Hey what's up Youtube! Today we're going to be talking about a device called Samsung SmartThings.
If you don't know, Samsung SmartThings is a smart hub. There are a couple of these on
the market. A smart hub allows you to do home automation. So you add certain sensors and
switches. You can add things such as light dimmer switches, light bulbs, water sensors,
motion sensors. Anything you can think of that could be a sensor they probably make
it and it's compatible with this device. Most smart hubs use a protocol or 2 protocols,
mostly, called Zigbee and Z-Wave. So if you see any sensors out there in the store or
online on Amazon or something, likely they're going to use that prototocl and they will
work with this device. So let's take a quick look at the device here. It's basically a
little white box and this little white box has an Ethernet port, power port, and 2 USB
ports here. Keep in mind, this device does not have WIFI so if you are limited in where
you can put it if you don't have an Ethernet connection or you can't put it near your router
that might be a deal-breaker for you so keep that in mind. When you go to purchase it,
you have 2 different options. You can purchase it as hub-only, which basically just comes
with a power cord and Ethernet cord or you can buy it as a kit. The kit from Samsung
comes with a few sensors, such as a motion sensor, outlet that you can use to switch,
and it comes with what they call the Multi-Purpose Sensors, which are very helpful. If you think
you might use some of those you can buy it as a kit and save a couple of dollars or you
can buy your own sensors and do your own thing. Basically you can do whatever you can imagine.
I have a ton of different things setup. I'll go over some of those with you and just give
you an idea just to show you some examples of the things you can do. And I'm going to
go into the app now just to show you what that looks like. Alright guys I'm going to
show the SmartThings app. Before I open the app I just want to show you here. I do have
some routines set, just so I don't forget here, I do have Good Morning, Good Night,
I'm home, so different things you can automate and you can actually have it set here as a
widget on an Android phone. Without further ado I'll open up the app and let's get into
it. The first thing you going to see when you open up the app usually is going to be
the Smart Home Monitor. The Smart Home Monitor works much like an alarm system. So it will
actually use your hub as an alarm. If you go in here you can see the status of my sensors
here. If you go into "Recently" it will you show you any status messages of things that
have happened on here. Right now it's just showing that all of my sensors are closed.
The next thing we're going to show here are the actual Things. So your Things are going
to be categorized into Rooms. So every time you add a Thing, it's going to go into a Room.
You can create Rooms for it. You can make a Room whatever you want it to be. It's just
a way to keep them organized. You go to Things and it shows you your actual Things are all
listed here. So all of them, uncategorized, which is why Rooms is helpful because it helps
you keep the Things categorized. I don't have a lot of devices here but if you had about
a hundred I could imagine trying to scroll through here and get to each one of those.
If you want, you can open this up. You hit "Basement Light". You can turn it on or off.
You can completely control it from here or you can just hit the button here to control it.
If you go to SmartApps, this is where you actually install SmartApps, which is
really the bread and butter of the Samsung Smart Hub. So without SmartApps you really
can't automate anything. You're manually just going into Things and hitting on or off or
doing whatever you want. However, the SmartApps allow it to be automated. "Family" are just
Presence Sensors. So myself and my wife. Samsung does sell actual SmartThings Presence Sensors
but I find that the phone works perfectly well. I don't see a real reason to buy the
actual Presence Sensors, so that's how that works. Next is going to be your routines.
I use these all the time. You can set these to happen automatically or you can actually
tap on it to cause it to perform whatever action. You can go in here and customize these
to do whatever you want. We have Notifications here. This is where you get actual notifications
from the hub. When you go in here you can see things that have happened, if you triggered
any event or something happened, it will all pop up in here. Your activity feed is ongoing.
This is what I like to call the SmartThings log. So every little thing that happens shows
up in here. So you have the Marketplace. The Marketplace is where you would go, even though
it's not really that self-explanatory, this is where you would go to add a new device.
So you simply hit "Connect New Device", you take your new device from the packaging, you
put your battery in it, hit the connect button, it's searchable, and then "boom" SmartThings
finds it. I've had that happen several times. Every device I've ever purchased was immediately
picked up by SmartThings with no issues. If you go somewhere like "Lights and Switches"
you see a ton of SmartThings apps but if you keep going down you see other things that
the community has created and most of the community-created apps are absolutely awesome.
I've done a lot of cool things. There are a lot of new ones in here that I actually
haven't seen. I may mess around with. Things that you may not have even thought were possible
or even thought to do are going to be in there. So I wanted to briefly go over my garage setup
here because I do have it setup in the garage. This little white box you see up here, that's
a relay. That's a Z-Wave relay and I have it wired into the garage door button. Typical
doorbell button. I have it wired into there so that when I trigger it, it just triggers
the button. Basically, I have both of the garage doors on there. If I open the app
it says "Chris' Garage Door". Hit the button. There you go. It opens up just like a typical
garage door. If you'll notice up here I do have this little white sensor. That little
white sensor is the tilt sensor or the multi-sensor. It works as more than just tilt but that's
how it can tell if it's open. So if you look in the app now, notice it says "Chris' Garage
Door" is Open. Sheree's is closed. So if I hit the button again...
The garage door closes.
After a second or 2 you'll see. Give it a couple of seconds to send the signal. It says
it's closing and then it is closed. So I want to briefly explain how an accessory switch
works. These 2 switches are regular Z-Wave dimmers. They are just made by 2 different
companies. However, this is a 3-way setup. So in my basement, like most basements are,
I have a basement light or "steps light" here that's controlled by 2 different switches,
one at the bottom of the steps and one at the top. However, when you're using these
Z-Wave switches you can't just put 2 regular light switches in here so you're going to
have 1 switch that's going to be a regular Z-Wave dimmer, which is the one we have here
on the left that controls this light. So if I actually turn this light off, it will turn
off the light there after a second or 2. I'll turn it back on here. So that works regularly,
like you would expect. The load is actually connected there on that switch and as you
can see the basement lights are on down here. So here we have the Z-Wave Accessory switch.
It looks just like a regular Z-Wave Dimmer but it is actually more like a dummy switch
so it's only wired up for power. It has no load of its own. Once you wire it up and pair
it with the SmartThings Hub it's used just as a remote control to tell other switches
what to do or other devices what to do. So in this case, you have this at the top of
the stairs. You can say "Hey when I hit this light switch, I want to turn off the stairs light"
or whatever else I want to do. In my case, when I hit this light, as you saw downstairs
we had the basement lights on. When I hit this light switch it turns off the steps light
as well as the basement light.
Alright guys, thanks for watching the video. Hopefully it
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Thanks for watching.