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Discussion on: Do you have any home automation projects in the works?

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ItsASine (Kayla) • Edited

Things in my apartment right now:

  • Hue lights in every personal light system (so lamps but not ceiling fixtures)
    • Turns itself on when boyfriend is getting ready for work and off by the time he should have left
    • Dims a half hour before bed, gradually turning off by the time its bedtime
  • Alexa with an Echo and Echo Dot (though boyfriend has a Google Home... I don't touch it)
    • Mostly used to check the weather or yell at it to turn on/off the Hue lights
    • It now can play Skyrim too
  • Logitech Bridge that barely works. It will turn on the TV but it is terribly finicky about my wifi. I need to fix it since it basically can automate anything with a remote.
  • Wemo Smart Plug that I used for Christmas lights
  • Withings (now Nokia) Smart Scale to sync my weight to The Cloud so various health apps can yell at me
  • IFTTT to tie everything together with the general internet (most useful right now is to get the scale to talk to Fitbit)
  • I have a firewall on its way to secure the whole set up, too
  • A Petcube and Amazon Cloud Cam to watch my cats while I'm at work. The Cloud Cam has a better app and quality but the Petcube, being actually designed for this, has a laser pointer to play with them. I still vote Cloud Cam, to be honest.

If I ever own a place, I'll deck out more and install fixtures like locks and stuff. But for now, I like this set up with my little apartment. Only things I'm tempted to improve are 1. a wifi Roomba since I hate cleaning 2. a wifi slow cooker so I can check on it while I'm at work and 3. an IoT router to play with.