Hello everyone. Thanks for tuning in again. I'm here today to show you how to
create a smart home for $250 USD. Now we're going to run through a number of
devices that normally people will want, and it'll give you all the functions
that you want in a smart home. So let's get going.
The first thing that I'm going to recommend you go out and get is a voice
assistant. Now there are about three or four on the market today that you can
look at, but ultimately the top of the line is the Google Home Mini. And the
reason I'm suggesting that is, number one it's a budget choice in general, you're
going to find this for $50 USD, and they're constantly on sale for $35 USD.
Or sometimes in pairs, and so Google will sell you one of these for that low price,
and what you get for that is an incredible amount of home automation
capability, controlling home automation devices, as well as access to all of the
information and services that Google provides as part of the Google Home Mini.
Some examples of those different services you can connect are, your calendar,
especially if you're an Android user and you have Gmail and the G calendar service.
You can go ahead, connect those up and get all that information, otherwise
you're going to need, if you're an iPhone user, to do a little bit of work but you
can still get your calendar read out by your Google Home Mini. On top of that,
you're going to be able to create things like alarms, timers on the fly, so you can
go ahead and you can ask your Google Home Mini to keep track of something for
you. Of course you can always ask from Google's vast storage of
information, you can ask about things like stocks, just general information, you
can ask where a place is and they can reach into Google Maps and give you all
of that. So for 50 dollars you get a ton of capability. Now once you have that
voice assistant, you're able to control smart home devices. You're going to need
a few smart home devices to go ahead and connect to that, and I'm going to
recommend what I think is first on everybody's list when they think of the
smart home, and it's one of the reasons I chose the logo for my company here, or my
YouTube channel, Automate Your Life. That is a light bulb and
we're going to go with the Philips Hue starter pack, and they're just the white
colored light bulb. This isn't the colored light bulb where you get sixteen
thousand colors. No we're just talking about giving you the ability to turn on
and off your lights at automated times, at different points in the day. These, for
example, you can set them at sunset or sunrise to turn on or turn off. You can
also do things like control them with the Google Home Mini that we talked
about at the start, and you can also set scenes for specific things that you're
doing. The other thing is if you are an iPhone owner, you can go ahead and
connect to Apple Homekit with Philips Hue and so you can control those lights
right from your phone. You can set the brightness, and you have just a ton of
control there. The Philips Hue starter pack is $64 in general. Sometimes you
will find it on sale, and thereafter you're going to have to purchase the
bulbs for about ten to fifteen dollars a piece, depending on the sale. But this
gives you two bulbs to start with and it lets you start to automate just a few
things. Next up are a couple of devices from Google once again. They're going to
interact with the Google Home application on your iPhone or your
Android. You already have that because you have a Google Home Mini. Now each of
these are approximately $35 USD. The first one is the Chromecast Audio and
the reason I'm suggesting Chromecast Audio is simply put, that almost everyone
has a Bluetooth speaker or a speaker in their home with a 3.5 millimeter input
into it. You can go ahead and put the Chromecast Audio into it and then stream
music to that speaker anytime using either the Google Home application, or
then you can use your Google Home Mini to actually cast your music, or control
your music over to that speaker. So this enables you to make a standard speaker
in your home a smart speaker. Now the other thing I'm recommending is the
Chromecast itself. I'm not going to tell you to go out and get the 4k
version, which is called the Chromecast ultra. I'm just suggesting you get the
standard version, and the reason for that is again you can use the Google Home app
and the Google Home to go ahead and cast your favorite shows over to your TV. So
it plugs in directly into an HDMI port on your TV and it makes any TV
essentially a smart TV. So if you're using the Netflix app on your
phone, on your iPad, on your Android tablet, you're going to have a cast
button, and you can instantly cast any show, control it from your phone, or
tablet, and send it to your TV through the Google Chromecast. So what the Google
Chromecast does essentially for you is make a Smart TV out of a standard TV as
long as it has an HDMI port. We have a few dollars left in our 250 dollar
budget. What I'm going to say to you is you could choose almost any of the smart
home plugs on the market today, and the reason I say that is most of them work
exactly the same way. Now for the purposes of this I'm
choosing the TP-link Wi-Fi smart plugs. They're normally $40 for two of them and
so you're able to then make a device in your home such as an AC unit, or a fan, or
you know a coffee maker, something to that effect, you could turn it into a
smart device simply by plugging that into your tp-link plug. And then
plugging that into the wall and then you could ask Google Home Mini to turn on and off that
device, or again you can control that from your phone.
TP-link has their own application. The last thing I'm going to suggest to you
is essentially a smart home camera, and when you look at the list of smart home
cameras out there, it's kind of like the who's who of home automation. We see Nest, Arlo,
and we see Logitech, a number of companies out there with
these very, very expensive smart home cameras. Now those are all well and good
if you want to go spend upwards of $300 on a camera, go
ahead, but what I've personally found is that the WyzeCam 2 and the WyzeCam
Pan, both of those cameras will do everything you could ever want, other
than a little bit of the facial recognition. I would say for most
people, they're not looking for that, and I would say for most people they're
not looking for that. They can go with just a simple smart home camera now WyzeCam 2's
are $20. This is a $20 USD for smart home 1080p capability, and it can
send you notifications for motion in your home, it can send you notifications
for when it hears sound from a smoke detector, or a carbon monoxide detector.
So there's a ton of functionality there, and the camera itself is really good
quality. Now the WyzeCam 2 does have a little bit of an issue versus some of
those other smart home cameras. It tends to detect motion based on light a little
bit, and so during a storm or something, you can end up with some notifications.
What this means is you have to manage when you want the notifications to show
up at, and/or not to show up, and so what I do personally, when I leave the house I
use a service called if this than that to turn on the notifications. So then I
know if someone's in my home, and then I turn them off when I return home. So that
video I'm going to stick up in the top right, right now, to show you how to do
that. If you want to go watch that now, it's a relatively simple process but
there you have it guys. That's actually a $245 USD smart
home and I'm saving you five dollars here. You probably have to use it on tax
anyways, but ultimately there you go, for two hundred and fifty dollars you can
get what I think most people are looking for in terms of a smart home, and there's
nothing there that is an incredibly difficult setup process.
So anyways everyone, if you have any questions, if you're
looking for any more details, go ahead, leave those in the comments below, happy
to get to you, happy to help out. Again thanks for watching and we'll see you next
time.
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