Using SmartThings lets you automate most of the stuff in your house. Leaving the house automatically turns of all the lights and heating, but only when all of us leave the house. When one of us returns in the house, the lights go back on and the heating is on as well.
The last few weeks my mom was visiting and when both me and my wife left the house she got stuck in the dark because both presence sensors connected to our keys were gone and the rule in SmartThings is when everybody leaves the house switch everything off.
A while ago my desktop at home started to acting up. So I decided I wanted it to replace it with something new. I was looking for something small yet powerful and it needs to be silent!. My colleague Galileo recommended the Intel NUC.
So after some searching and reading reviews I decided it looked good and would fulfill my requirements. It needs to be silent, powerful enough to use Visual Studio, enough memory, enough disk space.
I just found out you can use a video instead of an image as your account picture in Windows (works with Windows 8.1 and up). Pretty neat effect.
Post by Matthijs Hoekstra. So this is how you set it up. Go to your start screen, click on your name, choose ‘change account picture’
Instead of browsing for a picture you click on camera. In the camera screen make sure you switch to vide mode.
When I ordered my Raspberry Pi 2 I also ordered a little enclosure called the Pibow Coupe. Since the layout of the Pi 2 is the same I assumed every case would fit. Unfortunately that was not the case for this specific enclosure. But with a little help of my Dremel I managed to adjust it a little bit and it now fits perfectly.
When you build the case around your Pi board they little layers are numbered.
Last month Microsoft announced support for Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2. That was a perfect excuse to order one myself as well (I ordered mine at MCM Electronics).
Although it was in backorder it took less than a week to arrive. I also ordered a good power supply and a nice little case. Of course you need a memory card. 8Gb micro SD card should be enough for most situations.
This was bothering me for some time. In the hallway we have a wardrobe closet but that part of the hallway is kind of dark. I was already planning to change the dimmers (2 way) for z-wave ones, but I want to have something smart here as well. Whenever I open the closet I want to lights to go to 100% but when I close the closet they should return to the original value (either it off, or dimmed etc).
In the recent blog posts I described how I setup the different sensors and connected my Nest thermostat. But the real automation or getting things convenient is by tying everything together. I have been struggling to get everything to work. One time 1 part was working but it didn’t go to another state automatically and suddenly the lights went out when I didn’t want it to happen etc.
What helped me was drawing the following diagram and after that go through the app to define/configure all the different states (in the end, SmartThings is nothing else than a state machine)
I am updating my rubber duck app and I want to store the amount of ‘squeeck’s per device in roaming settings. So you can see the total but also how much you squeezed the duck on every device.
I am storing this as key value pair and the key is the device name.
So how do you get the device name? You can’t. There is (as far as I know) no API to get the device name.
I tried to add another z-wave switch to my SmartThings network. I bought a on/off switch at Lowes (all the ‘works with Iris’ stuff you can use in your z-wave network), this is just a GE 1-way on/off z-wave switch, to connect to my outdoor lights so I can switch them on/off automatically with sunset/sunrise.
When I connected it to the 2 black wires which were used to the existing switch the lights didn’t come on.
A couple of months ago I bought a Nissan LEAF. It comes with a trickle charger you can connect to your 110V outlet but it takes a bit of time to completely charge your car (over 12 hours). I leased the car with a fast charger pack which makes it possible to charge the car in a couple of hours if you have a 240V charger.
I decided I wanted to install this myself.