Smart Home Demonstration Video
This 3.5 min video showcases most of the smart home uses covered in this blog and more. It shows how a smart home can enhance the way of living.
Ranging from Lighting, Alarm system integration, Video and monitoring, Appliances integration, Scene controls, Visitor notifications, Fire Alarm sequences, Entertainment and Home Audio integration, Motion Sensors, Temperature sensors, Light sensors, In-Wall tablets, Voice control and Smart Thermostat integration.
Whole house automation is becoming more and more popular without having to spend tens of thousands of dollars. Many DIY products can be integrated directly or through 3rd party solutions into a home automation system.
Motion activated LED stairs lights with voice control
Walking up or down the stairs at night can be made to an experience by using LED lights. Being able to have different animations or LED patterns makes this even more exciting. How do you achieve such a thing? By using motion activated LED stairs lighting integrated...
Unleash your full Unify Dream machine Wifi 6 Speeds
With Wifi 6 and Wifi 6e and the just announced Wifi 7 standards rolling out, you want to ensure that you have the latest and greatest speeds at your home. There are some gotchas on the path to achieve the highest performance and I will also address the most...
New Philips Hue LED multi-color strips for a hefty new price
Philips announced today a series of new products ranging from new light strips, Hue Iris, new low-cost white bulbs, etc. The new Philips Hue Play Gradient Lightstrip is designed to integrate seemlessly with the Philie Hue Play HDMI Sync Box. Any HDMI device will be...
LIFX plans to attack Corona Virus Covid-19 with new “LIFX clean” bulbs
LIFX is planning to help the fight against Corona Virus Covid-19. Buddy Technologies, the mother company of LIFX announced their latest innovation by the name of "LIFX clean". Those new bulbs are going to be released in Australia, New Zealand and Europe once they...
LaunderPal is a smart laundry basket that takes care of your clothes and helps you manage them
An interesting idea did not get any traction. This kickstarter project didn't get the funding needed and will probably never see the light. With that said, here are the highlights for people interested. LaunderPal is the Smart Home Laundry Basket that recognize...
Light-Motion combination switch
GE/Jasco released a new Z-wave certified switch in Dec 2016, which was made available on Amazon in April 2017. There was no press release or announcement and many people don't even know that such a switch even exists hence my blog posting here. The smart...
Alexa now supports Multi-room audio
Amazon announced and released today multi-room audio functionality for the Amazon Alexa family devices. This functionality allows you to synchronize music across devices and across rooms by grouping them. Such functionality has been available from other...
Alexa enabled Retro-gaming
Many adults remember the times playing Arcade, Nintendo, Gameboy, Atari or Sega games at either at a Arcade game place, on their own console or at their friends house. Some of those games have been ported to Platforms like Xbox or Playstation but only a...
Existing blinds voice automated for any smart home hub
Today's challenges wanting to automate existing blinds Automated blinds are in high demand while their price is also very high. In addition it is very hard to find blinds which work with an existing home automation system and several companies have tried...
Alexa Drop-in
Amazon released a new software update allowing you to use your Alexa and Dot devices as intercom devices within your household using the green ring from the Alexa calling feature as an indicator. Just in time with the release of the Echo Show, Amazon released an...
Smart Speaker and Home Assistant Homepod from Apple
Apple announced their smart speaker and home assistant called "Homepod". The name sounds ok, but doesn't do the product justice, while it should not be surprising that iHome has been already trademarked by another company. With that said, Apple announced this new...
AutoVoice 3.0
In the video here you will see, how Google Home and Alexa interact together by using predefined commands but also the natural language feature. Regardless if you say "hello", "hi" or "howdy" it will be mapped to the hello action. You can also integrate variables for...
Echo Show
The day after Microsoft announces their Alexa and Google Home competitor called "Invoke" based on Cortana's voice engine, Amazon releases Echo Show as the latest member of the Alexa Echo Family. Echo Show has a touch screen and also includes now a calling feature. You...
Microsoft trying to compete with Amazon Alexa and Google Home
Microsoft is entering the voice assistant market by combining Harman Kardon speaker with the Cortana engine and calling it Invoke. Microsoft has confirmed the release of their Invoke series this fall 2017. No pricing has been published yet, but it is expected that...
Connected Home vs Smart Home
People believe "smart homes" and "connected homes" are the same. You might even see terms like "true smart home", where companies try to bring their point across of having a home, which is more than an assembly of connected devices. Let's look into those terms and...
Hinge Pin vs Strips for Door sensors?
Two new Z-Wave Plus Door sensors have recently hit the market. The GE Hinge Pin Smart Door Sensor is the latest. But, is it the greatest? It looks like a door hinge, and attaches like one too making it discreet. It has remote monitoring that will alert your smart...
C by GE
GE announced on December 6th 2016 a new line up complementing their C by GE products. GE Lighting already released Bluetooth controller bulbs earlier this year, but now they claim, that they redefined smart living with their new product line. This new product line is...
Amazon to the rescue with TTS
2 weeks ago I published a blog post about Microsoft shutting down their Data Market place with a deadline of March 25th 2017, leaving many smart home owners with almost no options for having a somehow decent quality Text-to-Speech (TTS) event notification and...
Chinese Alexa or Chinese Google Home
With Google Home entering the VCD (Voice Command Device) market, people assumed that there will be a rivalry between Google and Amazon. Out of the blue a third competitor entered the stage out of China. This device named "Ling Long Ding Dong" (name is for real) will...
Azure DataMarket shutdown
Microsoft announced the shutdown of their datamarket place as you can see in that email. One of their services being used in smart home deployment is their TTS (Text to Speech) service allowing smart homes to announce events using voice options in different languages...
The Haus is closing its doors
Some sad news from the Home Automation market... After not even one year of opening its doors, the home automation university "The Haus" based in Denver is closing its doors for good. The company assets are being auctioned online. The company Xssentials offering their...
Ecobee3 Lite
Ecobee released a new product - the Ecobee 3 lite. Unlike other competitors, where they release a gen 2 or gen 3 product, Ecobee has downsized the features for households which don't need all the fancy features allowing them to bring the price down significantly. In...
GoogleHome
Google finally revealed more details around their Google Home assistant product on Oct 4th 2016. They also allow now pre-orders to be placed for their official release date of Nov 4th 2016. Google is now entering the Voice control market, after they announced earlier...
Cedia 2016 Part2
Overview of High End Control 4 system Lutron Lighting solutions working in conjunction with all other Lutron solution options High end lighting solutions from Control 4 Savant Pro Home Automation solutions High End Home Theater and Audio/Video solutions from Control 4...
CEDIA 2016 Part1
Water leak, smoke detector, motion sensors, dimmers, the buttons, swipe and wall plugs. Fibaro Home Center 2 and Fibaro Home Center Light The new Fibaro Light controller hub launching in October 2016! Fibaro Systems from Poland has officially launched their controller...
Sunkpumps
With IoT ranging across a variety of use cases, I wanted to share one initiative which will benefit smart home users. Most homes have at least one or two sunk pumps installed in their homes (typically in the basement). Those sunk pumps help to prevent flooding of...
Smart Homes at IoT World (Part 2 of 2)
Internet of Things World 2016 was the 3rd annual event hosted at the Convention Center in Santa Clara CA. With over 10.000 attendees and over 200 exhibitors you were able to attend a total of 15 dedicated tracks around IoT ranging from manufacturing to smart cities,...
Smart Homes at IoT World (Part 1 of 2)
Internet of Things World 2016 was the 3rd annual event hosted at the Convention Center in Santa Clara CA. With over 10.000 attendees and over 200 exhibitors you were able to attend a total of 15 dedicated tracks around IoT ranging from manufacturing to smart cities,...
Alexa on your smartwatch
A Chinese company is about to release a new smartwatch which is integrated with Alexa from Amazon (Echo) called "CoWatch". Here are the details published from their Indigo crowd funding page. Speak, and CoWatch will listen. With a built in dynamic speaker - and...
IoT driving Home Automation
The Internet of Things (IoT) market is a massive market consisting of a network of physical devices (thermostats, wearables, security cameras, sensors, etc) where those devices collect and exchange data. GE and Cisco are estimating that market to be between 15...
Garage Door
To automate your garage door you will need a simple Z-wave relay and a sensor to determine if the garage door is closed or opened. Depending on your home controller there are many ways to accomplish this but here are two examples. Vera controller: Z-wave FS20Z-1...
Video Intercom System via Tablets
After trying a variety of doorbell systems on the market ranging from Doorbot now Ring, Skybell, etc. I decided to create my own intercom system which integrates into my home automation system. The reasoning for that was based on not having the ability to integrate...
