Monitoring the house using my dashboard

With all the automations in the house coming along just fine, like any developer, I knew my code might have some bugs. So to see what the status of the house and lights are, I leveraged the webcore dashboard. It comes as part of webcore and each “routine” which they call piston can have its […]

Night light dilemma – when sleeping in the dark is impossible

Simple things unknown about my wife to the general public, is that she cannot sleep in the dark. This normally means that we need to have a night light in the bedroom which to my luck has always been on my side of the bed. This normally has been too bright for me and also […]

Setting up motion sensing lights

It seems like the house is getting used to the automations faster than I expected as now lately I got a request from Dad, saying “Can you put motion sensor lights on my way to the washroom and kitchen, so that I don’t have to stumble at night?” and I said “DONE!!”. As I did […]

Adding weather into the mix for automations

Being from a brown family, my parents are very careful about their money. This became more apparent as mom started complaining that the kitchen lights are being turned on even if it’s broad daylight outside which was her way of saying I was wasting energy. She suggested that I change the settings so that it […]

Setting up house modes – How to deal with the bright lights

Well, having the lights controlled via the sensors for a month now has been fun as we all forgot how to turn on the lights in the major rooms, so mission accomplished! Now the challenge was that late at night you would have to wake up to have bright lights in your face. That was […]

Christmas lights setup – The “Honey I love you” post

Today’s blog was brought to you by – “Honey! I love you”. Those words have always been a warning sign that something will be asked of me. For those who follow Elma’s Instagram, (insert shameless plug to her Instagram account @elmamirandamirza), she put up the Christmas trees and decorations around two weeks ago. And yesterday […]

Automating the kitchen lights – Magic!!

Welcome back, now that we are set up, I observed Elma and my parents behaviours. I noticed that they love walking into the kitchen and not turning off the light.. Typical. So that was my first experiment.  I placed a sensor in the kitchen, and connected it to smartthings, installed my smart light bulbs in […]

Getting the right home automation ecosystem

Well, now that we are all moved in, we needed to find something that would work with our Xplornet network and how getting a smart home setup on a 25Mbs connection would be a challenge. During our research, we found a lot of products that can do a lot of things, but we stuck with […]