Smart Home

Amazon’s Alexa is rapidly becoming the premier smart home virtual assistant, appearing in dozens of devices from a wide range of vendors and spreading rapidly. The Alexa package features information services, media playing, online shopping (with Amazon) plus some 7,000 Skills extensions to allow it to work with other services, apps and smart home products. Not … [Read more...] about Top 10 Smart Home Devices That Talk To Alexa

Contents BeagleBone Black Next Thing C.H.I.P. VoCore 2 Parallella Intel Edison Side by side comparison Runners up Raspberry Pi is a computer that has the same size as a credit card.  Check here for the latest prices and discounts. Now on its third generation, the handy and affordable single board computer has a 1.2GHz 64-bit quad-core ARMv8 CPU, … [Read more...] about Top 5 Raspberry Pi Alternatives That Everyone Will Love

Amazon Echo is a device that allows you to play music, to get your questions answered, and to control connected devices just by speaking your command. Echo has been around only since 2014 and if you find yourself wondering what people are talking about when they mention it (or Alexa) or what you could do with it, here are some of the best uses for Amazon Echo. Play your … [Read more...] about The 10 (Plus More!) Best Uses for Amazon Echo

If you currently own an Amazon Echo, then you know that, by itself, it is a great voice activated device. It has one of the best speakers around and the fact that it allows you to control other devices and make them execute your commands takes the Amazon Echo to the top. Do more with Amazon Echo when you get these Echo-compatible devices: Lights and Switches Most people … [Read more...] about 15 Best Amazon Echo Compatible Devices – What to Pair with Your Echo

The engineers and coders at Amazon are adding new features to Alexa every month. Here’s 25 of the best new skills you can add, or things and features you can find to do with your virtual assistant. Available to a growing user base of Amazon’s Echo, Echo Tap and a growing range of other devices, they are slowing changing how we interact act with technology. From improving … [Read more...] about The Best Amazon Alexa Skills – 25 Top Things You Can Do

For the home user, the range of smart home automation radio systems provides a major source of confusion and a challenge to anyone planning their smarter property. So many devices use this protocol, or that WiFi - why couldn’t they all just get along? Given that the number of protocols is increasing, rather than shrinking with WiFi and Bluetooth Low Energy becoming … [Read more...] about Comparing the Insteon vs Z-Wave Protocol – Which is Best?

For the home user, the range of home automation radio protocols can be baffling and positively hostile, putting some users off the whole thing and limiting others to just one range of compatible devices. In this article, we compare Insteon and X10, two of the older schemes that were created when the idea for smart homes was to run all communication along home wiring. X10 … [Read more...] about x10 vs Insteon Protocol for Home Automation – What’s the Difference?