Smart Home\Home Automation

[Danko]

Hello, I recently received an Amazon Echo Dot and downloaded the IFTTT app which got my interested in home automation. Does anyone have any advice on low cost home automation projects that may be good for a first time user?

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[SpookyTsuki]

I think the lights are called phillips hue. You can turn them on by phone or by voice command (Siri) they're not super cheap. But they're not super expensive if you just buy 1/2

And they change color

 

[guinness]

Unless security becomes a higher priority...because if you want botnet DDoS attacks, home automation is how you get botnet DDoS attacks.

 

[Clock]

If you own a house, I'd highly recommend Abode home security. It's all z-wave based, integrates with Alexa, etc. It taps into your phone and whoever else lives with you and is smart enough to arm itself if none of you are home. When you get within a few blocks of your house, it automatically disarms. For all intents and purposes, it requires zero intervention. You can do a "Alexa, tell Abode to secure the perimeter" at night and it'll arm itself.

Next up is to buy a SmartThings hub, which will be able to talk to all of the wireless sensors you picked up with Abode as well as your future smart switches / bulbs / z-wave devices. It gives you a phone app that lets you see the status of all of your stuff, from wherever, and allows you to turn things on or off, dim, see if a door is open, etc. Pretty cool, and all integrates with Alexa.

For lighting, you've gotta figure out if you want smart switches or smart bulbs. I opted the smart switch route (the GE Z-Wave paddle switches) because it's way more intuitive for in-laws and the like than having to use voice commands or a cell phone to control their lights. If someone turns a light switch off on with a smart bulb, the bulb simply won't work because it has no power going to it. So you see a lot of hack-y and ugly solutions to that, including taping down switches, putting covers on them, etc. Smart switches don't have that problem. The downside there is that if you want color-changing lights like the Hues, they're not smart enough YET to talk to each other.

What's needed is a z-wave switch that doesn't cut the power to the lights it's attached to, but instead sends a signal to tell the light to turn off, on, dim, etc.

The other big one is a smart thermostat. The Ecobee 3 is awesome, and comes with a remote sensor that you can put in an area of your house that you want to make sure is heated / cooled correctly. The thermostat then basically takes the average of the temperature it sense with the temperature of the remote sensor and makes sure that everything is comfortable. This also integrates with Alexa, so you can say "Alexa, tell Ecobee to set temperature to 70", etc.

Then there's IFTTT and the SmartThings app, where you can start having x do y when z happens. Little example - when it's detected that we've left the house, all of our lights turn off, the home alarm arms, and the thermostat goes to "Away" mode. When someone's within a block of the house, the home alarm disarms and turns some of the lights on. If someone opens the garage door and the garage door lights are off and it's night out, the garage lights turn on. Our outdoor lights turn on automatically when the sun sets and off again (and it's smart enough to know that the sun sets and rises at different times of the year). You can group stuff together - so we have a few Christmas trees around the house right now and various decorations that are all hooked up to z-wave enabled outlets. "Alexa, turn on Christmas lights" turns it all on.

Lots and lots of fun stuff. It's pricey to get into, but once you've got it, you've got it.