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.

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.