#actiontiles

ActionTiles Gets it Own Android App on the Amazon App Marketplace

For those of us in the SmartThings ecosystem ActionTiles was a game changer and finally gave us a pretty way to interact with our smart homes. Amazon Fire Tablets have always been popular in the SmartThings community for use running our ActionTiles Dashboards. Users (like myself) have also gone so far as to come up with creative ways to mount Fire Tabletson walls in strategic locations and use…

Amazon Echo as a Device In SmartThings

Okay, this may sound silly but I have always wanted my Amazon Echo to show up in SmartThingseven if it just gave me basic information about what it was doing. I am not entirely sure why but mostly because I liked the idea of everything in one place. Well I have recently switched to using the Alexa App for all of my smart home needs and this does give me everything in one place but I still need to…

Requirements

Wyze Cam

tinyCam Pro

Kindle Fire HD8 (or some other android based smart device)

(optional) sacrificial Android Device to run tinyCam Pro Web Server

ActionTiles

Setting Up Your Wyze Cam

Obviously, the first thing you need to do is get your Wyze Cam(s) up and running. Wyze Labs has put a lot of work into the user interface and software setup process for getting your Wyze Cam(s) online and the process is as simple as:

Download and open the Wyze App

Create or log into your Wyze Account

Press the + sign to add a device

Plug in your Wyze Cam

When the Yellow Light on the back of your Wyze Cam starts flashing, press and hold the setup button on the back/bottom of the Wyze Cam until you hear “Ready to Connect

In the Wyze App select, I heard “Ready to connect” from the bottom

Enter your Wi-Fi credentials

Scan the QR Code displayed on your phone with the Wyze Cam

From the device, settings update the firmware of your Wyze Cam

Setting Up TinyCam Pro

Download and open tinyCam Pro

Select the + sign from the lower right corner of the app

Select “Add IP camera. NVR/DVR”

Select Wyze Labs under Camera Brand

Select WyzeCam or WyzeCam Pan (depending on the camera you have) from Camera model

Enter a name for your camera

Enter your Wyze account Username in the Username section

Enter your Wyze account Password in the Password section

If you are setting up more than one Wyze Cam (and already have one set up) select advanced settings and change the channel number

Select the back arrow at the top left of the screen

Select the hamburger menu in the upper left corner and select Live view

Ensure that you have video streaming from your camera

Select the hamburger menu again from the top left corner of the app

Select Settings and then Web server

In the Admin section select Password and enter a password

Check the Radio Icon next to Enabled in the Guest section

Select Password in the Guest section and enter a Password

Hit the back arrow at the top of the screen twice to go back to the main camera display of tinyCam Pro

Select the hamburger menu again

Turn on the Web server by clicking on the Radio Icon to the right of Web server

Make note of the IP Address and Port Number listed in the box that displays under Web server

  ActionTiles Setup

Go to ActionTiles.com on a web browser

Click on “App Log In” in the upper right corner and log into your account

From the editor select the Panel that you want to edit

Add a Media Tile to the panel

Select Add Media

Give Your Media a Name

Enter the following URL (modified for your use case)

http://ipaddress_of_web_server:port/axis-cgi/mjpg/video.cgi?camera=1&user=guest&pwd=password_from_guest_section

Click SaveSelect the Radio Icon next to your newly created Media and select ADD

You should now have your Wyze Cam integrated with ActionTiles. I am doing this on a Kindle Fire HD8 that is wall mounted in my kitchen. I am also using that same Kindle Fire HD8 to run the tinyCam Web Server so for me there is no need for a sacrificial device just to run that.

Adding Wyze Cam video into ActionTiles takes another step in the direction of centralizing all of your smart home devices. For me, ActionTiles has replaced most of my smart home apps and the ones it has not replaced I am launching from within ActionTiles but that is the topic of a future post.

What are your thoughts about integrating Wyze Cam or really any video supported by tinyCam into ActionTiles? Have you done it? Let me know your thoughts and experiences in the comments below.

Amazon Kindle Fire HD8 Gen7 Gets Rooted

It should come as no surprise that the Amazon Kindle Fire HD8 has found a nice niche as a wall mounted control center for many SmartThings and ActionTiles users over the years. They have always been affordable and had enough power to do most of what we wanted them to do. One thing however that we have not been able to do reliably due to firmware updates from Amazon is root the Seventh Generation…

  ActionTiles is not an app but a dynamic website (or group of websites) that allow the user to configure “Panels” to display the information and control the devices that they feel are important to their specific application. A common use for ActionTiles and one that I use, ist on a wall mounted tablet granting easy control for that room or group of rooms or even the entire house. I have a couple wall mounted Amazon Fire HD8 tablets mounted in various location throughout the house to do just that. But I also wanted to go one step further with ActionTiles and create almost an entire set of “Panels” that were all linked together from which I could see anything that was going on with any device I had connected to SmartThings. See one of my biggest complaints with the SmartThings App is that all my devices just show up in a big list and this is incredibly difficult (and slow) to navigate as I have almost 200 connected devices (I know first world problems). In the SmartThings App, I can assign Groups or Rooms but that is still cumbersome as in many rooms I have a lot of devices. I have always been a fan of the Wink App and got the idea to create groupings in Action Tiles Similar to the device categories used in the Wink App. So, what I ended up with is a whole lot of “Panels” with the appropriate devices assigned to them. In case anyone is interested in the flowchart below shows how I laid out my “Panels.”

Now obviously what I am using ActionTiles for is not 100% its intended purpose but it is a good stress test on the system and it performs flawlessly. I do have a lot of “Panels” and sometimes I have a delay when switching back and forth but nothing that I can not deal with. The big thing that ActionTiles brings to my SmartThings Ecosystem is wife acceptance. What I did for my wife is take my “Home Panel”, remove the icon that links to my categories and then saved it as s shortcut right to the desktop of here Samsung Galaxy S8 and renamed it SmartThings. My wife does not even know that it is ActionTiles and not the SmartThings App as I saw no reason to even tell her about the ugly mess of a SmartThings App that was available.

ActionTiles offers a level of customization that I feel most DIY home automation platforms are missing, the only ecosystem that can even touch it is Home Assistant. Unlike Home Assistant, however, you do not need any dedicated hardware to run it and it can easily be accessed by anything with a monitor and internet connection. If you are a SmartThings user and have not already done so please do yourself a favor and purchase ActionTiles, it will change your life.

I know some of you must be using ActionTiles with your SmartThings ecosystem. Share some of your “Panel” ideas in the comments below.

Well this is pretty interesting, Amazon today announced that on July 2nd we will be receiving “Show Mode” on our Kindle Fire Tablets essentially turning a Kindle Fire into an Echo Show. The first thing I thought of was my Kindle Firethat is wall mounted running Actiontiles as this could be a nice integration. While I do not think I ation. This could make it so that a lot of us could use our…

Amazon has a deal on the Huawei MediaPad M3 Lite. For SmartThings users, $50 off could make this a decent tablet to run Actiontiles!