This Smart Home Isn’t Stupid

I grew up as an elementary school kid in the early 2000s and vividly remember the Disney Channel original movie Smart House. It's on Disney Plus now, if you want to watch it, it doesn't really hold up, but 13-year-old Ben Cooper wins a Smart. house in a contest after his mother's death and the house is supposed to take care of himself, his sister and his father in the role of housewife, but the house eventually turns evil by preventing anyone from leaving and then It burns, killing the entire family. So maybe I embellished that last part a little, but I remember as a kid thinking that none of

this

smart

home

stuff was going to happen in the real world; there would never be meals made to order.

Self-cleaning floors. Voice controlled lights. sick party mode and sure a number of those things haven't and never will come, but many of them have come true and in ways far beyond what was dreamed of in a

smart

home

, but it seems like a lot of modern technology for the home smart, to say the least. It sucks really well and there are even entire internet accounts dedicated to pointing out the mistakes of smart homes with dozens of apps to manage voice assistant support and fragments and lousy automation, most smart homes suck but they don't have to . I have built my house on three.

Different principles: Number one, all smart devices should be able to be controlled non-smartly, either via a remote control or a button on the device. Number two, all devices should be integrated into a single centralized app with a single voice assistant as support and number three, automation should never get in the way. so let me show you how I built my smart home, that's not

stupid

, it all starts with centralized control and for that reason I chose homekit now,

this

is largely due to the fact that both my wife and I are primarily Apple users and , although I have my complaints about Homekit and I'll get to them in a minute.

There are some things that Homekit does surprisingly well that neither Google nor Amazon offer in their offerings, since all Homekit devices connect to a home hub. Now this can be an apple tv, homepod rip, homepod mini or ipad with home lock and all devices must be able to work without an internet connection directly to the home hub on my local area network, this means that when my internet goes out or when the company I bought Extraordinarily powerful personal geolocation automations that I can and do have automations that run not only based on whether someone is home, but also who is home or not and how far they are from home.

I'll talk about that a little later. I like Homekid for its safety. It is now Apple certified for Smart devices are much higher than those from Google and Amazon and while this certainly does not mean that Homekit is perfectly secure, nothing is and I have taken extra precautions, such as using VLANs, they are amazing, for I hope for a video soon about that Homekit, which in general is better. network citizen than the other two, so let's start at the base of the tree and build up, it all starts as I mentioned with the home hub or home hubs.

Interestingly, Apple allows you to have multiple hubs for redundancy and increased speed that any home TV or pod will have by default. to be one hub and the really nice thing about having multiple hubs is that it gives you more control in the room, for example when I'm watching TV and someone rings the doorbell a video appears with options to answer or since I'm in this room I can say, hey, turn on the lights and the homepod here knows that I want to turn on the lights in this room without me having to say where I am located in the house. hey, turn off the lights earlier, this was cost prohibitive. but now that the homepod mini is available for 99, it's a little more reasonable to put speakers and consequently hubs in rooms where you didn't have them before.

After you have installed the hubs with which you can control Siri, it is time to install smart home devices. now homekit is great in the sense that it has a large community that creates unofficial plugins for unsupported devices through a home bridge or home assistant. I have a few of them and will talk about them shortly, but as a general rule, you should buy devices that natively support the platform whenever possible. Now Homekit initially had a very small list of compatible devices, and compared to Alexa or Google, it's still small, but it's grown quite a bit over the last few years for lights I didn't want.

Choose smart bulbs, there are a few reasons behind this, most of the lights in my house are pendants and therefore the bulbs themselves are visible and smart bulbs, well, they are rarely attractive and this makes them a Immediate failure in my house. but the other problem is that they are expensive and those damn switches, since smart bulbs are powered directly from the light socket, they only work when the light switch that powers them is on when guests visit and flip the light switches. any way on the wall. It gets frustrating and ruins everything. Also, look, maybe I'm just a caveman, but I like to touch the light switches when I enter the room.

We need to get rid of this notion that everything smart has to be controlled by voice or a smartphone app and while there are wall mounted remote style solutions for wireless light bulbs I come back to my previous point that a are expensive and b smart devices should never get in the way. I needed a traditional light switch that would act like a light switch and mostly leave me fine with just a lutron cassette option I don't know a casino. This was the first smart home purchase I made about six months ago and I don't regret it for a second.

They're bulletproof because, well, they're just regular light. switches, you can press the top button to turn on the light, the bottom button to turn off the light and the arrows in the middle to dim up or down, this functionality does not require any smart home construction, it will work forever, it is always just a light switch, but it's not just a light switch because it has built-in intelligence. If you have a Lutron hub that's connected to your network via Ethernet, you can control all of these light switches through your app, which is fine if nothing special, but also natively. inside the homekit home app because this hub and its switches operate on a 431 megahertz radio frequency, you don't pollute your entire wi-fi network with switches and light bulbs, the transmission distance on these things is incredibly excellent, i have that little hub in the basement right next to a brick wall and it communicates with all my light switches throughout the house across multiple brick walls without a problem, also if you like the idea of ​​three light switches one-way i.e. multiple light switches controlling the same light in a room Lutron sells these inexpensive pico remotes, they run on a coin cell battery, but last up to 10 years on a charge and can be used manually, mounted on their little pedestal or, as I prefer, mounted directly on the wall like a normal light switch, you would never know that this is not a real light switch plugged into the wall because they work perfectly and look great, but they are not and they work even without a network connection, okay?

The lights were resolved, but I recognized that I needed some blinds to close the many large windows around our house that require privacy instead of manually raising and lowering the blinds because you get lazy. I knew I had to be smart and found that Lutron works well too. They make shades from Serena Shades, a subsidiary company whose smart blinds communicate through the same Caseta Hub protocol. Now, after some discussion, they kindly offered to sponsor this video and I accept it, but I must reveal that they have not provided any talking points, they have no input from the director. and they are watching this video at the same time as you, and that's important because sponsors can't force me to say I like something, so I almost never do it, but damn, I love these serena tones, they suit your measure. window, which is great because you just measure the window frame yourself or you can ask an expert to do it, but it took me about 10 minutes to do the whole house, it's very easy and then you can choose one of the many fabrics, luminosities, textures, colors and finishes.

The blinds will ship surprisingly quickly and seriously, each one will take less than five minutes to install using a spirit level. Simply install a mounting bracket on the window frame and then attach the blind, that's all. I know it sounds oversimplified but it really isn't, it's a piece of cake, they run off an AC adapter or D-cell batteries. I opted for the latter and it's a little strange carrying eight huge batteries per screen, but it's supposed to They will last. several years between replacing the battery and when the time comes to finally do it, it will only take a couple of minutes.

I like the curtains because they are pretty quiet, they all go down at exactly the same time and speed, which is rarer than you would expect. Think of a smart curtain, most of them are slightly behind each other and you can control them with a large wireless remote through your phone using your Siri app or home kit and with wall-mounted pico remotes like wall switches. Lutron light, for example, neither. of these light switches for my lights or curtains are real, in quotes, but you never know and they look flawless on the wall. Lutron stuff isn't cheap, there are less expensive options but there are also more expensive options and if you go to the Lutron subreddit or pretty much anywhere else you will find people loving everything they do and I'm finding there's a reason for that. , they are really good and they are because I can't explain it better.

Bulletproof, it just always works if you're interested. I left links in the video description below. Now look, I have other native homekit accessories, like my garage door opener, that literally has no other app it's set up in and only within the homekit. It's not connected to the internet at all, which is amazing or the Zono speakers. I have two, one on each of my TVs, that are compatible with Home Kit and AirPlay, which makes it very easy to play multi-zone music around the house that can be controlled via Siri, but there are also an avalanche of devices that I want to use in my home that are not compatible with Homekit and now we come to my complaints with Homekit.

Apple has done very little since the launch of Homekit in 2016 to increase the catalog of connected smart things. For example, Samsung SmartThings supports refrigerators, ovens, washing machines, robots, vacuum cleaners, smoke detectors, valves, etc., none of which are compatible with homekit and can be very frustrating. Fortunately, there is a large community of homekit enthusiasts who want to bring unsupported devices into the platform and how it works. simple, first install the homebridge software on a raspberry pi or an old computer that is now connected to your network due to the number of high resolution cameras I have in my house, I needed a computer with a little more robustness, so I'm actually running homebridge as a background instance on an old 2018 Mac mini, now this app basically pretends Homekit is a hardware bridge and mimics official support for devices that aren't.

Once you have installed Homebridge, access your control panel through your local. IP address and then you can start installing plugins for the devices that have them now, as far as I'm concerned there are actually three levels of home bridge support, number one plug and play, number two caveat friendly and number three , jank city for For example, I love my ubiquity cameras and doorbell because they are fantastic quality, extremely robust, and record locally instead of sending things to the cloud, which I appreciate. Unfortunately, there is no homekit support and I doubt it will ever arrive, but that is not the case.

It matters a lot as the Homebridge Unifi Protect plugin does everything I can expect and more with native support after a simple GUI based setup process all my cameras appear within my home app in full resolution with support for two-way audio and even cooler. however, my doorbell has this little screen that sends messages to people and even that is compatible with the bridgehome and it appears as a switch that I can turn on and off in the home app and it works great, it's plug and play and basically makes this unsupported device native, it's no different, the second level is supported with warnings, instead To extend the home kit beyond what it's actually intended to do, this is a broadlink rm3 mini, it's a cheap and smart ir blaster which I'll leave linked below if you're interested, but basically it can make any infrared device, like a mini split air conditioning system, be it an AV amplifier or, in my case, a smart bidet enabled by sending IR commands.

Now, the Home Bridge app for this plugin is certainly less user-friendly as it is largely command-driven. line-based, but it's not too complicated to set up and there are a number of useful tutorials on YouTube if you get stuck, but once you program the ir commands you want, you can turn them into launcher app actions. Now they're a bit strange because each one appears as a button or switch so they're not as fancy as say a native av remote built into the homekit but it's as good as it looks and it works can I just say hello , siri, each one is fancy no, but it works and then the last level, Jank City, what I mean by this is the process of supporting devices in Homekit that Homekit is really not well equipped to support, like my robot vacuum cleaner ecovax t8 aivi.

Look, I'm a big fan of vacuum cleaners and this one. My current favorite not only has a gorgeous auto-charging station that always keeps the vacuum's little canister empty, but it also has extraordinarily good mapping and leaves carpet lines looking better. than any other vacuum cleaner on the market, so it looks freshly vacuumed every time. It has really smart entry and exit zones and has above average suction. I'll leave a link. below if you're interested, but one of the main reasons I love it, okay, not the main reason, but one of the secondary reasons I love it is that there is a home bridge plugin to support it, now Homekit As I mentioned above, it doesn't actually support robot vacuum cleaners, so Homebridge has tricked Homekit into thinking that this robot vacuum cleaner is a fan, so if I turn on the fan, the robot will do an automatic cleaning in the house and I can adjust the suction power of the vacuum cleaner by adjusting the fan speed within the home app.

It's weirder, but you can specify that the vacuum cleaner clean a particular area, like the kitchen floor, after preparing a meal, which It's really nice and you can do it without having to go into the official ecovax app by simply toggling the switches on and off within the home app but this is where it gets weird if I turn off the auto clean switch which is the default just It pauses the task, so I have to turn on the end task switch to get it back to the dock spinning. on a switch to return to the dock and then once you arrive you can't start a new route until you turn off the switch back to the dock, so look, it's a bit strange, I still need to open the official ecovax app eventually and a times for finer control, but it works most of the time and it's awesome to be able to tell Siri to just vacuum the kitchen after a meal and everything works fine, so you may not have your devices installed, but they're not nothing without a place. to control them, I love and hate the official Apple Home app.

You see, it's really good at being reliable and fast and integrates well with the control center, which I appreciate and there is a Mac variant, but it's also very ugly without user intervention. I've created a bunch of custom wallpapers for each room in my house so they're quickly and easily identifiable, which has helped a lot with visual clutter because, by default, all rooms use the same wallpaper, so I've hidden much of the bark that I don't need to see, for example, I have a multi-sensor device in almost every room that detects the presence of motion, humidity, ambient light and temperature, they are cool and all, but I don't really need to know humidity from one room to another. space within an app and it's really just automation that I really use these things, so while it's a bit of a pain to hide all that cool information that you just spent money to get, it's worth it to hide the things that Actually, don't use it frequently because it will only clutter the app's UI and make the experience worse.

The best thing about Homekit is that it has a number of amazing apps in the app store that try to solve the limited user experience of home apps. is a 15 app that allows you to make much more powerful automations than the default home app using boolean logic and a number of other if clauses and for example one of the automations I have is to automatically turn off the alarm system when my wife or I arrive I go home and turn on the downstairs lights, but only if it's 30 minutes before sunset, otherwise they stay off. You see, you can get super complex with the automations and scenes you set up and the best thing is that they still propagate within the official office. launcher app so you can run them without having to go into that paid launcher plus app last time it came out and I'm still not an expert on that but I really love the new scene stream app instead of having a dedicated page for each room. like the home app, which can get very cluttered when you have one device in a room, and there are some rooms where I have to the scene flow just puts everything in a scrollable list, which makes it very easy to quickly select the other thing .

What I appreciate is that it has a dedicated home security tab that allows me a quick view of the door and window sensors that I have disabled in the official home app because, again, the clutter also allows me the option to arm and quickly disarm my security system and view my The organization of camera feeds by room and device type is amazing and the app is free. I literally haven't paid for it yet. I don't even know what the unlocked features are. A couple of things you can move and point to if you want. I want it, it's free if you want to pay, it's locked behind a pretty cheap annual subscription and that really brings me to my last point, don't lose sleep over 100+ compatibility, for example my home alarm system is natively integrated into Homekit and I love it because while the stock app is fine, being able to see the status of my motion sensors, my door and window changes, my camera feeds, and being able to arm and disarm everything from the main home app , it's amazing, but there is a really cool third-party device that is supported by a device called dome.

I have a bunch of these water leak sensors placed around my house ready to detect any misplaced moisture and when they actually detect a leak, the dome motor slowly shuts off the main water line coming into my house, stopping any possible drain. dead in his tracks until I can get home and consult with a plumber. Things like this have the potential to save thousands of dollars in the future in the event of an emergency, but the dome sensor is not compatible with the home kit and is only exposed as a device inside. of my abode application, but it's a big deal, who cares?

Not that I will use it often and it may save me money in the long run. On the contrary, my induction range has a smart application and is actually more useful than me. Expectedly because it has Heston Q cookware holder and precise sous vide temperature control, there is no home kit range and although technically this range supports this and Samsung Smartthings, neither of them are worth using in the standard application. that works well, no smart home will be perfect, but I feel like I've come pretty close, even if it's not the flashiest smart home, it always works, it's controlled smartly and it can also be controlled non-smartly, everything is unified in a centralized system. app and never becomes a hassle.

I love it, just like I would love for you to give this video a like. If you hate this video, send it to someone you hate. He will despise it too. Thank you very much for watching this. video please subscribe if you want to see more stuff like this in the future but most importantly and as always stay stylish see you guys so