You should read this
The setup we have e.g. where we started and how this relates to you. Read on it’s very likely you are in same boat…
Like most of you we have many existing devices that are not smart… TV, SetTopBox, Soundbar, AC etc. and none of them can natively work with any of the voice assistants out there. They have one thing in common though (and we have being struggling with it for years) – they all have IR remote controls.
Our first step
After brief research we discovered theBroadLink RM Mini 3. This device is very cheap and converted our living room very very quickly. The RM Mini 3 is capable to control all our existing electronics – TV, Audio, AC and so on. Basically everything that is controlled by an IR-based remote control. We will expand on this separately, but know, we highly recommend getting one of these!
We also both the Google Home Mini for our initial smart setup, we will describe the experience and decisions behind it in a separate post, but please be advised you don’t really need it to start. You can use the assistant on your phone and get the full functionality of google home, just install the Google Home app.
We already had
In addition to the none-smart devices listed above we already had the Philips Hue lights around the house – at least one bulb in each room, most of them colored, a light strips and a bunch of remotes. Controlling the lights via phone was nice, but was not good enough. This was the tipping point that made us look further into home automation and started this web page basically.
We will generate more content in the future, please let us know in the comments below of your experience, questions, thing you would like to see on the page and so on.
Signing-out and till the next post 😉