Hello, Smart Home: Sid & Kokil

When Sid and Kokil first moved to their new neighborhood, they heard some strange noises from the surrounding hills late at night. They turned to SmartThings to help monitor and secure their home from unwanted visitors–including the wild coyotes in the area (eek!).

Take off your shoes and check out their smart home!

Check out the other videos in the Hello, Smart Home series.

Want to recreate Sid & Kokil’s smart home setup in your crib? Here’s how:

How to: Get Notifications When People Come & Go

Sid and Kokil use SmartThings to stay connected to each other and their kids. They do this two different ways: The first is that Sid and Kokil use their phones as presence-sensing devices. The second is that they give their school-aged son a SmartSense Presence sensor that he keeps on his backpack. Both options will allow you to get a push notification on your smartphone whenever people leave and approach home.

Here’s a post going in to much more detail about you can set this up to stay connected to people, pets, and cars, and here’s a video showing you can set this up:

How to: Get Notifications When There’s Unexpected Entry In Your Home

Sid and Kokil keep open/closed sensors on all of their ground-level windows. Whenever they’re not home and the windows unexpectedly open, they get push notifications on their phones letting them know someone has just opened their windows. Here’s a quick video showing you how you can set this up with SmartSense Multi, Open/Closed, or other SmartThings-compatible devices:

How to: Trigger Your Door to Unlock/Lock When You Come/Go

Sid and Kokil have a Kwikset lock on their front door and basement door. They can lock and unlock these doors with a simple tap of a button in the free SmartThings app. They can also trigger it to automatically unlock and lock when their SmartSense Presence sensors or their smartphones come and go. Here’s how:

How to: Automate Your Garage

Because Sid uses his smartphone as a presence device, his garage door automatically opens whenever he arrives, and closes behind him after he drives away. Here is a detailed post showing you how you can do this, and here’s a video showing you how to set this up in the free SmartThings app.

How to: Trigger Lights to Turn on When There’s Motion

Sid works a lot from his home office and has set the overhead lights to turn on automatically whenever there’s motion. To do this, he keeps a motion sensor above his door frame angled down toward the desk, and has purchased a few SmartThings-compatible light bulbs. Then using the free SmartThings app, he has set the lights to turn on whenever his Aeon Labs Multi-Sensor detects movement. Here’s how:

How to: Use Foscam Cameras with SmartThings

While Foscam is not officially supported by SmartThings yet, lots of developers in the SmartThings Community have figured out how to use it with their SmartThings setup. Full disclosure: It does take some technical know-how.

Sid says that he was able to do this by using the Foscam universal device as the device type in SmartThings. He provided the local IP address of the camera and set up the camera/router with a static IP address.