chris nelson dot ca
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La Jolla diving with DPVs
I've been diving in the San Diego area a few years shy of two decades. In that time I've dove the cove, shores, Marine Room, Scripps Canyon and many others in the La Jolla area from boat or shore swim…
Talking to my house - Amazon Alexa (Echo) and SmartThings
Amazon recently competed their Alexa/Echo integration with SmartThings after previously integrating a number of other home automation hubs like Wink and Hue. I jumped on it as soon as it was available…
Home Automation dashboard for SmartThings
SmartThings does a lot of things well, but their main failing has been support for larger screens. If you have a tablet, you can run the phone interface, but it doesn't take advantage of the larger fo…
Smart Sleeping - morning wakeup routines with SmartThings
I've been using home automation as type of morning wake-up alarm for several years, but always found the scheduling to be cumbersome. In most home automation systems you need to rely on motion detecti…
Add Community Created SmartApps to SmartThings
One of the great things about SmartThings is how easy it is to develop for and how active the development community is. Users can create SmartApps for specific scenarios, and then use those SmartApps …
Su Casa Es Mi Casa - Vera automation hub hacked
Xipiter has a great write-up on how they hacked the MiCasaVerde Vera quickly and easily : The device has embedded SSH private keys on THE IMMUTABLE sections of the firmware image so we know that all t…
Smart Leak Detection - Using the Utilitech Water Leak Detector with SmartThings home automation
As I've been moving all of my home automation projects over to the SmartThings environment, I'm expanding my number of devices and scenarios in order to take full advantage of the easy monitoring and …
Smart Smoke Detection - Using First Alert ZSMOKE with SmartThings home automation
As I've switched my home automation from Vera to SmartThings I've also been expanding my network of z-wave devices at home. Since SmartThings does such a great job with different notification options …
Price differences for the USA and Canada: Alcohol
Having lived in the US for over a decade there are quite a few cost of living differences I notice when I return to visit Canada. One of the more obvious differences between the two counties is the tr…
Hyperlapse video of a walk down the IB Pier
I've been playing around with the Hyperlapse app from Instagram and took it on a walk down the pier at Imperial Beach: This was hand-held and I didn't make any efforts to keep the camera steady during…