Yale Real Living Touchscreen Review

One of the most useful home automation devices for homes with working parents and children in school is a smart door lock. These provide advanced security for your home and the convenience of smart home integration for its occupants. When adding home automation, this is one of the first devices that you should consider. Just like most automation devices, there are a lot of options and finding the right device can be a challenge. This is a review of my experience with the Yale Real Living Touchscreen deadbolt with the Z-Wave module.

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Voice Control of Broadlink Mini 3

Most homes, mine included, are still a combination of old devices which lack any decent connectivity options like WiFi, Bluetooth, Z-Wave, etc. and an assortment of smart devices. My home still has TVs, a Soundbar, Audio Amplifier, and DVD Player that can only be operated using an IR remote control. Most of the time the remote is lost when I need it and in the way when I don’t. These devices don’t have any tie-in with Google Assistant or Alexa, but they can be controlled using an IR blaster. Logitech makes a smart IR blaster, the Harmony Hub and smart remote, but these are a bit expensive. Broadlink has a line of low cost IR blaster devices, but these don’t integrate with Google Assistant. I found the $17 Broadlink Mini 3 IR blaster, which is also known as the Black Bean beacuse it is a small, black cylindar. It is low cost, and includes a bare-bones app, but it does not feature smart integrations. This article will describe a way to integrate the BlackBean with your Google Home and enable voice control for your legacy IR devices.

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Review: Vision In Wall Z-Wave Micro Switch

Here at RobotizeIt we are slowing evolving our homes to become fully automated smart homes. This is a process of selecting and installing smart devices and pairing them with our Google Home and Samsung SmartThings systems. Amazon Alexa and other smart home controllers should also work, but for now we are focused on the Google and Samsung hubs. This process can be confusing because there are so many products on the market and not all of them are worth the effort of installation. We hope to sort out the good from the bad and let you know which are worth consideration.

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Amazon Adds Voice Calling to Echo

Amazon gained a massive lead over Google in the Home Assistant space today by enabling Voice calls and Messaging with Echo and Alexa devices. I think Calling and Messaging is one of the killer apps for in home assistants and Amazon just jumped - no, warped - ahead of Goole.

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Hack to Send/Receive Text Message with the Google Home

Ever since I picked up a Google Home, I have been waiting for Google to enable messaging. Google is taking way too long to update the Home so I created this hack to add the capability. My goal was to be able to send a quick message to my Google Home via SMS and have Google Home read it out load to whomever is listening (presumably my wife and/or children), and likewise, to allow my wife and/or children to tell Google Home to send me a text message.

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