The age of the smart home has dawned, and it is no longer a luxury to be afforded only by the few or seen only in the science fiction movies. A whole crop of affordable devices has become available that can turn any home into a smart home, the one that intelligently adapts to your needs and preferences. With devices such as these you can automate, remote control, or monitor just about anything in your home. The depth and level of intelligence you wish to wire your home with is up to you. You can choose one that offers the most important functionality for you or combine multiple to fully smarten up your home.
1. WeMo
Belkin’s WeMo series of devices has been around for a while, allowing you some level of control over almost all of your home electronics. The basic product is the WeMo Switch that plugs into any wall outlet allowing you to switch it on or off from anywhere you have internet access using the WeMo app on your smartphone. The app also supports scheduling the times you want your devices on or off. The WeMo Insight Switch offers an additional monitoring feature that can give you an insight into your devices’ power consumption.
If you combine it with the WeMo Motion sensor you can also trigger the on/off switch when motion is detected. A simple example use would be to turn the night lamp on when someone sets off the sensor by going to the bathroom. Belkin also offers a dedicated WeMo Light Switch as a replacement for your traditional light switches giving you the same remote control ability and automation over your main lights. With their smart LED light bulbs you can also dim the lights just right for any mood or occasion.
Other devices include the NetCam remote controlled Wi-Fi camera with night vision, and.. the Crock-Pot smart slow cooker with WeMo integration. Basically if you were to get the entire set you would significantly smarten up your home just with these devices alone.
Certainly worth mentioning is the integration with the IFTTT service, which we’ll talk about later on. It allows you to set up IFTTT recipes or triggers for your WeMo connected devices. For example, you can set it to turn the front lawn night lights on when a weather website indicates that the sun has set. You could also turn your air conditioning on if weather gets hot.
An alternative to WeMo may be Parce, which has similar functionality to the WeMo Switch along with great power usage analytics features.
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