Autotelic
Active member
- Joined
- May 4, 2015
- Messages
- 33
- Reason
- Lost a loved one
- Diagnosis
- 03/2014
- Country
- US
- State
- OK
- City
- South eastern
I freely admit I know just enough to be aware of my ignorance about this stuff. It hasn't stopped me from trying to make voice commands and phone/tablet control as much stuff as we can. I installed Nest for heat/AC. Harmony remote for the entertainment system. That remote also controls the lamps since we switched to Philips Hue hub and bulbs. We got an Amazon Echo early on and this is where my reach exceeds my grasp. There are a lot of recipes available to automate things using IFTTT and Echo, but unless they are dead simple I often get them wrong. And I don't understand why they are wrong. I can just see that they don't work. An example of this is using Echo to control the lamps. When I started this, I would buy one of something to try it and see how I liked it before committing to more, so when I wanted to control the lamps I bought a Wemo plug and plugged a lamp into it. I named the lamp and now I can tell echo to turn it off or on and it works, every time. Good experience. The downside is, once you plug the wemo into your receptacle, you've taken a 2 plug outlet and made it a one plug outlet. So, for the rest of the lamps in the den I got a Philips Hue hub and some white bulbs. I named the lamps and I can control them With the Harmony remote, or the Hue app on my phone, but Echo can't do it. She finds them but can't control them. I have no idea why. So I'm wondering if anyone else out here is having any success with this stuff, and if so which items in particular are working for you.