SwitchBot, or affordable home automation

October 11, 2021· Michel Aguilera

Having had the opportunity to test several home automation solutions, I was pleased to discover a Chinese company, SwitchBot. Its appeal is that it offers an affordable home automation solution that requires no work inside the walls and is easy to set up. An overview of the solutions offered, the modules and the interactions available.

Home automation… made easy!

When we talk about home automation, certain preconceptions about cost or complexity regularly come up. In fact, you can quickly see that this is not the case at all. Nowadays, several solutions make it possible to integrate components to make our everyday objects “smarter”. What can happen, however, is that adding various brands or communication protocols complicates day-to-day management. SwitchBot (a name that, in English, means robotic button) symbolises precisely this philosophy: making objects smart that were not smart to begin with. One example is one of the nicest products: the connected switch pusher (the Bot).

What this little box can do is quite simply…press a button! This may seem trivial, but it opens up quite an interesting range of possibilities: any object that was not designed to be automated can very easily become so. With openness to platforms such as IFTTT, SmartThings, or possible interaction with voice assistants such as Alexa, Siri or Google, the SwitchBot ecosystem opens the doors of home automation to everyone (and to all kinds of objects). From then on, only our imagination will limit the scenarios and automations we can create.

Short introduction video:

Which brings us to the need for management solutions that allow third-party integrations and make this easy and understandable for ordinary mortals. Here again, SwitchBot offers a controller (simple, small and nice). The control app (available on Google Play and the iOS AppStore) lets you aggregate the various objects to be controlled, by means of SwitchBot products. Short introduction video on setting up the SwitchBot Hub Mini controller:

The company has several products for automating our environment. There are motorised units for drawing our curtains (various versions exist, depending on the type of curtain fitting):

To give you an idea of all the possibilities, here is a video I made covering the unboxing and configuration of a few of these items:

As you can see, it is simple and quickly up and running without any great knowledge of home automation. The main advantage lies above all in an installation with no cable runs and no complex network.

In short, it’s going to work!

It is fair to say that this is a great discovery when it comes to home automation installations. “Simple” is the watchword of SwitchBot products, which are also effective and quick to set up. Moreover, I was able to test my integration with other home automation controllers, such as Homey, and it was very quickly integrated into my other scenarios. For those who are interested, I have a discount for the SwitchBot online shop (valid until 18 October 2021). If you use the code 25OFF7, you will get 25% off your purchase. You can also go to this link.