This past weekend, we switched over to Daylight Savings Time and all of my smart devices followed suit. Well, one didn’t: My Samsung SmartThings Hub took an extra 24 hours to adjust, so routines for lights to turn on 15 minutes prior to sunset lit up … [Read more...]
It’s time for the DIY smart home 2020 challenge with Home Assistant
After living with the Samsung SmartThings Wi-Fi hub functionality for a few weeks, it’s time to move on. Well, sort of. I like how Samsung’s product is running my smart home currently, so I’m not abandoning it. Instead, I’ll be looking at a more … [Read more...]
Why I’m pulling the plug on Wink
Over the last year or so, many of us have been wondering what’s going on with Wink. Version 2 of the smart home hub hasn’t seen many updates and I can’t remember the last time I heard about newly supported devices from Wink. Indeed, the most recent … [Read more...]
IoT news of the week for April 19, 2019
Alexa gets 2M ad-supported songs: The most commonly used smart speaker feature is listening to music, so it only makes sense that Amazon bring its Music service to Echo devices for free. And by free, I mean you won’t pay any fees but you will be … [Read more...]
Can you run an OpenHAB or Home Assistant smart home in the cloud?
Typically, people who use either the OpenHAB or Home Assistant open source smart home platforms tend to run the software on their own computer or a low-cost Raspberry Pi. Can you actually run these on cloud platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud or … [Read more...]