Having an automated house has been great. Not just to save money, but also time and brain power (the little I do have). After Elma , Mom and Dad pushed me to write a book about it. Here is the first version of what could be more. Hope you read it, enjoy it and eventually […]
After using the sensors in the kitchen along with the weather for a while, we noticed that the weather information was not the most up to date which meant that the lights would not be turned on or off correctly. I did some digging into it and found the following Light & Motion Sensor which […]
With fall soon approaching, it brings the uncertainty of what the weather will be like. To ensure that Mom and Dad stay warm and, me not constantly running back and forth from turning the heat pump on/off and opening and closing the windows. I had to come up with something better. From a previous post […]
It’s been a while since we’ve gone on a vacation and oh how I miss them. But whenever I’ve been on vacation I’ve always thought about the house and think about it safety. Now that we’ve moved away from town and our neighbors are farther away from us, we can’t count on them to let […]
After a few months with the SmartThings installed in the house, I knew that my code would have some issues. I wanted a way to see which lights were left on in the house so this way if I noticed a light being on for an extended period of time and none of my motion […]
For a very long time, Elma has been getting migraines and we did not know what was causing this. Now if anyone has had a migraine before, depending on the level, it can literally be blinding. Each person’s triggers are different so we, over the years, figured out that one of the major triggers was […]
Now that the dashboard was all setup, curious me wanted to see if I could add more information on it that I normally look up, like the weather. The big question was around what information do I like to see, was it just temperature or should I include cloud cover and other things as well. […]
People talk about the covid weight gain, I fear that mine has been well before covid even started. So to keep an eye on my weight, we had purchased a Withings (now Nokia) weight scale and in all good things it connects to the internet. With the dashboard setup and me used to keeping an […]
A few things we have learnt over the years; the sun will still rise every morning and will set every evening. A good metaphor around the challenges and hopes around our day to day lives, but also the fact that I needed to make things turn on and off in the house. Now that is […]
With all the various sensors in the house, my lazy behind did not want to check the battery level on each one of them. Time to automate that as well! I wrote a script which polls all the devices once a day, and if anyone’s battery is below 15% it will let me know which […]
