How To Control Anything With A Stream Deck - Alternative Smart Home Ideas

ladies and gentlemen boys and girls welcome back to the world of home tech with me your host paul hibbett and welcome to the stream deck i love this thing it has these little tactile buttons i just can't stop pressing uh anisha bought at me for christmas and the idea of it is that video game players who spend all their time on twitch compress these things and get shortcuts to come up for twitter and their twitch stream and they can send emojis and do all kinds of cool things but me being me i of course went to a mad scientist on it and made it do a load of stuff it's not meant to enjoy so first of all this is how it comes if you press the welcome button you get a welcome page very exciting uh super easy to do of course i could configure that button to load any web page i wanted and that's quite a handy thing straight off the bat you'll see is automatically moved to my default panel this panel has all of my home automation tasks on it and that's because i'm not editing a video right now if i opened up premiere pro or photoshop it would immediately change to a different panel of keys and that is one of the beautiful things about it is it can automatically give you the things you're interested in based on the things that you open up on your pc so in itself this is a great product but what i've done is i've started using it for home automation so i've got music room off and music room on which will switch all of my lights on and off i've got some other lights that perhaps will control other rooms and i've even got my little vacuum cleaner so my broadlink rm pro will fire off the infrared signal to start my vacuum at the press of one of these buttons which is pretty cool i then got these two buttons here these will switch panels manually so if i want to go to my video editing panel i can click that and i get it and clicking that button there for example will load my pc not super fast right now but there you go that's photoshop i've got premiere pro a couple of other things i use and of course you can load specific files so i could open up the waveloop which is a file on my desktop which looks like that which i have in the background of all my videos or i can open a particular folder so if i close the waveloop off and then click on the png folder i get the folder opened automatically for all of my png files for when i'm doing my video editing so this is a great little device for creating videos as generally for just work streams for doing things that you don't want to have to do all the time manually you can automate them which is great and now i'm going to show you how you could do more things than that because we can connect this thing to if this then that and get it to control any home automation device in the whole universe let's do that okay so in my stream deck i'm going to create a new set of buttons i'm going to go to edit profiles and press the plus button and then double click here and just call it whatever i want so i'm going to call it if this then that and press enter and if i come out of this now you'll see that i now have a profile called if this then that and it's empty so i now have an empty set of buttons except for this stupid welcome icon so i'm going to delete the stupid welcome icon and i now have a completely blank slate i'm going to create a website button for example i'm going to go to www.dominos.com just to show you exactly what this thing does i'm going to change the icon here using set from file and i'm just going to set the domino's pizza icon and it really is as simple as this if i press the button domino's pizza dot code uk loads up which is amazing um i don't want it to do that however if i am in the united states which sadly i am not uh you could actually get this button to simply order your pizza for you just by using if this then that's url instead of domino's pizzas url so i could remove this put in a special url that would summon if this then that and if this then that in turn would use the domino's pizza service to order your pizza which is insanity you can just drag these buttons around and you'll see it moves instantaneously on the stream deck and what i'm going to do is i'm going to add another website and this one is going to contain uh if this then that url to switch on paul's philips hue lights uh so i'm going to first of all load up if this then that in the web page i'm going to sign up i've already done that so i'm not going to sign up you will need to uh i'm going to go to my applets and then new applet and if you're not familiar with if this than that it basically connects one thing to another thing so you could get it so that your nest thermostats when it reaches a certain temperature would set your philips hue lights to be blue for example um i don't know why you'd do that perhaps you're mental but i'm not going to do that what i'm going to do is i'm going to say if i receive a particular website address then make my philips hue lights come on so i'm going to say if this happens and i'm going to search for if this then that's web hooks service i'm going to say when i receive a web request that's the only option i can choose anyway with the event name hue lamp on all in one word i think that's important and click create trigger then i want that to happen and that is phillips hugh now i'm being asked to connect because it doesn't know who i am it's saying well whose philips hue accounts do you want to control so i'm going to say connect to paul hibbert's philips hue account i'll never have to sign in again once you are connected with ift to philips then you can create as many philips recipes as you like the first one we're going to create and in fact the only one today is turn on lights it then finds all the lights from my account so it's got my living room lights right light left light and down light i wanted to control all of my living room lights create action and we now have what we call a recipe which says if the maker event receives hue lamp on then turn on the living room simple as that finish now all we need is the url to control that so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go to my applets again services and then web hooks and then documentation and what this does is it tells you what your personalized url address is for being able to control the web hooks channel so that is the url and all we have to do is replace the event uh with the event name we just created so i can add the event name in there in place of what was there before our event name was hugh lamp on so i'm just going to put that in exactly the same words and i now have my url so if i copy all of that to my clipboard now just going to put it into my notepad for safekeeping that is a special url for triggering my hue lights uh in if this then that and if i put that in here and press the button congratulations you've fired the hue lamp on event how exciting a bit annoying though we don't want to see this web page do we fortunately stream deck of thought of that if i click access in background and now press that button i don't see anything happen but my philips hue lights come on when i press that button if i want to replace that icon i can just go set from file and i can put my hue lamp icon in there and i've now got a hue lamp button that when i press it it switches my hue lamp on it is simple as that i have now connected this to if this then that and i can now switch my lamp on phillips hue controlled so is there any point in getting one of these the answer is yes and no um it depends really on your usage case i spend an awful lot of time at my pc and i've got an awful lot of things that i do very regularly and i get fed up of using the mouse to go to the right folder and opening shortcuts up manually when it could just be pressing a button to bring those things up it's great for photoshop it's great for video editing it's great for lots and lots of things outside of home automation if you're just looking for a home automation gadget well that's not what this is but that said you could connect it to a tablet uh or in fact a little tiny usb stick style windows 10 pc and as long as they're running a 64-bit operating system that's super important this thing will work you could put it wherever you wanted it would be quite an expensive solution but people spend a lot more than that on professional solutions that don't look this good and aren't this malleable i think this is actually although i did it for a laugh a pretty superb little device for doing home automation so i would recommend this for anyone who spends a lot of time at their pc not just for the home automation side but the automation on your pc side for helping you with your workspace and i'd also recommend it for anyone who's got money to burn who just wants to have a really cool device that they can stick anywhere as long as they've got something they can connect it to that has a 64-bit operating system and windows 10 on it i hope you've enjoyed this video if you have please give it a thumbs up if you want to see some more of this guy hit that subscribe button and if you want to help support my channel there are links in the description to do that too i'll see you next time uh this is a stream deck and i have no idea what i'm on about just start again do a whole bunch of things with vishna what but i wasn't satisfied with it just but me being me i went to a mad scientist on its mad scientific scientist chad test that would have been fine i could have used that why didn't i nob head [Music] wow [Music] you

Channel: Paul Hibbert

Views: 107,358

Rating: 4.8807812 out of 5

Keywords: Stream deck, Elgato, Home automation, IFTTT, Alternative, ideas, smart home, Paul Hibbert, hack, home hack, Tutorial, how to, guide, Easy

Id: Ph7pMGuN-YQ

Length: 10min 20sec (620 seconds)

Published: Sat May 19 2018