What's up guys.
It's Chris Majestic here with Majestechs.
This is going to be Part 3 of the Home Automation Series.
So as I said in the other videos, I'm going to focus this video more on Smartthings just
because it can be a little bit difficult but it is very capable.
So I want to go into these different apps to show you how you add devices and how you
link the different hubs together.
Alright so lets go ahead and start up the SmartThings app.
The very first thing I want to go over is some basic home automation tasks.
So maybe you've already purchased some switches or bulbs or whatever you have and you want
to know how to get these things to work.
Alright so let's go ahead and go to "Automation".
So in "Good Morning", if you tap the cog there, you can see that I just have it set to turn
off these lights or switches.
I just have it set to turn off the master bedroom fan so I can just tap that routine
to make that happen in the morning.
My wife just kind of does that so she doesn't have to get out of the bed and turn off the
fan.
"Secure The House Away" is basically going to turn off everything and set the mode to
"Away" and I have this set to automatically perform when everyone leaves so if I go in
here you can see how it says "Someone Arrives, Everyone Leaves," and all of these other ones.
If you go to "Everyone Leaves" you can say "which" and select which people.
I have both of us set in there.
That way it doesn't just do it when one of us leaves but when both of us are gone.
And then I have it delayed 1 minute.
"Turn Off The Lights" is self-explanatory.
That's basically just going to turn off all the lights when it's triggered.
So this is going to be for some pretty basic stuff.
Now once you want to get into more advanced things, that's when you're going to start
to use SmartApps because it's not only going to be easier to do, but it's also going to
give you idea that you may not have even thought of.
So actually let's start at the Marketplace.
So if you go to Marketplace and you go to SmartApps you can kind of go through each
of these different categories and you'll get some cool SmartApps.
A lot of them come from Samsung but a lot of them are also community-created.
You see how it says Michael Struck there, Michael Struck again.
A lot of just random people even though it looks like he dominates the Lights and Switches
category.
But yeah, these are just going to be SmartApps that are created by people and they're going
to do a ton of different things.
So like "Lights Off With No Motion and Presence" is a good example.
Stuff like that you can just use that SmartApp, install it, so it's going to have right here
how you set it up.
You're just going to put in minutes of inactivity, whatever light switches you can to control,
then you're just going to hit "done" and it's that simple.
SmartApps are definitely the bread and butter of SmartThings.
So SmartThings also uses SmartApps to connect to other hubs.
So as you see here I've got Amazon Alexa.
I've got IFTTT in here.
Logitech Harmony is in here.
The Google Assistant from Google Home is also in here.
You've got Smart Lighting which is a Native SmartApp and very easy to use.
And if you saw in Part 2 of the Home Automation Guide I mentioned my light switches about
the 3-way setup that I have.
So this "Basement 3-way" is exactly what I was saying.
This 3-way switch I have set.
"Which lights do you want to control?"
I want to control the Steps Light, which is at the bottom of my steps and I want to control
all of my basement lights which is under "Basement Lights" so I have those checked.
"What do you want to do?"
i want to have it turn on.
"Select a trigger."
The trigger is just going to be the switch since that's what it is.
It says "Which switch?"
It's going to be the Basement Steps 3-way and then "Turn the lights on when" I turn
that switch on.
Then you can have this checkbox here for "Turn off as well."
That means it will do both, turn on and turn off automatically.
Some other basic stuff I have in the Smart Lighting app is the Garage Light Control and
this very straightforward.
These are the garage lights outside and I have them set to turn on at sunset and there's
a checkbox here to also turn off at sunrise and that's pretty much it.
Very simple and I don't ever have to worry about turning my lights on or off outside.
Now on to some advanced SmartApps.
So the SmartThings community is going to be one of my favorite things about SmartThings.
So as I mentioned, there are ways to add SmartApps that don't already exist or someone may have
already come up with a way to get a device to integrate with SmartThings that Samsung
themselves haven't actually done.
So if that's the case, you want to go in the community and look around.
It's pretty awesome.
You can do a lot of things in here and there are some really smart and cool people in here.
So you can go to "Devices and Integrations".
That's where a lot of things are.
You can go into Mobile App.
You can go into SmartApps.
This is where you're going to find some cool SmartApps.
Now I've already picked one out.
So you may not know but the Nest Thermostat does not natively work with SmartThings so
someone, this guy here, Tonesto7 has actually made a SmartApp for that so it's called the
Nest Manager 4.0.
It's going to give you all the details here, show you a screenshot of how it looks.
Pretty awesome.
Now these community SmartApps have different ways that you can install them so I won't
really go into how they're done just because they all give you instructions on exactly
how to do it and that would make this video incredibly long.
Just go to the community.
All of the instructions you need on how to add these SmartApps to SmartThings are all
there and they have a Wiki dedicated to how you do it as well.
Just to give you an example I'll just show you a couple of these here.
Rule Machine is one of the most powerful SmartApps ever.
So you can do pretty much anything with this app.
It has access to every single device you have and you can allow it to do whatever you want
so right here I have "Kitchen Light On Arrival."
That's basically going to say hey when I get home and my garage door opens, to turn on
the kitchen light.
Here's another one: Sheree's Garage Door left open for 25 minutes.
That's going to send us a text message and a push notification that hey you left the
garage door open.
Another one is going to be Garage Door Open With Nobody Home.
So I have them separate that way the push notification is separate.
Define the Conditions.
The condition is that the Z-Wave sensor is open and Chris and Sheree are not present.
"Select Actions for True."
That's going to be push notification.
"Chris Garage Door Left Open with Nobody Home."
It's going to send that to my number.
You can pretty much do just about anything in here but it's a very very powerful SmartApp.
Definitely my favorite.
So Rule Machine is something I use for advanced automation but as far as getting things to
work natively that don't necessarily work with SmartThings out of the box, Total Connect
is a prime example of that.
So the way Total Connect works is that's basically my HoneyWell alarm panel.
You may have seen from my other videos.
So I have that set in here so that SmartThings can actually turn my alarm on.
I don't have it setup for Smartthings to turn it off, I just don't trust it.
I don't want to give it that much control.
But that Total Connect app was created by one of the users in the community and it basically
just ties into the backend API of the online web version of the Total Connect website.
So it's that simple.
You just put in your login information and that's it.
Whenever your mode changes to away it's automatically going to turn the alarm on for you.
So this is where SmartThings has a big edge over something like the Wink Hub because you
have these tremendous amounts of SmartApps to accomplish whatever you want it to do.
So there are a lot of different combinations of linking these different hubs together.
Obviously I can't show you all of them but I do want to go through some.
So the first thing I want to go over is adding the Harmony Hub to SmartThings.
So the first thing you're going to do is open up the SmartThings app and you're going to
go to Marketplace over here in the corner.
Scroll all the way down.
You're going to see SmartThings labs.
Scroll to the bottom and there's Logitech Harmony Home Hub.
Now again, it says Home Hub but it will apply to any Harmony Hub.
Connect Now.
And you see it gives you a note there.
And then you're going to click on Harmony to enter your credentials and it's going to
take you to the Harmony login page.
So I'm going to go ahead and put in my credentials here.
Okay so we're going to hit "Done."
We're going to hit Next.
This is where you tell SmartThings what you want Harmony to be able to control so I'm
just going to put all my lights in here and then I'm going to hit "Done."
Now you notice you have a Logitech Harmony SmartApp here.
So when you open that it's going to try to find your hubs.
You may have to give it a minute or two to find any.
Make sure if you have more than one hub or if you do have one hub that it's connected.
So I'm going to go ahead and hit "Hubs" here.
I have three.
I'm going to check all three of them and it's going to have the activities.
These are the activities for all of the hubs so I'm going to go ahead and check that.
Done.
Keep in mind that all of those activities were already setup through the Harmony Software
so if you're not sure how to do that or if you have questions you can go to the Logitech
Harmony Review I did.
So let me go ahead and launch the Harmony Software.
Alright so it automatically connected to my bedroom.
I'm going to go Menu>Harmony Setup>Add New Devices.
Alright so you're going to go to Devices>Add Device.
Home Control.
And there's SmartThings.
Click SmartThings.
Sign In.
Put in your credentials, Log In.
Then you're going to select your hub so it's going to be the Home hub in my case or whatever
you named yours.
And then here is where you can pretty much put in whatever you want it to be able to
control so I'm just going to let it control everything.
It doesn't really matter what you choose here.
It's up to you.
So I'm just going to choose it all and Authorize.
And that's it.
So you have two different situations here.
You have Harmony which can control SmartThings devices and you have SmartThings which can
control your Harmony activities so you want it to work on both ends.
You may want to do something like turn your lights off when you start an activity.
That's all going to be done in the Harmony app since you can see the lights from SmartThings
in the app so you can just add that to your Harmony activity.
So the next thing I want to show you is how to add SmartThings to Google Home if you have
a Google Home.
So the first thing you're going to do is launch the Google Home app.
Go to the menu.
Tap Home Control.
If you have devices in there they will already show up but we're going to hit the "+" sign
to add a device.
Tap SmartThings.
It's going to pull up the SmartThings API just like it did for Harmony.
And then you're going to choose everything you want it to access right here.
And I'm going to tap Authorize.
Alright it's syncing.
Alright, now it want to assign them to rooms.
You can go ahead and assign it to rooms however you want but you would just tap on each device
and assign it to whatever room you think it should go in.
I'm going to skip that for now.
I'm going hit Done.
So I hit "Got It" and that's pretty much it.
So now you can just control all of your SmartThings devices right from Google Home.
So considering Google Home doesn't work directly with Harmony, if you have a SmartThings Hub,
obviously as you can see, you can use it control your Harmony activities so you don't necessarily
need them to communicate directly since all of your Harmony Activities are listed as SmartThings
switches you can just tell Google Home to turn on the TV and it's going to trigger that
Harmony Activity to start and your TV will turn on.
Same thing with turning it off.
Alright so since we're still on SmartThings now, I'm going to show you how to add SmartThings
to Alexa.
Alright so the first thing we're going to do is go ahead and fire up the Alexa App.
And once it loads we're going to hit the menu.
You're going to hit Skills since we're going to be adding the SmartThings skill.
You can see we have "Your Skills" up here but what I'm going to do is go ahead and search
"SmartThings."
Search.
There it is.
Tap on that.
Enable skill.
You're going to put in your SmartThings credentials here.
Go ahead and log in and just like you did on the other apps you're going to choose whatever
hub you want.
This checkbox is going to allow it to connect to your devices and routines.
So then I'm going to hit Authorize and that's it.
So once you have Alexa "Discover Devices" that's going to be done.
The next thing we want to do is add Harmony to Alexa.
So we're going to search for that skill as well.
So let's go ahead and type in Harmony.
There's the Harmony app.
Enable skill.
it's going to ask us to log into the Harmony servers.
So unfortunately right now Alexa only allows you to connect to one Harmony hub at a time,
which sucks.
But there is a workaround for this if you have SmartThings.
So lets go ahead and get through this then I'll show you what I mean.
So for now I'm just going to choose my living room because that's the hub that I use the
most.
This is where you can choose whatever your friendly names are going to be so if you've
got like your wife or whoever in the house who wants to name one of these activities
something different.
So you can say whatever you want to trigger that activity.
So you're going to go to Next and this is where you're going to see all of your favorites
here.
So this is definitely helpful because you can just tell Alexa to turn on whatever this
channel is or whatever your favorite is and you can add a friendly name for that too and
it's going to turn to that channel.
So that's definitely awesome.
So I'm going to go to next.
And then we're going to link the accounts and then that's it.
So if you have Harmony, Alexa, and Smartthings you can actually control more than one hub
at a time with your voice even though the Alexa app ony supports one hub.
Now unfortunately when it comes down to favorite channels, that is something that you can only
do with one hub at a time since that is the Alexa app going directly to the hub.
But as far as all of your other activities, since you have those activities in SmartThings
and they're just listed as switches, once you add all of your switches and everything
from the SmartThings app into the Alexa app, you're going to have all of your activities
there.
So you can just tell Alexa "Turn on my living room TV" and then SmartThings is going to
talk to the Harmony Hub and the Harmony Hub is going to do it.
So that's kind of a cool workaround.
There is really no downside to that but unfortunately if you don't have a SmartThings hub and all
you have is Alexa and the Harmony Hub, you can't do that.
So another thing I want to briefly go over is a tablet I have on my wall near the kitchen.
And this is a basic Amazon Fire tablet and I have it connected to my wall using 3M locking
strips.
so if you look here, you can just pop it off the wall.
So it's basically just going to use that same strips that you usually would find for like
an EZ-Pass for your car.
So they just simply kind of lock onto each other so you can just pop it on and off the
wall like that.
Alright so this is going to be really straightforward.
Obviously I have the weather here.
This is the SmartThings widget.
So I have my routines and Automation right in there.
Obviously you see all of the smart Apps I have here.
And then I have my daughter's camera, like a baby monitor camera right there.
So it's pretty self-explanatory like I have Harmony here.
I just just open that up since I'm near the living room I can just go ahead and trigger
one of the living room activities from right here.
And then if I need to have a charger right here that I can just plug into the side of
it if I want to.
Alright guys well that's going to be it for this video.
Again, this is the last video of the Home Automation Series.
If you haven't already, go back and watch Part 1 and Part 2.
If you found it helpful go ahead and hit that thumbs up for me.
I do want to hear your questions and comments so go ahead and post in the comments section
and I'll respond to your questions and I'll see you guys in the next video.