Help Me Come Up With Ideas For My Loft Apartment

Devices & Integrations Connected Things
1

Help me come up with some cool ideas using my existing equipment and make suggestions on additional equipment purchases. We plan on living in the apartment for the next year or so, until we are able to purchase a home. We will be moving all of our smart devices with us to the new home.

I have a small 450 sqft loft apartment. The Kitchen, Livingroom, Bedroom & Theater are all within a single space. The closet and bathroom are obviously separate.

There is a stairwell and garage that is directly accessible from inside the apartment. The garage does not have sufficient space for parking my car (yet). It does house our mini stockpile and serves as our laundry room. There are also stairs to access the front door from the exterior of the apartment.

Here are my current devices:

I’ve only had my smartthings hub for a few weeks now, but it definitely has become a hobby for me. I’ve got:

Smart Things Hub
7x GE Link A19 12w LED Lightbulbs - (two in living area, two in kitchen, one near bathroom/closet, one for bedroom lamp, one for stairwell)
2x GE Link PAR38 13w LED Outdoor Flood Lightbulbs (one serves as our porch light, the other as a deck light)
Sonos Play One Speaker (in main living area, possibly will move to bathroom and purchase connect amp for living room/theater)
Nest Gen 2 Thermostat (living room)
Nest Protect Smoke Alarm (living room)
Dropcam Pro Camera (living room security)
Wemo Insight Energy Monitoring Switch (hooked up to window ac unit)
Aeon Smart Energy Monitoring Switch (hooked up to desk lamp)
SmartSense Motion/Temp Sensor (not in use)
SmartSense Open/Closed Sensor (attached to front door)

I still want to get a smart lock, a few more open/close sensors and I think that’ll be it for my loft apartment until we get a house. I really want to do some neat stuff with all of these, but I haven’t done much other than having lights turn on to wake us and the sonos greeting us when we walk in the door. I want to get some more sensors, so if any of the three doors leading to the stairwell open, then the light turns on. If motion is not detected for a period of time, it turns off. I need to come up with some other good ideas with my existing equipment.

2

The stuff you are thinking about doing is really the core of what STs does. Once you start doing more things you will start to figure out more things for your space. Are you looking to “build” or “hack” things. If you’re looking to build i have some cool idead i can share.

3

I definitely want to do both, but I think it would be neat to build some things. I do really want to get a security setup going, as we had our cars broken into. I have a foscam outside now, but it is not in use. (no dvd)

4

Check out the forum for some posts on foscam stuff. They can be integrated really easily. Also, I have a way to have them trigger “motion” events and will be sharing that soon.

What did you want as far as security. Doors, lights that flash when motion is detected, etc? When I get home I’m gonna write out my setup for you to hopefully spark some ideas

5

Sounds good. It would be nice if the api allowed access to the nest protect alarm and motion sensor and it could be used as a security alarm.

I think i’d like to have the foscam detect motion by our cars, then one of the outdoor lights (deck light) turns on. Should our porch light stay on, or stay off and turn on with motion or when we arrive home?

I have a drop cam indoors and just have it on all the time. It is kinda creepy having it on when we are home, but it might be good to be on in the event of a break-in, if we were home at the time, so I just leave it always on.

I ended up using the motion sensor in the stairwell to trigger a ge link bulb to turn on whenever someone enters from any of the 3 doors.

6

What is your setup like?

I noticed there are several foscam device types. Which one works the best? Also, how can I setup foscam to record 24/7 for 7 days to my computer, then delete every 7th day.

7

Gonna need a third party app for that. I use EvoCam. Works really well.