- Interested in getting more out
of your smart-home automation than your hub can provide?
Today we're going to look at Stringify,
which is one powerful option that'll take your robots
and routines to a whole new level.
Stay tuned.
(electronic music)
Hi, again, John Stone, the DIY Smart Home Guy,
here to talk about an app
that'll put your home automation on steroids.
Since I'm hanging out on our farm in Thailand,
I haven't gotten around to making it a smart home yet.
I needed something to talk about that doesn't require me
to be in our US home, so Stringify it is.
As always, there are links to related videos
and affiliate links to all products discussed
in this video in the description below.
Say hi to Jeff.
Hi, Jeff.
For those of you who aren't familiar with Stringify,
it's a cloud-based logic system that has the capability
to connect other cloud-aware smart devices and services
like the Amazon Echo, Wink Hub, SmartThings,
IFTTT, and many others.
You can use these connections to create advanced logic flows
that can respond to triggers and make more things happen.
At the time I recorded this video,
Stringify is only available for iOS and Android devices.
In the Android world, it's only available
for newer releases, so you may have to do a little research
to make sure it's compatible with your device.
Just like any other app, you'll need to create an account
with Stringify to get up and running.
Now, it's important to understand
that Stringify is a cloud service.
This means that if your Internet goes down,
anything you've left up with Stringify won't work
during that period of time.
For those of you that are a bit unsure
of how cloud services work,
let's walk through a simple example.
We'll start with an Echo Dot and a Wink Hub
in our little house.
Anytime you give an instruction to a Alexa,
she takes that request up to the Amazon servers.
If the command was related to your smart home,
Amazon sends the instruction set over to the Wink servers,
which is still out there in the cloud.
The Wink service takes that command and sends it down
to the Wink Hub inside your home,
which in turn sends the command over to the light,
and voila, the light turns on.
If you already have an Echo,
you'll probably already have noticed that,
when the Internet is down, Alexa's pretty useless.
Well, Stringify operates in the exact same principles.
Stringify sits out on a server and,
when it fires one of its flows,
it will send that information over to the Wink Hub.
The other thing that's happening is,
Wink is sending information over to Stringify.
If Stringify detects an event that's contained in a flow,
it starts the process all over again,
and, since you can connect Stringify to your Amazon Alexa,
you give voice commands to the Echo
which in turn fires Stringify flows,
which does even more cool stuff.
Now, Stringify isn't limited to the Amazon Echo
and smart home hubs, it connects to a whole host
of cloud services, including IFTTT, and if you're wondering
if you can do the same things with IFTTT, the answer is, no.
IFTTT is limited to a single trigger and responding action.
Triggers and actions are basically if this, then that,
type of commands, where in essence, you are stating,
if some cloud service does this,
then tell that other cloud service to do that.
In our example, the this is called a trigger
and the that is called an action.
What Stringify allows you
to do is add conditions and constraints.
This means that you can add in and and or constraints
to your flows for a more powerful experience.
With this feature, you can say,
do this thing if and only if this other thing is true.
Let's look at an example.
From the list of Stringify services,
we're gonna use TimeOfDay, Doorbell Motion, and Light,
and using our Stringify flow, we'll use this to say
that if there's doorbell motion or it's nighttime.
If these are true, it'll turn on the light.
In this example, both of these triggers are meaning that
if the other thing happens, doorbell motion or nighttime,
is detected, we'll do this one thing,
but that's really not that useful.
I only wanna turn on my light
when the doorbell detects motion at night,
so to accomplish this, we'll modify this flow.
I'll give an example later of how to create this in the app,
but for now, I just wanna let you know that it's possible.
By joining these two connections,
I have the ability to make one thing a trigger,
which is the doorbell detected motion,
and the other thing is turned into a constraint,
do this thing and if it's nighttime.
If that's true, then the doorbell motion will turn
on the light.
I can also add in additional constraints like here,
I only want the entry light to turn on
if the hall light is turned off, so that's pretty powerful.
Now, let's get into the app and make this flow.
The first thing you're gonna wanna do is
go over to the Things.
In the Things, you're gonna wanna make sure
that you have your hub.
I have my Wink in there.
Once you authenticate into your hub, it's gonna bring in
all the hub-exposed devices like I have here.
Date and time should already be there;
that'll get us going.
Let's come back over to our flows.
You can see that I have quite a few flows in there already,
but let's just go ahead and create a new one,
so we'll click on that Create button
in the upper right-hand corner.
There's a little bit of an explanation
here about what a flow is.
Now, first thing: you can do two things here.
One is if you click on that little plus sign down
at the bottom, we'll get all the things
that are exposed in our Stringify app.
I'm gonna go and I'm gonna select the things
that I wanna add to this.
The first one is going to be my front doorbell.
I'm gonna come down; I'm also going
to select my upstairs hall light,
and then I'm gonna want my stairs light,
and I wanna bring in also my date and time.
You'll see around, you have a bunch of little circles here,
and those are where we're gonna place everything.
For this, we're gonna grab, press and hold,
I'm gonna grab that doorbell and drop it in there,
and as I said, I want a little date and time on there,
and then I'm gonna grab my stairs light
and we're gonna put that in here.
Just for fun, I'm gonna move that doorbell up to here.
You'll see the little gears here.
What that indicates is that we have
to configure these items, so by pressing that,
we're gonna say, my trigger, remember that is,
when this happens, this is my if,
and my if is going to be when motion is detected.
That's going to fire a trigger,
and I'm gonna set a date and time, if it's nighttime.
Save that.
What I want this to do is, I want a action,
so come off of triggers and go to actions,
and that action will be, turn on,
and I'm gonna save that.
We said we wanted to make this an or.
That means, if my doorbell rings or it's nighttime,
so if you just swipe across gently;
I'm just gonna swipe across here on this;
and it's gonna that little yellow ball is going
to follow me down there to that stairs light,
and then I'm going to do the date and time over there
to the stairs light also.
What this means is, if I have motion at my doorbell
or I have a date and time that is nighttime,
it'll turn the stairs light on.
That's it; all we would have to do now is enable this flow,
but as I said, I wanna make this an and,
so to delete the date and time,
let's just go back and delete, we're gonna remove that.
To make an and, I don't have to go over
and add those devices in.
I can grab that little yellow chain
and I can just drag that down to a circle.
I can come grab my date and time, and you'll see
that it is connected, the date and time
with the doorbell, before the chain.
That's what turns this into an and.
We'll do the same configuration.
We're gonna come down and say, only if it's nighttime,
and we'll save that.
What we've effectively done here is said,
now, if I have motion at the front doorbell,
and it's nighttime, turn that light on.
Again, I could enable that flow,
and that's just what's gonna happen.
I also said we could add in another thing,
so let's grab that same yellow chain,
and I'm just gonna gently drag that over to that open spot,
and this is where I'm gonna go down to my upstairs hall,
and I'm going to say, again on the trigger side,
only if that upstairs hall if off.
Remember, what we've done is, we've set up a series of ands,
so it's if there's doorbell motion,
and the upstairs hall light is off,
and it's nighttime, then turn that stairs light on.
Pretty cool.
With a little bit of imagination, I think you'll start
to see some pretty powerful ways to use Stringify.
My recommendation is to write out what you're trying
to achieve on a piece of paper first.
Do something like this, where I spelled out
what I'm doing with words.
This'll make it a little bit easier
when you're trying to create the flow in Stringify.
One thing I didn't like is that it's not very easy
to just look at your triggers
and conditions to see what the settings are,
but it doesn't bother me enough to stop using it.
In the future, I plan to make more-advanced flows.
I'll put links to these videos
in the description below once they're released.
Thanks for watching; don't forget to subscribe;
and don't forget to click like.
Over here are a couple of other videos that you might enjoy.
For more reviews, tips, and DIY videos, visit AZHB.com,
and thanks to all of you that already follow me
over on Facebook or Twitter, both are @DIYSmartHomeGuy.
'Til next time, cheers!