I received a SmartThings hub as a gift this past holiday season and have been working on the integrations between different manufacturers and services (Belkin, HUE, Logitech, IFTTT, Google assistant, Home Assistant -> Raspberry pi based automation, Particle photon,....)
It was purchased through amazon and look like the image below:
All the testing and tinkering has been great, and I have found the SmartThings app to be the best way to interact with all the things ( as it should be, they were early and are continuing to improve). Trying to use IFTTT to control stuff and plugging into other services is great but if SmartThings has the option use it. Simplicity is the key to all of this home automation, working, succeeding, continuing,... ( I enjoy the aspects of figuring it out and making it work, while dealing with a few hiccups, I do not think most people would have been as easy going about it and would have gotten quite frustrated, it is easy to get frustrated. You just expect it to work as most things do nowadays)
You become very reliant on these SmartApps within the SmartThings apps fast, as in I used a motion senor and light switch to automate turning on the entry way light between sundown and sunrise. If it is not triggered for some reason (I have had to reset that motion detector a couple times now). You are taken to a whole new first world problem that you used to do every day very happily and have to turn on the switch with your hand. It sounds ridiculous but it becomes so nice very quickly to not even think about it when your hands are full of grocery bags.
So far it has been very fun and I have been trying to put together some help on items I struggled with as I started out.
Thanks for reading and happy Home Automating!
It was purchased through amazon and look like the image below:
You become very reliant on these SmartApps within the SmartThings apps fast, as in I used a motion senor and light switch to automate turning on the entry way light between sundown and sunrise. If it is not triggered for some reason (I have had to reset that motion detector a couple times now). You are taken to a whole new first world problem that you used to do every day very happily and have to turn on the switch with your hand. It sounds ridiculous but it becomes so nice very quickly to not even think about it when your hands are full of grocery bags.
So far it has been very fun and I have been trying to put together some help on items I struggled with as I started out.
Thanks for reading and happy Home Automating!
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