welcome back to three new product reviews here on automate your life and as
usual these are three distinct and different products that will bring you a
different perspective on the smart home
hello Automaters thanks for tuning in again I'm Brian from automate your life
and today I'm going to take the frustration out of automation by showing
you a different side of the smart home space now it is important for me to let
you know that some of these products were given to me some of these products
were sponsored but you know that doesn't change my actual review here on the
channel it does ensure that they get into a review like this you know we like
to keep our reviews clean and tidy and that's exactly how our sponsor MacPaw
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check out MacPaw's clean my Mac or clean my PC solution down in the
description below and get started today I'm going to start with the Bosma X1
security camera and I actually saw these guys at CES and they have much more
coming to their overall lineup but what we're talking about today is this
security camera that retails around $100 now you can go ahead and add some
sensors to this system for around 20 dollars and that gives you some
additional functionality that we'll talk about within the review right now those
are just door sensors and a doorbell and you can go ahead and add those to the
system but I only got to play with the door sensors themselves so that's all
we're going to talk about today the camera is 1080p itself and it has a 145
degree wide angle viewpoint it's a color night vision I think is very impressive
and probably makes it better than average for most of your smart home
cameras in terms of dealing with the nighttime it connects through that
2.4 gigahertz that we are so used to and it also has an advanced PIR motion
sensor on the front of it so it's not just reliant on the camera detection
pixel-by-pixel going ahead and seeing if anyone's there it actually has a PIR
sensor as well embedded in the device it also has a 110 decibel siren on it so
it's serving that dual purpose here and you don't have to buy a separate device
or create different automations you can also adjust whether you if you've put it
kind of in a different direction horizontally or vertically you can
adjust the orientation there you can schedule the device and it is fully
2-way capable and it has a pretty good speaker and microphone on it so it's
clear communication back and forth there are a number of components with the
Bosma x1 that I've really enjoyed and the door sensors are a good thing to
kind of talk about rate here because you can actually use those door sensors to
move the camera and it's not an auto tracking camera you're not going to have
it sit there and auto track people through your space but what it will do
with those door sensors or the doorbell is move to the spot that you've trained
it once it gets an open signal from one of those so you can then basically track
someone through your space or at least see them come into your space without a
full auto tracking camera and in a lot of cases auto tracking doesn't work that
well so this is a good implementation and again those door sensors at that
point they are like a component of the camera and you don't have to go look for
the ability to integrate with your other door sensors anywhere else
they're just integrated with the camera and it's going to work and that's kind
of the same discussion that with the siren and with the PIR motion sensor
that is physically on this device those are both directly integrated and so I
don't have to look externally I don't have to think about any other system
working it is all contained on here from the dislike side of things it's really
just the lack of that auto tracking that we talked about and the lack of
integration with the smart display so right now it's a skill or an
action-based integration so you can ask about things through your voice
assistance but you can't get them you can't get it to display on that device
otherwise the system is highly powerful all internalized so you're not reliant
on a bunch of other things throughout your smart home and I think you can
cover a really good space in a smart home it's been high reliability and the
pricing I think is right in line with a lot of good solutions out there
especially when you think about getting those door sensors within the price of
that kind of a level of camera now before I move on to the next product I
always get these questions and go ahead guys leave this down below I know you
want me to compare it to other cameras and you have a specific one in your
smart home or one that you're thinking about go ahead and ask about that
comparison I always answer those questions down below the next product I
want to tell you about is the Ecovacs Deebot 500 now I've actually had this
since Black Friday that's when I bought it and it went on for about $200
Canadian and I saw at about a hundred and fifty dollars u.s. so keep that in
mind as I go through the review here of this smart vacuum and that's what it is
it's not a smart mop and it doesn't have necessarily all of the bells and
whistles that you're expecting on some of the more expensive models but I'm
reviewing it as a very budget option here for a smart vacuum what it does is
very simple there's basically three modes that this can operate in and until
you start the operation with either schedule through their application or
your Google or Amazon voice assistant then it will sit on a charging dock and
wait and once you activate it you can kind of put it into three different
modes so there's an edge cleaning mode where we'll go around the outside of
your home there's also kind of a random mode or a pattern mode where they try
and make it look like a pattern but it's kind of random and then there's a spot
cleaning mode where it will kind of go out and bigger and bigger circles from a
single spot in your home what I like about the Deebot 500 here is what you're
going to like with most smart vacuums it's doing most of the work for you
and you don't have much maintenance to do and with this one what I did like is
I saw some timers within the application that allowed me to know how long I had
with the components on here and then I have to go and replace those components
so even the maintenance was kept very minimal and very easy to see coming
those components are fairly minor but I feel like given how long the timers are
in that maintenance I bet you those parts won't even exist when I go to
replace them with how far out that's going to be around oh my gosh no in
general the device does what it's supposed to it picks up most of the
things on my floor but it's not a high suction vacuum and it's not really good
in corners and well it's actually not very good in corners and this is where
the reviews gonna kind of turn because as they tried to keep this a budget
option what they actually did is removed most of the smarts from this smart home
vacuum and it runs into lots of things it can't deal with carpet very well and
truthfully most of these don't deal with thick carpets very well but it doesn't
deal with carpets very well and it doesn't deal with objects you know I
have a chair that this has become hung up on physically on top of the back legs
because they're not very high off the ground or they're kind of a ramp up and
you know it will physically get stuck on that it will physically get stuck on
anything when it's on carpet and so it just doesn't do very well but if you had
a home with a very open space mostly hardwood and relatively thin
carpets this would actually do a very good job but the best example of its
algorithms and and its sensor technology is actually more around what it's been
doing when I send it kind of home or I send it to Doc so you can do that
through the Google assistant or Amazon's voice assistant you can say send and I
called the Jeeves to dock and so Jeeves tries to go home and
and start charging but it couldn't find its way back in most cases because there
were chairs around and there's there's a table nearby and it was just running
into those things and the way it's trying to get back to the dock is a big
circle so it can take 20 to 30 minutes and sometimes I find it just in the
middle of the floor done so there's really some Hang Ups here around its
ability to be smart and to get around objects but if you're relatively open
and my folks bought one and they have a relatively open home and at that point
they've had pretty good success with this and have been relatively happy the
last thing is it really doesn't pick up anything that is over a square inch and
and it just doesn't even matter I mean it can be paper it just doesn't pick it
up and so it's it's not a super powerful smart vacuum here and so I think if
you're just looking for something that's a budget option this is an OK option but
in general this is not something I'm going to recommend to the smart home
community I'd rather have you step it up a little bit and get some smarter
functions so we'll talk about other options on the channel as we go so make
sure you hit that subscribe button right now the last product I want to talk to
you about today is the echo flex and this is the two different setups that
you can buy currently it's a $25 u.s. smart speaker with amazon's voice
assistant on board but you also have the ability to attach a motion detector rate
here for $15 or a full color lightbulb here for another $15 u.s. so for $40 you
can get different setups or you can just buy the base set up for the speaker and
a USB charging port on the bottom what I like about the echo flex is a very long
list I could go on for a long time but it's some of the flexibility around how
you can use this and you'll see an upcoming video on automate your life
that shows a ton of different ways to use this device in very powerful
situations in your smart home but you know when you look at the 3.5
report that they give you the Bluetooth connectivity option you don't really
have to rely on that speaker that you're not going to write home to anyone about
the other thing that you can do is really place this in almost any
environment it's not got that soft cloth that we've seen on all of the other echo
products so putting it in a humidor a dusty or a damp environment is not out
of the realm of possibility and I haven't had any issues doing that
throughout my smart home you can also install two of these on the same outlet
just by putting them on top of each other and in general if you don't even
want one of these extra components you have this USB port that allows you to
charge things like your smart phone or connect other devices to it as well now
what I don't like is more around the pricing and this is kind of a funny
thing to talk about because to be honest if you want to utilize this you're going
to want a different speaker so you have to connect a speaker through that
throughput 3.5 or the Bluetooth connectivity options and then it's
actually a much more expensive device so while you get the initial device for
twenty five you're not going to use that speaker whatsoever if you don't want it
that's okay but then if you just want a motion sensor well now you're at forty
dollars us and you can go get a Samsung smartthings motion sensor for twenty to
twenty-five dollars depending on if it's on sale and you can get much cheaper
options from companies like wise so really the pricing for a smart sensor
smart motion sensor connected here is not that good now the other side of it
again you want a smart light again you're at $40 here for a color bulb
which is okay if you're comparing to something like Philips hue but these
days you can pretty easily find a twenty five dollar smart color bulb that is
ZigBee or Wi-Fi and usually under that so what I'm really saying to you is that
yeah this this is a great little setup but in order to do motion control of a
smart light in the same outlet this was an $80 us setup and that's not what
you're going to spend on a system like smart things once you have that hub
you're really able to augment that system for very well very inexpensively
in comparison so you really have to have a specific use case I think for these
and again I'm gonna show you a ton of these and overall I found it very
powerful to have one of these motion sensors sitting in a location in my
smart home and then triggering out to those other systems that has actually
been very powerful because of where I can put the motion sensor and I still
have access to Amazon's voice assistant so overall this is a really great
product from Amazon I love the flexibility of it and I think it will
fit in a lot of places in your smart home but really think about that
solution and look as to whether or not there is something that is less
expensive or whether or not you want to just step up maybe wait for a sale and
get an Amazon echo dot instead it's really just this design piece that might
trend you towards an echo flex I think so there you have it guys that is three
new smart home products for you to have a look at all of the links are down
below in the description and if you'd like to watch more of these kinds of
videos where we roll through a ton a different smart home that playlist is up
on screen otherwise guys thanks for watching make sure you subscribe and of
course don't hate automate