Pine Tree Original

Ever since seeing a few addressable LED and PHOTON videos on youtube, I have always wanted to make a fun project for these devices. I was having such a good time I made a maple box to house it and then found the blynk app that allowed me to make it even better. For all of this to work you need to have a general understanding of how to connect your Photon Particle to your account,actually connect to the web through USB or the app , general soldering and particle IDE knowledge. If you would like a more step by step for the initial connection and setup that cannot be found through the links below or online through the learning tools on teh particle website let me know in the comments. Particle Photon documentation https://www.blynk.cc/ There may be other apps out in the app store but this one looked like and seemed like a great option. I did not test on IOS just android but would love to hear back if it is as awesome on IOS as it is on android. I could have gotten all the function...

HUE bloom control from smart things, with no hue bridge. I recently received a Samsung SmartThings Smart Home Hub & Philips Hue Bloom, Zigbee, Works with Amazon Alexa  and was excited to get started automating lights and changing its colors, from the app and the google home. After a bit of research ( aka googling and reading the ST forums)  all I could find was that I needed the Hue Bridge to connect the ST hub to the Hue Bloom. This did not sit well with me and I though the protocols must be sort of universal to turn on/off, intensity, color. So I got the ST app to at least recognize the device even if it did not know what it was and started to systematically go through the ST ide   to figure out if I could tell the app that it was a smart light with color control. After some trial and error I found a solution that allows me to use the ST automation to control the On/Off, color and intensity from the app. I can also now use the Google home ( setting it as a d...

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 e...