There are still a couple of things I would like to automate in my house. For one when everybody leaves the home the home should switch to ‘away’ mode. The other one which would be nice is if I get home with the car the garage door opens automatically or closes when you leave the house.
First thing I tried was setting up the Windows Phone from me and Sandra to use as a presence sensor.
Last week I ordered this motion detector for my home. I want to use it to automatically switch some lights etc in my SmartThings network.
Connecting the motion detector to the network is easy. Just follow the instructions. I use this for 2 different scenarios. 1st scenario is when I go downstairs in the morning, the sensor detects me coming down the stairs and tells the house ‘Goodmorning!’, that turns the lights on, turns the Nest to 69, if it isn’t already and turns on the Sonos on my favorite radio channel.
I wanted to make it even easier for myself when I leave and enter the house. What we do now when we leave the house we set the Nest to away and when we return we set it to Home. That’s something we can automate with SmartThings.
I found this script on github: https://github.com/pstuart/smartthings/blob/master/set%20tstat%20to%20not%20away.groovy
So when I set my home to goodbye the Nest goes in ‘away’ mode and when ‘I am back’ the nest goes in to ‘home’ mode.
As I described in my previous post I want to create a couple of scenarios in my house.
The first one is a simple one. I want my lights at the front of my house automatically turn on and off when the sun sets and rises. I replaced my outlet switch with a z-wave switch and connected it to my SmartThings hub.
After that it’s easy. Go to your SmartThings apps.
Since I bought the SmartThings hub and several switches and sensors I was thinking which scenarios I exactly want to work. So far I have been fooling around and I found out if you want a complete working set of scenarios without me using the app all the time to set my house in a state I want, I need to think it through and build all the scenarios from the beginning.
As I mentioned earlier, I bought a SmartThings hub and want to connect a couple of sensors and devices.
One of the devices I bought is an energy meter. Since I drive an electric car I wanted to get some more insights in how much energy I use charging my car (and also what I use in the house).
I found the Aeon Labs energy meter on Amazon for $35.00. Aeon Labs does have a newer version (V2) but I could not figure out why that would be a better deal for me.
Last week I got myself a SmartThings hub. I was already looking for some time to get into to home automation. I have a NEST thermostat, some Philips Hue lights but wanted something more.
These are the scenarios I want to try to solve:
I would love it when I come downstairs in the morning the lights come up (but only when it is still dark) and Sonos starts playing my music.
It’s been a long while since I blogged here. After we moved to the US keeping up with our family blog, work and starting a new life here in the US, blogging here wasn’t a high priority.
Since we are more or less settled down and I have a little bit more time doing some technical stuff it might be a good time start blogging again.
As you can see the blog moved from www.
This is one of the funny April fools jokes I found today. Most jokes aren’t that funny. But this one is subtle.
Go to http://www.bing.com/
Search for google. This will be the result.
Michael Kroll, Principal UX Manager from Bing explains the ‘Introduction Bing Basic’ in his blogpost 🙂
Oh and if you check the bing.com page the statues smile once in a while 🙂
My daughter watches a lot of videos on the iPad (youtube and some local stored videos) today she wanted to watch the videos on the pink iPad (our Surface RT with pink touchcover). I have an SD card with videos inserted in the Surface but they don’t show up in the videos library. When you try to add the SD card to the videos library Windows complains it can’t do that because it’s removable media.