s Barbie Dreamhouse is another man’s Wi-Fi controlled fire alarm.

In theory, you can control everything from your phone through an app. In practice, your “smart home” may require the patience of a monk and the eyesight of an owl.

The written tutorials that you can download are generous but machine translated, so you’ll probably have to figure out sentences like, “When the window raining, the motor stops your happiness.” Still, for about $55 from Temu, plus a $20 import fee, but with free shipping and a one-dollar credit if it arrives late, you really can’t go wrong with your smart doll house and it makes a great conversation piece.

And to fill up your parcel to get the best value from 4×4 specs, you can buy yourself couch covers, cookie cutters, curtains, and chronographs.

The smart home is marketed as an “educational STEM kit,” which means you can tell your family it’s for the grandkids, even if the children lose interest halfway through step two.

By the time you’ve finished playing with it, you’ll have learned basic electronics, the concept of automation, and the ancient truth that lithium batteries are never shipped from overseas in case they blow up the plane.

In any case, despite what the instructions claim about a mysterious 36-volt lithium battery which would power an electric bike or a hedge trimmer, the little Arduino house runs perfectly well from a USB cable or a simple 9-volt DC wall adaptor, the sort that powers a radio or charges a razor. The 36-volt reference is almost certainly a translation hiccup. Plug it into your laptop or a phone charger and everything lights up happily without the smell of burnt toast and deep-fried microchips.

If your new smart home finally works the way it should, you may feel justly proud. The little LED screen glows a welcome, the fan hums, the door beeps when you enter your four-digit PIN number. In that moment, you’ve joined a distinguished long line of inventors and Nobel prizewinners starting with Thomas Edison, I think it was, who first said “Let there be lights!”.

But at least this house can fit on your escritorio or kitchen counter and won’t flood the basement, so if you are thinking of ordering Christmas presents, there is still time.