Home Automation Archive

A year ago I posted about how my husband and I were going to start automating our home using the SmartThings platform. At that time, we just had two lights automated. We honestly didn’t do much with it most of the year (which is good, since Samsung didn’t provide the best upgrade

Update 12/20/2018: Logitech has disabled local APIs for their Harmony remote. I can no longer recommend this product. In the recent past, I scoffed at expensive remotes. I remember about five years ago, scoffing at my husband when he bought at $90 smart remote during a Woot Off (to be fair, it was

Note: This is about the second generation Nest. Google announced a newer one earlier this month with bigger screen and a more sensitive light sensor. As far as I can tell, those are the only differences. We bought a Nest thermostat on Black Friday last year, and now that I’ve had it

About a year ago I wrote about how we started our home automation project by buying a SmartThings hub. Samsung has just now released the new version of the of the hub, and we decided to pre-order. I just finished the migration process and thought I’d let you know how it went.

Disclaimer: We decided on and purchased SmartThings on our own. There are affiliate links that will give us a cut if you buy it though. It seems home automation is becoming the next big thing in consumer tech.  It’s been something enthusiasts have been playing with for years now. But with prices and difficulty