I treat HA in my home the same way I do IT systems: test everything in a non-production environment first. My home office fills this need. Nobody uses the room but me, so it’s full of all sorts of barely-working devices and hacky integrations with other HA platforms.
Things that work reliably move into the rest of the house. Things that don’t work or aren’t 100% reliable stay here. Of course, this acts as a filter that results in the automation in my office becoming worse and worse over time, but that’s fine because it’s all stuff I still want to hack on. The other result is that while I don’t push a lot of actual automation into the rest of the house, what does wind up there works pretty reliably and as a result is generally well-received.
It’s not always practical to buy multiple devices since I don’t have an unlimited budget. Most of my outlets are wired so I’d have to remove them after testing or buy multiple. My wife understands this and after a brief period of frustration she excepts the risk.
You don’t really need multiple devices for this to work. Set it up somewhere where your wife won’t be using it first, then let it do it’s thing for a month or two. Only then do you move the device into an area where it will be used by her. This won’t require a full time test/dev environment (although that can be helpful too). Using a staged release approach in HA really helps manage user perception of the value your purchases are bringing into the home. Let her see the cool stuff once it’s working and reliable, hide the warts so only you get to see them.
I appreciate your suggestions, but there really isn’t a problem here. My post was to see if anyone has played with facial recognition and the kinect. I added the thing about my wife because I found it humorous, not because it was causing animosity in my house.
@keo - look at ispyconnect or BlueIris. You want the camera to connect to Keylemon or something similar. There are a lot of facial recognition packages with professional CMS/NVR solutions. I have mine setup so that the cameras trigger simulated motion sensors, which is great.