Awesome Aqara magic cube home automation ideas

in this video i'm going to show you how you can control the smart devices around your home from televisions lights and audio devices using this the acara magic cube i'm going to show you how it works how you can connect it to home assistant to use in your automations and give you some examples of what i use it for around my house let's take a look hey home automation guy start the show the acara cube is a zigbee device and it has lots of different sensors in it that know how you're holding it and how you're interacting with it it can detect which side is facing upwards whether you're twisting it sliding it or shaking it as well these can all be used to trigger automations for various devices around your house there are actually over 70 different interactions that can be done with this cube and each one of these can be used to trigger a different automation within your home assistant so you're really only limited by your automation and the devices that you have available to you i bought my cube on amazon for about 15 pounds officially you do need the acara hub in order to use it but since it speaks zigbee you can connect it to any other zigbee device that supports it i use mine with home assistant and a usb zigbee dongle if you don't really know what zigbee is or how to use zigbee with home assistant check out the links in the description below because i've linked some previous videos i've done which tell you all about what zigbee is how to use it and how to connect it to home assistant but once you've got your hands on one of these cubes it's time to take it out of the box and play with it in home assistant like most acara products it feels really well made and solidly built it comes with a handy tool to pick open one of the sides under which you'll find the cr2450 battery and the pairing button inside home assistant we need to pair this just like any other zigbee device we go to the zha integration click configure and then click the add device button this will then start the pairing mode you'll then need to go back to the cube hold down that pairing button for a few seconds and it will start to pairing process once pairing is completed give the device a name so you can easily find it in your device list later and specify which area the cube is living in if you're not familiar with pairing zigbee devices with zha check out the video in the description which goes through this process in a lot more detail now we've got the cube paired we can go to our device list click on it and you'll see all of the information about it the easiest way to create automations with the cube is by importing a blueprint a blueprint is a piece of code that other members of the home assistant community have created and shared that makes it easier to create complex automations the great thing about the home assistant community is there's always someone who's tried to do the thing that you're trying to do beforehand and shares their experience online with you the blueprint that i'm going to show you today is specifically designed for the acara magic cube and for zha if you're using zigbee to mqtt decons or some other way of connecting your zigbee devices to home assistant you'll need to use a different blueprint you should be able to find one pretty easily by doing a quick web search i've put a link to the blueprint that i'm showing you today in the description below so you can easily access it simply click on the link and you should be able to follow the rest of the guide from the blueprint description you can see it supports flipping it to any side sliding it knocking it shaking it dropping it waking it that rhymes and rotating left and right or clockwise and anti-clockwise you can trigger a home assistant automation using any one of these actions but first we're going to scroll down and you can see the actual code within the blueprint that is going to be imported into your home assistant if you want you can check that out to make sure that it's not going to be doing anything malicious but generally these things are used by multiple people around the world and have been audited by the community themselves most blueprints in the home assistant forums have an import blueprint button if you haven't used this before you'll need to specify where your home assistant lives so here is where you put your home assistant url in this is only stored locally in the browser and when you click the open link button it will deep link into your home assistant and automatically go to the place where it needs to import that blueprint you can click the preview blueprint button which will show you again the same content of the blueprint that you saw on the forum and then the import blueprint will bring it into home assistant itself once the blueprint is loaded into home assistant you can create an automation directly from this page the first thing we'll do is give this automation a name in my home i've got two cubes so i have to create two different automations and this helps me work out which ones which we then choose the cube that we want to use for this particular automation and here you can see the value of using this blueprint there are 57 different actions that you can trigger from the one cube if we had to program all this up manually it would take forever so here you can see there are different actions that can be triggered from different sides of the cube it's a cube so it has six sides it means you can flip it from any side to side one trigger the automation or specific ones if you go from one side side four to side one you could do different actions that way as well as you can see there is a lot of scope here for you to go crazy with your own automations but it's a completely white cube which side is which sometimes the low-tech way is the best way so i'd suggest getting some post-it notes writing the numbers one to six across the top in small letters and then cut out the numbers individually and put them next to you the first one is the easiest one the side that has the acara logo on it is always side one so we should start by labeling that one to find the remaining sides you need to go into the developer tools section and then click on the events area at the top you can then listen to the events from the zha service and see what's coming into zha when you move the cube when you flip the cube over you can see that the information provided into zha shows us that it has been flipped to side two so we can now stick the number two from our posters onto this side and keep repeating this process until we've numbered every one of them so now that we know what side of the cube is what we can start creating automations and keep playing with them until we're happy with the result in this example i'm going to show you how you can use the cube to turn on and off for light as well as adjust the brightness by twisting it clockwise and anti-clockwise we're going to use the flip to side one action to call the light.turn on service which will turn on our living room light to 100 brightness and we're going to use the flip to side 4 action to call the light.turn off service which will turn off the living room light we'll use the rotate right action to call the light.turn on service which we'll use to adjust the brightness so pick the living room lamp as the target again and we'll use the brightness step value change and we'll increase the brightness by 10 if we rotate it to the right we can do the same with the rotate left we'll use the same light.turn on service to adjust the living room lamp but this time we'll change the brightness step value to -10 which will decrease the brightness now we'll save that automation and test it out in the real world when we flip the cube to side one it will turn on that light we can then rotate the cube left and it will dim the light and right to brighten it then we can flip it back to the other side to turn the light off since it's a totally white non-descript cube it's pretty hard to use in real life because you don't really know what side is what the post-it notes are great for testing but it doesn't really cut it in the real world i use my canva account to create some large round icons which i then uploaded to moo.com to get some stickers created and sent to me these are colorful easy to see icons that tell me what side of the cube does what these stickers fit perfectly onto the cube but the downside was i had to get 50 of them delivered because that was the minimum order size so i've got plenty of spares still they only cost 17 pounds and they're a pretty decent quality once i've perfected all the automations i want to use with the cube using the post-it notes and use them for a couple of days just to make sure that i'm happy with them i replace the post-it notes with one of the stickers that represents the thing that the cube does when it's flipped to that side eventually you'll have automations for every side of the cube and you can place the stickers on top you can see that this really does make it a lot easier to identify which side of the cube does what and i can now show you how i use two cubes in my home one in the living room and one in my office to automate common things that i do around the house it's worth pointing out here that i don't actually use zha in my own home assistant setup i use zigbee2mqtt it's a lot more complicated to set up but it does give you some extra compatibility with different devices and some more functionality in some cases for example with the magic cube if you use zha it will only detect whether you're rotating it left and right regardless of what side is pointing upwards with zigbee to mqtt i can set different types of automations for different sides up twisting it left and right so for example if the light bulb side is pointing upwards and i twist it left and right i can have it turn up and down the lights if the speaker item is showing upwards i can turn it left and right to increase and decrease the volume on the particular device in that room i'm sure that the zha blueprints and functionality will improve over time so it's likely you'll be able to do this same sort of thing using zha in the future but if you'd like to learn more about zigbee to mqtt and why i use it in my own network i'll be releasing a video about this later on so if you click the subscribe button you'll be notified when that video is available and you'll be able to see it as i mentioned i use two of these cubes in my house the first one is in my office and i use it to control the lights and the audio and different settings depending on what i'm doing throughout the workday for example if i switch the cube to the light facing upwards icon it will turn on all the lights to their default settings if an incoming video call happens throughout the day i can just shake the cube this will pause any music that's playing on my speaker and activate my key light it will also turn on some of the background lights behind me so that i have some ambient lighting i can control the brightness of the key light by twisting the cube this makes me feel brighter or lower depending on how i look on the camera i can also control the music playing through my speaker by switching it to the spotify setting if i double tap the cube on the desk it will resume playing whatever i last played on spotify twisting it will increase or decrease the volume [Music] if i slide the cube it will skip to the next track and then double tapping the cube again we'll pause the music then when i'm done working for the day i can flip the cube to the lights off position which will gradually fade out the lights as i walk out the door a lot of the automations in my living room are very similar to those in my office for example i can turn on and dim and brighten the lights just by twisting the cube i can also control the spotify and the music the same way as i can in my office however there are some very specific automations just for this room as well for example i already have an automation that dims the lights to a comfortable level whenever the tv is turned on if i want to go and get a snack or go to the bathroom i can actually pick up the cube now and shake it and it will turn the lights to 100 brightness and pause whatever's on tv once i've gotten a snack come back from the from the bathroom i can just tap the cube twice and it will put everything back to how it was dim the lights and restart the thing on the television i also have an automation that changes the input of my television to the front doorbell camera so if i hear a noise outside i can flip the cube up to one of the faces and it will change the input to be that video camera i can see what's going on outside without having to get up from my seat and finally i also have bedtime mode which means i can flip the cube over to the picture of the bed when i'm ready to go to sleep and it will slowly dim out the lights over the course of two minutes this lets me like tidy up the things that are happening in the living room make sure everything's ready for the next day and walk to bed knowing that the lights are going to automatically turn off by the time i get there when i first got my cube i really thought it would just be a bit of a gimmick and a bit of fun to play with but it's actually become quite indispensable at least in my office i use it all the time to adjust the music that i'm listening to the lights depending on what i'm doing and that shake to turn on the video conference mode is really handy when i've got an incoming video call the cube in the living room is a lot less used i already have a ton of other automations in that room that activate the lights at sunset dim the lights when the television is turned on and many other things but i do use the shape to go and get snacks quite often throughout the night i do have to admit though that it is not the most reliable piece of equipment and not the most reliable thing for automating your house i find myself often shaking tapping and sliding the cube with nothing happening i've been turning it to turn the volume up on something and then all of a sudden it catches up with itself turns the volume to a hundred percent and deafens me in the middle of the night another thing to note is this doesn't really pass the guest test if you gave this to someone who came to your house for the first time and told them to turn on and off your lights and the television using this cube they'd look at you like you were a fool you should use this in conjunction with the other ways you have to control things around your house you've got a perfectly good television remote and perfectly good light switches so make sure you're not relying on something like this for your automations but use it instead to augment what you already have that being said i think there are quite a few use cases for the tool like this for example if you have someone who has limited motion or a disability or vision impairment they may be able to interact with this control things in their house far easier than getting up walking across the room to find a light switch you could easily add braille or different types of elements to these sides so someone who has limited vision could pick up the cube feel which side is which and interact with their house that way i think there's a ton of ways that we haven't yet seen home automation systems be used to help people around their houses for me personally though this has been a really fun project i've really enjoyed the process of conceiving planning out and implementing the automations with this cube for the 45 pounds i invested in two cubes and a bunch of stickers i really got days of enjoyment out of it and it really has become a useful tool to have around the house despite it not working occasionally so if you've enjoyed this video and learning about how i use this cube around my house please click the thumbs up button to let me know i regularly release videos like this about how i'm using different types of smart technology in my house to make my life easier or just more fun so if you'd like to know when these videos are coming out click the subscribe button and then together we can make your home [Music] smarter [Music] come on

Channel: Home Automation Guy

Views: 29,092

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Id: wRf9RT2YgaI

Length: 15min 37sec (937 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 29 2021