Home Automation dashboard for SmartThings

SmartThings does a lot of things well, but their main failing has been support for larger screens. If you have a tablet, you can run the phone interface, but it doesn’t take advantage of the larger format. For use on my desktop computer I installed an Android emulator to have access to the app on …

Smart Sleeping – morning wakeup routines with SmartThings

I’ve been using home automation as type of morning wake-up alarm for several years, but always found the scheduling to be cumbersome. In most home automation systems you need to rely on motion detection (what if I just got up to use the restroom, but am headed back to bed?) or timer events (what if …

Add Community Created SmartApps to SmartThings

One of the great things about SmartThings is how easy it is to develop for and how active the development community is. Users can create SmartApps for specific scenarios, and then use those SmartApps multiple times in their SmartThings environment as needed. Unfortunately, there isn’t an “app store” type concept within SmartThings. Unless a SmartApp …

Su Casa Es Mi Casa – Vera automation hub hacked

Xipiter has a great write-up on how they hacked the MiCasaVerde Vera quickly and easily: The device has embedded SSH private keys on THE IMMUTABLE sections of the firmware image so we know that all these devices have the same embedded ssh key. It uses that key to access the manufacturers backend and set up …

Smart Leak Detection – Using the Utilitech Water Leak Detector with SmartThings home automation

As I’ve been moving all of my home automation projects over to the SmartThings environment, I’m expanding my number of devices and scenarios in order to take full advantage of the easy monitoring and alerts which are possible within the SmartThings ecosystem. The Problem Leak detectors are normally pretty simple devices; water conductivity completes an …