Home Automation

How to Control the Xiaomi Mi Vacuum from HomeSeer

Back about a decade ago we had a Roomba I had received while doing the payperpost . The wife and I liked it and it did a pretty good job. It eventually died as electronics do and I wasn’t able to resurrect it. Eventually it went to the dump. Rather than replace it we just…Read more

Five Free Home Automation Tools

So you’ve spent all your money on a crapload of smarthome devices and don’t have anything else to spend on software, or you just like tinkering with stuff and discovering how and why they work, or maybe you’re just a fan of not supporting developers for their hard work and want something for free. Actually…Read more

Today’s Home Automation Deals

Funny that I wrote about these earlier but Homecontrols is currently having a sale on a few items including Vera. You can pick up the VeraEdge for $69.95 and the VeraPlus for $119.95. That’s a $30 savings over Amazon’s price for the plus. The Zipato Z-Wave RGBW LED Light Bulb is on sale for $39 (that’s…Read more

Home Automation Hubs and How to Pick One

As far as home automation hubs go, the sky is the limit… as far as cost anyway. There’s a pretty large range in what they can do and it all depends on what you want to do and how technical you are as well. If all you want to do is control a few items…Read more

How to get into Home Automation on the Cheap

Unless you’re like me and spend the next 17 years picking up odd bits of equipment here and there and slowly build up your Home Automation system, one of the biggest barriers to getting introduced to Home Automation is the cost. It’s most definitely not a cheap hobby. If all you want to do is…Read more

Ten Things You Can Do With HomeSeer Home Automation

I’ve been a pretty loyal HomeSeer user for the last 17 years or so, ever since I got into Home Automation. While there are plenty of pros and cons about it, mainly because it’s paid and everyone wants free beer, that’s not what this is about. I’ll touch on that later. One of the things…Read more

Why Your Home Automation and IOT Shouldn’t be in the Cloud

Updated 3/12/17 – It was mentioned that the Nest Thermostat does not work without Internet connectivity. That’s not entirely true. The thermostat does continue to function as normal, it is the remote control features that won’t work without Internet. Last week’s little “hiccup” with Amazon AWS servers and a large portion on the web basically…Read more

Alexa Can Now Control Wink-Compatible Smart Locks

Recently Amazon has added smart lock capability to it’s Alexa smart home API. I’ve been patiently waiting for the fine folks at Homeseer to update their skill so that I can start doing the same without having to say “Alexa, tell Homeseer to lock the front door” etc…. Anyway, Wink has beaten them to the…Read more

State of the Smart Home?

So I’m browsing around the other day and came across an article over at Wareable. Haven’t ever been there but I’ll probably stop back by and check it out occasionally. Anyway, the article is titled “The State of the Smart Home” and they attempt to give a brief history of home automation over the last…Read more

Google Home Review

So I set up Google Home a couple of weeks ago and figured it had been up and running long enough for me to give a preliminary review. So far the WAF factor (as well as children) has been meh… Don’t get me wrong. I love gadgets. I love Google stuff. I was a big…Read more