Category Archives: Me & my ramblings

Talking to my house – Amazon Alexa (Echo) and SmartThings

Amazon recently competed their Alexa/Echo integration with SmartThings after previously integrating a number of other home automation hubs like Wink and Hue. I jumped on it as soon as it was available in the Alexa iOS app. Setting up SmartThings with Amazon Alexa (Echo) As with other SmartThings integrations, the first step will request an …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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