Automate your home entrance with Keymitt, Alexa, SharpTools and NFC technology
How can a smart home passion turn out to be one of those things that you cannot live without?
Meet Kenneth, he lives in a small village just outside the city of Newry, Northern Ireland, which area is known for its outstanding natural beauty, at the foot of Slieve Gullion Mountain. Besides being lucky to live in such a beautiful place, he is also a barista trainer and coffee standards auditor. If ever happens you are nearby searching for a good cup of coffee, then you are in the right place.
Kenneth is a big fan of Philips hue lights and what he loves most of them is their sync box and gradient light strip to get a more immersive movie experience in his Dolby Atmos Man Den. He is passionate about anything related to the home automation arena and his project at this moment is to make SharpTools Dashboards all around his home. In his free time he manages a help group of 30K users of Amazon Alexa in the UK along with other two Smart Home enthusiasts.
The harmonic setup of his Keymitt Smart Lock and the Smart Home system is very unique and genius, of course fruit of much knowledge and experience. We have asked him to share it with us, for everyone to be able to get most of their Smart Home system and avoid mistakes.
Why have you decided to use Keymitt Smart Lock for your front door?
Uniqueness. Keymitt Smart Lock was the only one of a few that will work with a 5 lever mortice lock and the built-in features were compatible with the Smart Home system I use in my home.
How are you using NFC technology and Alexa to unlock the door?
Starting with the entrance I decided to use NFC technology to lock and unlock his door. How?
Through Siri Shortcuts and using NFC tags on the front door. The locking and unlocking is executed by Keymitt Smart Lock once the command is received. It’s really easy to set up and everyone who comes to my house is very impressed by it. They are also very impressed with the locking and unlocking of the door using the SharpTools dashboard and of course using Siri and Alexa voice commands.
Controlling Keymitt Smart Lock with SharpTools Dashboard
Binding together the two smart devices was not easy at task, but with some ingeniousness and help I decided to use each Keymitt Webhook to unlock the door and lock the door in separate automations, by giving each action a separate title with enhanced security PIN.
One of the automation I am using often in SharpTools is pressing “Lock the door” in the evening and the outside driveway lights come on 100% as well as my patio lights switching ON at 30% if it’s after sunset.
Biggest challenge during the building of his Smart Home ecosystem?
Reliability. I started off with an Echo about 4-5 years ago just asking Alexa to play music and the weather, etc. but I very soon started buying smart plugs and bulbs and these were all Wi-Fi based and ended up overloading my ISP router, because of this I quickly moved to decrease the amount of Wi-Fi devices I had and changed most of my lighting to Philips hue and the zigbee protocol which led me into Samsung SmartThings to add further products and delving deeper into home automation. With the purchase of the hue bridge and SmartThings hub this made all my devices a lot more reliable and automations more or less ran 100% of the time.
Compatibility. When starting out I purchased some products that either would only work with Google or HomeKit and not Alexa so you had to learn quickly so as to not make those mistakes anymore, now there are ever more products that will work with all 3 of the major players (Alexa, google & HomeKit) as well as SmartThings and I tend to stay with those companies but with the impending onset of matter sometime in the first half of 2022 this will help with any compatibility issues (fingers crossed) especially for those just starting out on their smart home journey as they will just need a matter certified product and they’ll know it shall work with their AI or smart home platform of choice. Very exciting times in home automation lie ahead! (again fingers crossed)
What would you like to add to your Smart Home system in the future that you think will really suit your needs?
Once I finish my sharptools dashboards (I need 4) I am going to work on automating cutting off the water mains when a leak is detected. I have 5 SmartThings water leak detectors around my house in various places, for example under some of my wash hand basins, dishwashers, etc. and these can alert me if I have a leak. Currently I have no way of acting on that information I receive if I am not physically in the house so I would like to have something similar to an automated valve closer that would spring into upon a leak being detected.
It is obvious that building a Smart Home system can be tricky, but choosing the right devices can really help you do that the easiest way.