In our latest YouTube video, we give you some ideas for helping get your kids out of the house for school in a timely and stress-free manner. In my house, this involves using wakeup lights to rouse the kids in a gentle manner (at least as gentle as it gets at 6:30 in the morning).…
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Homes with existing alarm system wiring can provide your home automation system with a multitude of sensors. The problem to date is that there have not been really good options to take advantage of the wired sensors. Until today that is. In late 2018, Fibaro released the Smart Implant which is a Z-Wave plus device…
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This page is a work in progress. As I test more locks, they will be added here. Thank you for your patience. Make/Model Protocol Install Complexity Proximity Unlock Motor Noise Power-fail Backup Hub Command Reliability Lock Status Report Reliability User Report to Hub Reliability Alfred / DB1 Bluetooth Z-Wave Low Yes Low USB High High…
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Here is the How behind the What. Since I use the Hubitat Elevation (HE) Home Automation Hub, all examples are based on HE and Alexa.
When it comes to testing smart locks, I focus on two aspects: 1) does the lock do what it’s told to do when commanded by the hub; and 2) does the lock tell the hub what happened (locked, unlocked, which user, etc.). My goal is for these tests to be as automated as possible. The more…
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Update April 2020 – Wink employees have been active again on their Facebook and Twitter pages. I see that people are getting support. Wink also announced a mandatory firmware upgrade, which is encouraging. Unfortunately there’s not much other news available. Wink has been silent. Very silent. According to one article, they already have. So if…
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