Recently I was selected by the Insiders.eu website to trial the new Samsung SmartThings starter kit for 6 weeks.
I’ll be doing two or three posts to detail my experiences, starting with this one, Part I – Unboxing.
First I did an unboxing video on Youtube at the Hobbit Office:
Then I set about installing the kit; a presence sensor, a mains power switch, a magnetic switch sensor, a motion sensor but first starting with the Hub.
The Hub is the device that all the other kit (sensors, switches, etc) connect to wirelessly, but first we must physically wire it to our home broadband router so you are able to access it from the internet and it is able to communicate with you should it need to.
The kit comes with four AA sized batteries which are used as a power backup for the Hub should the mains fail. Sliding the base of the hub as shown below reveals the battery compartment and once installed the covers just slides straight back. At this point I noticed a blue light came on on the Hub – a good sign.
The Hub will also use a mains adapter as it’s main power source, so make sure you have a spare mains socket near your router for this.
The Hub uses a short ethernet cable to connect the ethernet socket on the back of the Hub to a spare ethernet socket on my broadband router, in my case I’m using a Virgin Media modem.
Ethernet socket on Hub
After connecting up I gave the Hub about 5 minutes to do what it needed to establish a link to my router.
Next, I downloaded the SmartThings iOS app for my iPhone 6. It’s a free app. When started it asked me to create a new account, and asked me to enter the code that I received with my kit. After that it quite calmly connected and walked me through pairing the sensors and switches.
Samsung SmartThins Presence Sensor
The only odd thing at this stage was the presence sensor did not seem to appear initially after I removed the plastic “remove to pair” tab.
Later I was able to use the “Beep” function to test the sensor was paired ok, though I wasn’t sure how to stop the beep after it started, though it did do eventually.
I could see in the SmartThings app on my phone all the “Things” that my Hub was able to see, along with their status, for example, the motion sensor changed from “NO MOTION” to “MOTION” as I waved my hand in front of it.
From this point it’s a matter of deciding where to put my kit and how to set up the app so it did some useful stuff. Part II details how I set the app up.
