Gadgetory

even just a few years ago smartphones were not a thing or they were but you had to be a total nerd or super rich to have one now everything's different if you have an Amazon echo you at the beginning of a smart home if you have any appliance you can turn on or off from your phone you have part of a smart home it turns out that smart homes are really easy to start building nowadays and you can do some pretty cool things with them like control your lights your heating your TV your often more limited by what would be dumb and excessive than what you actually want to do so how do you get started we're gonna go to my apartment and I'm gonna show you what you can do for under two hundred dollars to make your home a little bit smarter all right so the first place to start is a voice assistant I'll admit these would be kind of creepy but let's sort of get used to them they actually turned into a fun and pretty convenient way to control your stuff I chose the Google home Mini it's $49 but they're on sale all the time so don't pay that much obviously you can use this to look stuff up or play music or podcasts but I mostly use mine to turn my lights and air conditioner on and off I could just use a button or do it in my phone because I see a lot more convenient a lot of times especially if I'm on my way out the door or going to bed now we're gonna get into those smart lights and how I turned a dumb air conditioner into a smart one but before I do that I want to talk about how all these devices are talking to each other because there's a lot going on and it can get pretty confusing you're probably familiar with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi Bluetooth is great for things like fitness trackers headphones mice and keyboards and Wi-Fi is great for while bringing in that to your laptop smartphone smart TV and so on but they're using different gadgets for a reason they're designed to do different things Bluetooth is pretty slow at transferring data and it can't travel very far but it doesn't use a ton of power Wi-Fi is really fast and can travel farther but it does use a ton of power there's really only one distinction that you have to remember Bluetooth gadgets usually aren't connected to the Internet so unless you connect them to some kind of hub you can't control them while you're out of the home where things get more complicated is when you get deeper into smart home tech it turns out Bluetooth and Wi-Fi just don't fit the bill for everything now there are great for things like light bulbs that need to be reached at the way far end the house for that there are other wireless technologies like ZigBee and z-wave these is really tiny amounts of energy so you can have sensor sitting around on battery power for months but that means they're super slow at transmitting data they're also built to travel much farther because the messages can't jump around so one light bulb can transmit and off man to the next one and the next one and so on what this means is that if you're buying something you'll have to make sure it actually works with your stuff one of the things that you're gonna need a hub for is smart lights I think the best smart lights are from philips hue and you'll want to start with their starter kit because it comes with that hub we're just gonna hook up to your router set everything can talk together the starter kit cost $64 it comes with a bunch of bulbs and while Phillips has a bunch of like color-changing stuff to don't worry about that it's just more than you need so our lights are great for just a bunch of little conveniences you can have them automatically turn on when you come home or when the Sun Goes Down I bet you have at least one speaker in your house that isn't smart or could be smart for $35 you can plug a chromecast Audio into it and make it able to do a lot more so I have this - speaker system here it's old it's from like 2004 or something but if i hook the chromecast Audio up by plugging is the aux port I can have control it for my phone or do this I can say hey Google Play childish gambino on both speakers all right Donald Glover from Spotify and are you playing on both speakers all right so the last thing is a smart plug it's basically just an individual outlet but you can plug something into and then turn it on and off I got TP links Casa you can get a 2-pack of them for 45 bucks so these things are really cool because they're all at once really versatile but also really limited because they've literally just turn things on and off so I connected my two air conditioners to them so that I can control them and turn them on when I'm coming home from work now some caveats they are literally just chilling power to these things and turning them back on they can't control anything at all so my air conditioner it turns out will automatically resume its prior state when it turns back on so because of that this works out really well because I can just flip it on and it's gonna start making things cool again you can use this for things like fans and lamps too that are just gonna automatically resume their same state so that's it that's just about $200 but there's a lot more you can do with the stuff you already have if you want to get a little bit more complicated using apps on your phone you can hook things together to do even more there's a service called ifttt if this then that that's really good for this so for instance I set up a rule saying that if it's over 80 degrees in Brooklyn my air conditioner will automatically turn on and you can do that for all kinds of stuff with your lights with your speakers now I really think the best way to get your smart home is to do it piece by piece like this by one thing see how it works for you and then get whatever else makes sense next now I went with the Google home mini but it might make more sense for you to go with Alexa or if you use tons of Apple devices to go with a home kit system just start with whatever works for you and then add on bit by bit and before you know it you're gonna have a much smarter home hey thanks for watching if you like what you're doing you might like what our friends at life noggin are doing they make a bunch of animations explaining stuff like who is winning the global tech race