It’s never been easier to automate your home with Belkin’s WeMo devices
Home automation used to be the domain of rich home owners willing to spend thousands of dollars to have their blinds automatically open at certain times of the day, or a plethora of lights controllable via a touch screen. They’d need to enlist the services of a home automation specialist who knows the ins and outs of esoteric protocols like X10 and C-Bus and can find the obscure products to interface with them. But in 2015, thanks to buzzwords like the Internet of Things and the prevalence of smartphones and tablets, what was once niche and expensive is now widespread and (relatively) cheap. Belkin’s WeMo range of home automation products are more accessible and easy to use devices currently on the market.
You’d think setting this sort of thing up would be di† cult, but it’s surprisingly simple. WeMo devices are based on Wi-Fi and most of us have already Wi-Fi in our homes. When you take a WeMo device out of the box and turn it on, it creates its own Wi-Fi network that you connect a smartphone to. Once connected, the WeMo app guides you through adding the device to your existing Wi-Fi network. No IP addresses to confi gure, no scripts, no serial ports and no tiny little DIP switches. Remote access is ingeniously handled via Belkin’s cloud service, no need to open up ports on a router to run a server at home or set up dynamic DNS services.
The basic product in the WeMo range is a switch (RRP $69.95) that can turn things on, or o” , direct from your smartphone, at home or away, with barely any confi guration. Use an electric heater and want to turn it on 30 minutes before you arrive home from work? If it’s plugged in to the WeMo switch and you’ve got Wi-Fi at home, just launch the WeMo app on your phone and turn the heater on with a single tap. That’s literally how easy it is to use.
Also in the WeMo line-up are LED bulbs (RRP $179.95 for a starter kit, $59.95 for additional bulbs), which can be installed anywhere and allow lighting to be controlled via a smartphone without any new wiring. The WeMo motion sensor (RRP $79.95 and includes a switch) can detect when movement occurs, or when someone enters a room and turn things on or off based on that motion. New to the WeMo range is the WeMo Maker and Insight Switch. The Insight Switch (RRP $99.95) works like the basic WeMo switch but has the added benefit of logging the power consumption of whatever is plugged into it. For those comfortable with low-voltage electronics, or a specific thing they want available via the Internet, Belkin has the WeMo Maker (RRP $149.95), which is essentially a relay that plays with the WeMo ecosystem. Hook up things like garden lights, garage doors, blinds, or even sensors to measure temperature or humidity.
What makes the WeMo so versatile is integration with a web service called If This, Then That (IFTTT). With IFTTT, all sorts of scriptable automation can occur and best of all, IFTTT is a joy to use and easy for everyone, no programming knowledge required. A tiny list of what IFTTT and WeMo integration is capable of include:
• Turning on a lamp at sunset.
• Geo-location based triggers (e.g: turn o”ff something plugged into a WeMo when you leave the house).
• Turn a WeMo device on or off based on a specific list of dates and times.
• Toggle WeMo on or off when someone enters a room.
• Send notifications, Tweets or Facebook messages based on WeMo device activity.
There are thousands of combinations of IFTTT “recipes” that can have your WeMo device interact with other IFTTT enabled hardware and services such as Dropbox, Facebook, Google Calendar, Gmail and hundreds more. The only limit is your creativity.
Not everyone needs to automate the stuff in their home, or hook it up to the Internet, but if you’ve ever thought to yourself “yeah, it would be awesome if I could control that with my smartphone”, then Belkin’s WeMo range is easy to recommend. WeMo is simple to set up, If This Then That support works brilliantly, is well priced and a piece of cake to use. Anthony Agius