
Hey guys, it's Alex here from Homey. In this video, I
want to highlight the Aqara Cube. Now this is a super kind of unique and quirky smart home
device that you can use to control some of the devices in your smart home. Now it's
not super clear from the packaging or advertising of this product what exactly it does so I wanted
to dive into this together with you and see what's possible with this cube device. Now I want to warn
you there are some funny ideas coming up that our community has come up with for using this cube
at home.
But first, let's see what's possible once you connect it up to Homey. Let's dive into it and
head to devices, you'll see I've already paired up my cube for pairing instructions wait till the end of this video.
If I head into my tile for my cube I'll see that there's a couple of things that it's
tracking, so it has a slide – oh – it just changed to rotate because I think I touched it but the last
motion that happened is rotate. It's face up on face one and the last rotation is minus 14 degrees.
So this is already a little bit complicated what's exactly going on here. Let's explore it. So if I
flip the cube, you'll see that this changes. Now face two is up and the last motion it recorded is
a flip of 90 degrees. Let's do this one more time Now I'm on face four and I flipped
90 degrees if i flip it across 180 the cube also records this and knows now it's back
on face one. So, that's what it's tracking for the cube.
The next step is to attach a couple of Flows
to these movements. So let's head into Flows and create a Flow. Now what I want to do as a simple
example of what's capable of, is toggle this lamp on and off doing a 180 degree flip. Let's set this
up, let's add a card, we'll head down to the queue Now here you see a list of the actions for
a 'when'-card so these are actions that can trigger certain events, if you're familiar
with Flows you're going to understand this so what we want to do is when the cube is flipped
180.
But there are also different things here so you can do a Flow for when the cube is shaked,
when it's flipped 90 degrees, if the cube has slid if the cube has been double tapped or the
cube is rotated. So there's a bunch of options and you can get as creative as you want, but
let's head to cube has been flipped 180 degrees. I'm going to say any side up, here you could also
specify what side is up after the 180 degree flip I'm going to hit the check mark, head to 'then'
and say what action I want the cube to do, once it's been flipped 180 degrees.
So that is
my film studio, select my studio desk lamp and I'm going to say: toggle on or off. Hit check
mark and hit save. Give it a quick name, so cube 180 just to remember what that's all
about and now if I flip the cube the light should turn off. Let's see if this
works, flip it over and the light turns off So now if I flip it again 180 degrees, comes back
on, now you can see immediately just from here that there's a lot of options you can do to this. You
can have different flips, take different actions So one of the fun things I thought might be
great is to add a Flow for when you shake it that it changes or randomizes the color of
your lights. That might be really fun for at home, when you're trying these things with family
members and you're showing them the smart device they have no idea what it does, they give it a
shake and all the colors change in your room That'd be quite fun, so I'm going to set that up.
Let's head to back to Flows and then to the cube Now in this case I want to say cube is shaked, any
side up so doesn't matter which side was up.
Then I'm going to add a card for the light, to
randomize color. So I head to the light I wanted to use and say 'set a random color'. Hit
the check mark. I'll save this, say cube shake… ..random. Now if I shake the cube, my light color
should change. Let's try this, give it a good shake… – try it again – and the color changes to
red. Let's try it one more time – and blue so it's quite a fun sort of quirky little
smart home gadget you can have at home Now I've shown you a couple of the things that
you can do with it and our community has come up with a couple of ideas for themselves, so
some of them use them as audio controllers so have it for instance skip a song if
you rotate it 90 degrees to the left or play last song if you rotate it to the
right, you can also change the angle of it to alter the volume of your audio system..
There's
a lot of different things you can do with it, but one of the great ideas that that person had, was to
add stickers for what movements are actually being done. So as you can see, there's not much telling
you on the cube itself what setting it's at So if the cube is face up on a side, I'm not sure
what's going to happen if I flip it over, so it really helps to sort of add some icons to the cube,
to identify what side is what – and then to remind yourself what Flows you've attached to it.
The Aqara
Cube also comes with a couple of flaws. The shake sensitivity is relatively high, so if you have it
lying on a desk and you hit that desk, sometimes the cube thinks it's being shook. And then it
triggers the Flow for your lights to randomize Another one is, it has a function to do angle
and to use this for instance to dim some lights Now I've set this up in a Flow
but it's relatively hard to do So let me show you what I'm talking about. Let
me quickly set my lights to a normal color. And if I now try and dim the lights it's a little
bit difficult, so I'm going to rotate the cube about 45 degrees.
Now the light will dim down. I'm
not sure to what sensitivity or to where, but it's dimmed, okay. Now to dim up the light you have to
go somewhere past 90 degrees, only to the left so I'm gonna do it about 75 degrees, and the light
should increase in brightness – try that again – Okay, well this highlights what I'm talking about.
It's relatively difficult to get this thing to dim your lights to an accurate level of what you
wanted, so I would not recommend it as a dimmer. So I've shown you some of the cool
features that you can use the Aqara Cube for Now we don't recommend it to dim your lights
with, because that's a little bit tricky. But it is a fun little device to have in any smart home
to entertain your guests or your kids with. Now I wish you good luck and I hope that you can get
creative with the cube and figure out some of the things that I might not have explored yet.
I want to show you how to pair the Aqara Cube with Homey.
Let's see how this is done so the first thing you have to do is open up the cube itself. In the package you get this little metal tong, which you can use to open up the back of the cube The next step is to find the pairing
instructions. Let's head into devices, hit the plus and search for Aqara and the
brand names. So here's Aqara and Xiaomi Now we want to find the device.. Let's
head down to the cube and hit connect So to add the cube, what we need to do, is hold
the cube during inclusion in close proximity to Homey.
Okay, well we're relatively close here
on the same desk. Then long-press the reset button for more than three seconds until the blue
light flashes three times. Okay, hold it down – one – two – three. I see the blue lights
flashing and I'll release. Keep pressing the button until every two seconds to
keep the sensor awake during pairing Oh, we see how quickly that's done. The
cube has now been paired to Homey..
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