Ok… I thought
so hard and long on how to start this blog.
Can I make
the intro to somehow connect to my previous blog, so that I can make people read
it before coming here?
Or should I
make the same old reference of Sci Fi movies? Will it be repetitive and make
people think that I’m not creative enough?
Should I make
it as a stand-alone blog just sharing the automation gadgets I have and start
by writing how technology has made our life easier.?
After many
and many thoughts here’s my intro... Hello and welcome to yet another blog in ZAKAPEDIA
(Not sure how many noticed the name :P, Branding is very important Bigilaaeee..)
In the last blog
I shared some glimpses on how I transformed or was forced to transform my
working desk setup at home. If you have not read it yet here is the link. Top 10 Gadgets to organise your desk. But there are few more additional yet powerful
gadgets that I and my family members use regularly. Though they were initially added
as a fun interactive gadget mostly used for entertainment, but sooner they
invaded our lifestyle. And now it is quite difficult to do away with them. In fact,
they have invaded so much into our lifestyle that we want to carry some of the
gadgets to wherever we travel around.
Flashback – Back in 2016 IOT (Internet of Things) was a hot tech topic. Everywhere I went every I was bumping into it. Maybe I was being victimized for targeted marketing. And me being very naïve about IOT back then which I am still misunderstood that IOT is a concept of just connecting devices together. I had even written a blog about it. Here is the link https://www.zakapedia.in/2016/01/making-iot-reality-in-our-home.html?m=1
In fact it is way more than that. I don't want to dwell more into it now as it is not a matter of interest in this blog.
Free advice
(Targeted Marketing): For those people who think what these big 4 (Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon) companies will
do gathering my private data. They change your perspective about a product or
an idea and even try to instill an idea that you will subconsciously follow. Even though you may have a stronger mind and will power you will fall for it eventually because that is how we have been
living our life. Though it will not happen overnight, it will happen over time. If you look back at your journey of life none of the decision that has
been made is purely yours, there will be always some influence to it. So think or thrice before you hit that buy button on a shopping cart or hit that post button on a social media.
Now coming back to our content I being a big
fan of Home Automation had a wish to automate everything at home. I started
with two products and this is was in 2018
1.
Syska Smart Bulb:
This looks like a normal white LED bulb, but comes with a
built in Wi-Fi microchip. The microchip connects to your Wi-Fi router and in turn
connects to a Syska app in your phone, through which you can control the state
of the bulb (On / Off). It also has the option to change to many different
colours, 16 million they say of which I have used only 5 or 6 so far. The reason
I went for this bulb is that it was sold at a combo offer with Echo Dot at a sale.
To top it the bulb was compatible with Alexa (meaning you can connect your
Alexa with this bulb and control it over voice commands). Now a days there are Smart Tube lights as well in the smart home market.
Let me tell you the best use case for this product.
If you are sleeping inside a mosquito net with the lights switched off and
there are few mosquitoes inside your net which are making those annoying noises
stopping you from falling asleep. Now in this case if you are having a normal
bulb you will have to move out of your mosquito net to switch on the light and try
to find those mosquitoes inside. And by the time you move in and out there will
be few more of them inside again. With this smart light once you have snuck
inside the net you need not move out to switch on / off the light to kill those
mosquitoes inside. You can either give a voice command or just use the app.
2.
Amazon Echo Dot:
This is by far the futuristic tech gadget I’ve used so far.
It can do wonders and whatever I can think of and even some things which I
cannot think of. Now most of you would have already known of its capabilities
and for others who don’t know about it. It’s a device which takes your voice commands
as input, converts them to a machine understandable language and answers or executes
those commands instantly.
Features that I liked the most:
1. The interoperability it has with multiple devices – Amazon is trying to build an eco-system with its echo devices and software. We have the Echo dot, Echo Show, FireTv Stick, Echo Flex, Echo Auto (a useless device don't go for it)
2. The integration support that it has with almost all the apps. You can book cabs in Ola and Uber, make payments with Amazon Pay, order food from Swiggy and Zomato, add groceries to your amazon shopping cart, connect to your smart home devices. You name it and Alexa can connect to it. You can even build your own skill and integrate with other apps.
3. The ease with which it understands the local slang – Literally it can understand any slang spoken in English. I found it to be more accurate when it comes to picking up words, provided we have a quite environment.
4. Other language support – It can support Hindi as a communication language for now and I’m sure they will include more regional languages to this in the future. It also has Celebrity voices which comes with a pricing though.
5. The routines – It is basically a kind of alarm that we can set but with added functionalities. You can add ‘n’ number of devices which should work with the alarm. We can also set custom trigger events to perform a task.
E.g. When I say Alexa – Turn on Entertainment
– It turns on my Sound System and TV and I can make this happen at a particular
time of the day.
When I bought this product in 2018 initially, I used it to
only play songs, and control my Syska light because I only had this option enabled and there were no more smart appliances that could connect to Alexa. I had the Echo dot connected with my
bigger speakers and would often enjoy the high-quality music streaming from Amazon
Music. But later as my son grew up, I had to disconnect it from the bigger
speakers as most of the times he would be sleeping in the room and it would be disturbing
for him when Alexa says something. By this time, I had even automated the Syska LED
to switch on and off automatically at certain times using the app feature. So basically, the echo dot was not being
fully utilized. I started looking for Alexa's other capabilities and understood that I need some smart appliances that could speak with Alexa to make it fully operational. There is a famous dialog in Tamil which says "Oruthana emathanum na avan kita karunaya ethirpaka kudathu avan aasaya thoondanum" (You should not look for sympathy when you are trying to con a person, just kindle his desire he will fall for it) and there I fell for it and found this next product to give get more juice out of Alexa.
3.
Sonoff Smart Wi-Fi Switch:
This is another level of gadget which converts a normal device
to smart. I have two versions of this one is an external one and another one is
a mini device which fits inside our normal switchboxes. It’s an external device
(Switch) which you can connect to your existing device. This device again works
on the same principle that it has an Wi-Fi chip inside with a relay to turn on
/ off the appliance. And it integrates with both Alexa and Google home to voice
activate the devices connected to it. I’ve connected the mini version to my ceiling
fan and now it is smart. The external one I have used on a junction box and it powers
on / off all the devices connected to it making them all smart.
Features:
1. It has a dedicated app which has the option to switch on / off the devices and even create schedules. We can set a schedule for devices to turn on or off at a particular time.
2. It has an inching mode – This is used where we want the device to be ON only for a particular amount of time. Practical use case would be Water heaters and Motor pumps. Often, we tend to forget the heaters after switching it on making us feel guilty. This comes in handy in those situations where it switches it off after a set time period no matter whenever we switch it on.
3.
It comes in various options and devices.
It has a power monitoring device which can measure the units of power consumed
by a device and temperature sensor switch which can work based on the room temperature.
The point to be noted here is it is just an external switch
which powers on or off the devices. If you want to turn your old sound system
smart, this smart switch only power on the device and it would be on standby
mode. We will have to use the IR (Infra Red) remote of the sound system to turn
it on actually and this is not full automation. The next device will actually solve
that problem.
4.
Universal IR Blaster
This gadget is a replacement to all the remotes which
uses the IR (TV, Sound Systems, Air Conditioner, Set Top Box). There are many brands in the market now and each brand's device has a
dedicated app combined with it. You control all the devices using the app
instead of the physical remote and even integrate it with Alexa or Google home to voice command them. Once you power on and connect this device to
your Wi-Fi network, you can literally configure any physical remote into it. It will already have some of the popular brand remotes pre built in it and the best feature is
this device can actually learn.
If your device (a local brand in my case) which is not available in the pre-built list then all you need to do is choose the remote
type (TV, AC, Sound System) and it gives you a blank template with empty
buttons on the app. You have to press the empty button and it will go into
learning mode, you can press any button on the physical remote and voila the
functionality is transferred to the app.
We don’t
use any physical IR remotes now as everything is into our mobiles. There are some
remotes which work on Bluetooth (FireTV stick and MI TV stick) for which there
are devices too (Bluetooth + IR Blaster)
Tip: There are
a lot of products in this category which are cheap. If you want to start with
home automation start with this.
With all said and done I leave it to you to explore more about
each gadget and use it accordingly. There is a numerous way you can integrate all
these gadgets and the use cases are countless. Apart from these there are other smart home gadgets like the smart plug, smart spike buster, smart fan with regulator control and the list goes on. For now I'm contented with the gadgets that I have. Though they were bought out of passion but still I'm satisfied that it making our lives easier in someway or the other. If you think that any of these gadgets
will solve a problem statement in your daily activities feel free to use them. And if you ever want to make your home a smart
home give me a call / IM me in social media would be glad to help you. I’ll
leave you guys with a small demo with the automations I have at home.
If you are reading
this line, thank you so much for your patience and taking the time out to read
this blog. Please do comment your feedback down below. Right now, the only way
I get the feedback is through number of views each blog post makes, which keeps
me encouraged to write the next one. So,
whatever your feedback is good, bad or worst just pour it down in the comments.
Meet you in the next one.
0 Comments