Smart-Home on the cheap

Kuchengnom
Aug 23, 2017 · 6 min read
My initial setup

My friend has this really cool smart home setup with lights, thermostats, thermometers, window sensors, speakers … well fancy stuff. And I am jealous of all this fancy stuff. But paying something like 60 bucks just for a smartified 💡 sounds just unreasonable.

So I looked for a cheaper option.

Our friends in the east

My fascination with Chinese products is a little older than this smart home idea.

I buy my iPhone charging cables from over seas, I got my action cam directly from there, and more recently I might have become a Xiaomi fanboy.

I got my always present 10400mAh Xiaomi Power Bank, over my Xiaomi Earphones and Mi Band, to my latest item, the Xiaomi Flower Monitor.

I am still playing around with that one, but more on this in a seperate article:

When downloading the Mi home app I needed to set up and use my plant monitor initially I realised there is much more.

I picked one that seemed as a good starting point; A temperature and humidity sensor.

That was also a quick purchase, under 10 bucks. Only after the sensor arrived I realized I needed a Smart Home base station to connect my sensors to. Luckily Gearbest had another newsletter promo and I got that thing for 25 bucks.

When the package arrived (I put a window and door sensor with the order for like 6 bucks) I realized the base station has an awesome Chinese power plug … so I could add 5 bucks to my list for the power adapter – lucky me no voltage conversion needed.


Set up — or how I learned to know the words for connection established in mandarin

Let me get a quick say in for the awesome packaging. Xiaomi does really well, I’d call it even Apple-esq. Beautiful clean white boxes, with little to no disturbing lettering and product centered interior. And of course a quick set up guide in full fledged mandarin.

When I plugged the Base station in I started the setup with the Mi Home App, I ignored the Chinese brabbeling being emitted from the built in speaker. The device opened a wifi which I connected my iPhone to and thus put in the WiFi credentials of my home network so the device could connect to that. While that was going on I think the device was reading out it’s IP out loud… in mandarin.

When all that was set up I did a full functionality test… light on, light of, color change, brightness up and down. But the internet radio 📻 function really cracked me up.

That’s my daughter in the background complaining about the sounds :D

For the other functionalities I best put the sensors to the test. Hence I started on connecting the originally bought temperature and humidity sensor. And that was really easy. Again, I used the Mi Home App, selected the temperature & humidity sensor, and pressed the only available button on the sensor. I was greeted by a sweet voice instructing me to… something in mandarin.

But the sync worked fine. I got a temperature and humidity reading. The temperature reading was reasonably accurate so I went on to check the triggers. Here I set up a simple rule; If temperature falls below 17 degrees Celsius change light color on base station to a cool blue.

Now I just had to wait for the evening temperatures to start slowly creeping in.

Meanwhile I fiddled around with the door & window sensor. This little guy had a “tool” packed with in the box, that somewhat resembled the iPhone SIM card tray removal tool. To get the sensor to start the setup/reset one just had to insert the little guy in a well hidden hole — and I was again greeted by presumably the orders to establish the reign of the communist party in mandarin. 😜

Once through the setup I was getting readings: Open. … but the sensor was definitely closed. So I opened it and got the reading closed. Aha! — I thought. I see a pattern, so I closed the sensor again but to my astonishment the reading now said closed. This is actually correct so I assumed the little guy just needed a bit breaking in. On opening the sensor again the reading now still said closed. <ó.Ò’>

Right now I have a sensor that really reliable delivered random boolean values — to formulate it positively.

Current temperature 18.01 degrees Celsius — so no trigger yet for the temperature thing.

Rules and regulations

There is a whole set of trigger suggestions and one might come up for some random ones too.

There is a timer I tested on the base station that rang as expected on time.

For better or worse I set up a timer based night light. Between 2300 and 0600 the light on the base station and this one also worked very well.

But that temperature trigger did not work at all. Oddly I realized also that the sync was not working correctly. The trigger was set up but when I wanted to edited it it said the sync failed. This lets me assume the first trigger set up did not work but was faulty set up.

When looking into the historical data only one day (the day of the set up) is shown. Although the temperature reading updates and the device said the sync of historic data was successful, I can’t seem to look into it.

Best re-set up all this

Bring color to your life

The Yeelight RGB light Strip arrived in all the playing around with the smart home set up, so I had some new, hopefully fully functional, toy.

How high are the odds that this thing didn’t seem to work when it comes to wifi connection.

Luckily it has one button. ☝️ one awesome button that does everything. It turns the light strip on and on holding the button down, cycles through the available colorrange. I am really happy with the light strip and have been using it since then in „offline” mode.

My resumé

The overall look and feel of the Xiaomi product line is really neat, unobtrusive, and thought-through.

It is on the software side of things where it gets annoying. Starting with the positive things, I really appreciate the English translation, not common for Chinese products. The setup process is well meant, meaning, when the process works it is painless and smooth. Sadly it is not that reliable.

Furthermore this stuff is hard to debug. The devices speaking to me in mandarin is not the problem, it’s the inconclusive error messages displaying sync errors and such.

It got to the point that I have stopped fiddling around with it and just use the smart home station as night light and the light strip as ambient lighting … the temperature sensor just sits there probably recording data into the local storage.


For what it’s worth, when I was researching around I found an interesting project on Github how to access the gateway and connected sensors via your Raspberry Pi. That might be a project for another day.


Update on that front…

It seems they have really sized down on the supported devices … and after switching to a different server I can’s access my gateway any longer, let alone set it up gain … darn.

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Kuchengnom

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A user's experience is the guide to user experience :)

productlove

we try and play with new apps and things … and share what we love — simple