Samsung's Smartthings after eight months

It’s been nearing 8 months now since I first installed Smartthings in my home in the Netherlands. It’s not perfect by any means but it’s been sufficiently good that I’ve bought a second hub and components for my apartment in Copenhagen.

I guess that means it must be reasonable from my perspective.

The biggest positives I have found with the Smartthings system have been the ease of set-up and the fact that it works with a bunch of the most common smart components.

At home in the Netherlands I have almost every light fixture now moved to the Phillips Hue system and Smartthings so far plays well with this. I’ve also integrated open close sensors from Samsung themselves, Fibaro motion and smoke sensors and motion sensors from Aeontec. There’s a smart plug from Belkin and the Sonos system is also attached and connected up and along with a Siren I can hook up a fairly nice alarm system to give any would be intruder quite a fright.

The apartment in Copenhagen is a little smaller and I’ve include Hue here with just a couple of sensors. But what I have started to use more and more in Copenhagen is the Amazon Echo (Alexa) connected to Smartthings.

Alexa, works with Smartthings but probably the most frustrating things with this is that the voice recognition really uses correct and proper enunciation or using standard names for things – which have obviously been provided more input and variety of pronunciations. For example Alexa will understand almost every time if I say “Alexa turn on the living room lights”. However if I say “Alexa, turn on Mr. Skinny” she won’t understand 50% of the time. So giving your lights and appliances fun names is a little tricky.

Saying that though, I still like the combination and possibilities and have started to experiment adding IFTTT to the mix.

I still think there are quite a few things that Smartthings could do to make integration much better. Especially with appliances such as the Sonos or Robot Vacuums. But saying that there are quite a few user created device handlers from the Smartthings Community that add significant amounts of added functionality to some components. So though officially supported these device handlers and the community is on good reason I stay with Smartthings. For those not comfortable with messing around with device handlers and the like it still offers a good core basic solution I feel for automating your home and when you put it together with systems such as Hue and the Echo is really at this stage pretty good.

I’m still continuing to experiment and add to my installation and plan to integrate a Logitech Harmony Hub, Arlo Pro and trying to figure out a way to establish some sort of Miro Presence Detection so I can start including automation rules for such things as I’m up and about but my partner is still in bed so wake her up in 30 minutes :-D

Will try hard to keep everyone updated on progress here…. but I see I am falling behind on various aspects of my blog,… especially on the promised insights into my move to Copenhagen!