The Smart Home System You Have NEVER Heard of (but DEFINITELY Should) - YoLink Review

it was just over a year ago that i had john from yolink reach out and send me a number of their products including their smart home hub a garage door opener a contact sensor and some other devices but as i worked with the products back then i found the application had a few issues and it wasn't as reliable as i was hoping for we were trying to work out a sponsored video at the time but i actually had to say you know what guys i don't think this product lineup is ready for our community of automators and we walked away for a little bit but today i have a sponsored video plus i am very excited to tell you about yolank which is a system you've probably never heard of but definitely should hello automators thanks for tuning in again i'm brian from automate your life and today i'm going to take the frustration out of automation by showing you this really unique system but also a system that isn't overpriced and let's be honest and just say that that's a rarity in today's smart home market one of the major reasons for today's video is actually because a number of our patrons had reached out to me over the last year and said hey have you heard of this company have you seen what they're doing i'm even able to solve some really big things that i haven't been able to do anywhere else and it's things like that that led me to the point to understand a little bit more about the technology embedded in this system i'm constantly telling you about zigbee and z-wave and wi-fi and nowadays i'm telling you about thread and all of those are wireless communication technologies but a lot of cities are using a different technology they're not using any of those to deploy smart city features or capabilities what they're actually using is called lora and that is what is embedded within all of the devices in the yolink system one of the biggest features of lora is long range and it kind of makes sense with that little acronym there but it's also really low frequency you're kind of low around that z-wave range in most countries and then on top of that it's intended to be really reliable this is why smart cities are putting it into their infrastructure anyways this time around link has sent me a number of new devices and i'm pretty excited to get these unboxed and opened up but i have my old system sitting around and the only device that isn't still plugged in from all of that or isn't still powered is my original hub so i leave that to the side and i start the process of setting up the new hub that i got and i say process but it's scanning a qr code in the application and then the device is registered and that's how it goes with all of the devices from yo link so it's a really easy setup process and i've never had it fail like some other scanning and it's just great so anyways i get this second hub setup and it is instantly finding the other devices that i've had in my home so i see my contact sensor come online the smart plug the smart power bar that i've had and the leak sensor starts to show up too all of these devices instantly connect to the new hub and that's one of the big features of lora and the yolink technology they don't care which hub they're connected to as long as they're all registered to that same account so i go and i grab my contact sensor it's all the way across the house and when i bring it back one of the things i want to do is i want to test the reliability of the automations because this was one of the problems i was having earlier last year when i was testing out the system i had an automation setup where i opened the contact sensor and it would turn on the smart plug and close it and it would turn off the smart plug and i was not getting the best reliability results but as i do it this time what i'm finding is it is perfect in terms of reliability and then i'm surprised by how fast it is so i actually had to reach out to yo link ask john again are you sure these aren't local automations because they are cloud-based now i'll talk about a way in later on in the video that you can actually get around that but it's cloud-based and yet it seems perfect and so i said that the application wasn't so great a year ago and it's not perfect at this point but i'm noticing a lot of updates and upgrades so as i'm poking around there i go into the settings for my contact sensor i can see that i can get alerts really quickly but the big thing that i notice is that the battery bar still looks totally full it's been sitting in my home idle for a year and if i did that with a zigbee device or a z-wave device or any other battery powered device that i have would either be dead or probably half dead and this shows full so then i go and i find my original hub and i connect that in using its power adapter but i've actually set up both of these hubs using wi-fi which yolink tells me isn't the preferred method but i'm going to do all of this testing using the worst case scenario so you can connect it in with ethernet but i still have yet to do that due to this being a lora hub i don't really need the second or third one in this place because actually that technology boasts a quarter mile distance now if you were running an apartment building you might actually run into a situation where this would be really helpful but what happens to all of these devices is they connect to whichever hub is closest or the best signal strength so you can have this kind of a mesh system put together and that's what i have in my home it just doesn't matter because my home's not that big but that ability to have such a distance for my devices gives me the opportunity to solve something you guys ask me about all the time and i walk down the street i go to my canada post mailbox and i put the contact sensor in there now what i do is i i'm using a little bit of sticky tape in there and i'm just doing little tests and people are thinking i'm crazy as they're driving by and i've got my camera out and i'm taking video of a canada post mailbox but i set up the contact sensor in there and then i adjust the notification settings to know whenever that comes on or whenever that door is open and i rename it to mailbox but i'm finding that my phone is getting just too many notifications in my life in general and then i don't want to look at them i don't want to have them and i turn them off so instead what i decide to do is connect this whole system in with amazon's voice assistant and i have a brand new echo show 10 that i create a routine for so what i add in there is a notification out of that device just an audible one and then i also turn a couple of lights blue to signify that i have mail now obviously you're going to be able to do whatever you want within that scenario but that's all i need mailbox is opened as i'm in the miss a routines there and i'm working with them i notice that a number of other yolink devices are in there as triggers and this is the first time i've ever seen a leak sensor as a trigger for a routine with miss a so that is an entirely unique feature and speaking of those leak sensors there's actually a number of them in the yolink lineup but the one i like the best actually has a little speaker on it plus it has a lead attachment that any part of that lead gets wet you can get a notification so you can get that under things like your fridge or your uh dishwasher here i think that's what i'm gonna do with it plus just with that little speaker i'm gonna audibly hear it whenever i enter the home however that leads me into what i think is the most important components that they sent me here because it's all well and good to have leaked detection but you need to do something with it and you need to feel really good about that action actually happening so they sent a motorized valve or a motorized actuator actually and then they sent a little battery pack or it's the controller for that and yeah it's battery powered so you could stick this on any part or in any part of your home and have it work but i know you guys i know there's a number of you going yeah but that's cloud-based automation i don't want that in such a critical application and i've talked to you guys about that before i agree with you and so i asked yo link about this before we even got to this point and what they gave me was an absolutely unique feature of this platform that solves that whole issue so what you can do with these products is to pair them directly now i say pair and that suggests two but i've actually done this now with four products so i took the two leak sensors i took the siren that they sent me and i took the valve controller and i paired them all together and what that actually means is you're holding the set button on both devices for about four or five seconds and you see the little green lights go and they're paired together and what that means is locally now when one thing happens the other actuates so when my leak sensor goes off my valve closes so then i paired the other leak sensor and i paired that siren and all four of those are now working as this local system that requires no interaction from the hub or a cloud or anything else they're just going to protect my home and when i think about lots of you guys and lots of your situations you know what you've got a trailer and you're you're gone down the road you don't need internet you can just pair those products together i think the same holds true for lots of those little vacation properties and this works with the whole lineup so it's a really really interesting and unique feature that i think has a ton of application and there's one other critical aspect to the lora technology that really matters here see whenever i've put wi-fi devices or sometimes even the zigbee devices you know what i put those in a mechanical room there's a lot of reflective or refractive metallic surfaces and just a lot of materials that are hard for higher frequency devices or higher frequency communication to get through so you know you have this lower frequency again with the lora protocol and that helps it to get into those kinds of spaces so i really like it for that kind of an application so with that in mind i actually decided to try out one of the hardest places to automate in the home and i've only ever had some success with z-wave devices inside of my freezer so i took their temperature and humidity sensor and now i know the temperature of my ice cubes at any time so i have all of these things set up and i'm feeling pretty good about the system but you guys know that i like ease of use and ease of installation and that's one of the reasons i've really enjoyed having switchbot in my home i have that little bot or little button that just can press a number of things but i've actually struggled in a couple of places to use that because the little actuator is just too small so i was actually struggling getting that to work with the garage door controller that i had it's actually just a really deep one so i'd have to do some some rigging and i haven't been successful as of yet to get that button pressed plus my remote is a little funny and i've seen a number of you have actually stripped off the whole outer cover of those remotes to get to the little button to use switchbot button and this is where the new yo link finger actually becomes one of my favorite new devices so i take the garage door sensor i stick that on there it takes all of three seconds and i know the opener closed status of my garage door then i take the yo link finger and i am literally at this point giving the finger to every other garage door controller because within a minute i've stuck my remote to the railing in my garage and i've stuck that finger on the railing as well and i'm able to customize or configure where that finger is so you get this little ability to make sure that you're always pressing that button perfectly so i have that set up in moments and then i decide okay let's do this really hard garage door controller that's so deep with this finger device and it works perfectly again within minutes so that little adjustable arm becomes such a critical aspect but i notice inside of the application that the finger and the door sensor have kind of become one device in there so it's a nice single tap in to see the status and to actually open and close my door but again that's not how i want to control things i don't want to be constantly going into an app one of the things i am always doing is driving up with my phone that has the google assistant on board so i integrate those devices into the google assistant and i wanna find out how that's gonna work now for many of you who've used the google assistant you're gonna know that when you try and lock a door or unlock a door it's going to ask you for a pin code and honestly it's pretty random as to whether or not that whole thing works so i'm a little bit worried as i ask the first time to open the garage door but it instantly works it doesn't ask me for a pin code it's just treating this device as an open close type of switch and so i am able to instantly with the google assistant as i'm driving up open and close my garage door so i have voice control but i'm kind of hoping in the future that we get something like geolocation or more conditions because that's actually one of the drawbacks you know for those of you who are using something like samsung smartthings or habitat you're used to multi-condition automations that's not possible right now with the yo-link system you kind of only have that one condition or that one trigger event and then you can execute a number of steps but you know for smart things people habitat people there's no integration with those hubs either and there's not really a home kit way right now so it's not integratable into every system the other thing that i'm not totally in love with is the application still there's just a few cosmetic issues and i'm not in love with the menu system i wish that would kind of get reorganized one more time i'm sure that will happen as we go but it's not stopping me from solving any of these issues that you saw me solve today and on that note what i'm betting a lot of you need right now is to see this system in action a little more in depth so we went out we created three tutorial videos that will show you how to set up devices how to solve these issues like the garage door the leak sensor that pairing of those devices locally to see how that goes and how that all works so we created that playlist it's up on screen for you now you can go watch those videos otherwise thanks for watching today guys and of course don't hate automate

Channel: Automate Your Life

Views: 65,062

Keywords: yolink, smart home, lora smart home, yolink alexa, home automation, yolink alarm, smart home automation, water leak sensor, smart home devices, yolink review, yolink finger, smart home setup, lora, smart home tech, best smart home devices, best smart home, yolink motion sensor, home automation system, budget smart home tech, smart home tech 2021, best smart home products, local smart home, smart home sensors, smart home ideas, automate your life, smart home sensors alexa

Id: 9gJqf6TpHh4

Length: 15min 47sec (947 seconds)

Published: Wed May 12 2021