Home automation and security re-design

closeHey, just so you know ... this post is now about 3 years and 1 month old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

Ok, enough sports posts, let’s get back to some tech!

I’ve been distracted from tinkering with my 3D printer lately because for the past two weeks or so I’ve been going through a re-design of my home automation and security setups. After an almost two-week outage of the ADT skill for Alexa (during which I wasted a lot of time on the phone with clueless tech support people who kept trying to walk me through the re-linking process despite the fact it kept failing), plus more false alerts from some of my window sensors and the realization that I was paying ADT a lot of money each month for these hassles, I decided to dump them and move on to something else.

Since ADT was both my security system and home automation hub (through Pulse), this decision necessitated some research and careful planning on how to replace ADT and still be able to use all of the Z-Wave hardware I’ve acquired since 2011 and replicate all of my automations, schedules, alerts, etc. The end result was a combination of Ring SecurityHomeSeer, and Amazon Alexa.

I’ve got a lot of cool stuff to write about, so watch this space for three separate posts coming soon about my new setups and experiences with both systems.

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