D-Link’s taking the contrarian approach to the smart home market with their Connected Home Solution, in that you can piece components of your smart home together bit by bit without busting the wallet.
So you have a Wi-Fi Smart Plug (DSP-W215, Rs. 3,749) and a Wi-Fi Motion Sensor (DCH-S150, Rs. 3,749) that can add smarts to your existing home. Making the approach affordable is all very well, but are they products worthy of your home?
What’s Good?
The Wi-Fi Smart Plug is the most basic unit of home automation – plug it into a wall outlet and and you can use your smartphone to monitor and control any device that you plug into it, whether you’re in the same room or halfway across the world. Bear in mind, control is limited to turning the device on or off.
The mydlink companion app lets you create schedules for when the connected device should be turned on or off. And if you’re a data nerd, the Smart Plug is your friend, tracking the power usage so you can see in real time (via the app) how much power is being drawn…and even set up a power budget to ensure you’re not wasting too much energy. Temperature can be monitored too, which is neat.
Now, motion-detecting alarms have been around for a while, but D-Link’s Wi-Fi Motion Sensor is a new take on the idea, with the infrared sensor packing the ability to send an alert to your phone. Setup is effortless, and everything is again controlled via the mydlink app.
Once it’s setup and connected to your Wi-Fi network, you will be sent alerts the moment the sensor is tripped. You can adjust sensitivity or create a schedule that lets you set when the sensor will be active. The great bit is that D-Link has nailed the execution, and the device works faultlessly once you’ve set it up to monitor the room, picking up the slightest movements and sending the alert to the app no matter where you are.
Where it comes into its own is in conjunction with the Wi-Fi Smart Plug, where you can define actions that can be run on the Smart Plug when motion is detected… say, turning on a light when you walk into the house… or your coffee machine, if that’s what you want.
What’s Bad?
The Smart Plug does what it advertises, but little else. Unlike the WeMo offering from Belkin (yet to be launched), there’s no support for IFTTT recipes to make it work with other services, which is a bit limiting.
The same holds for the motion sensor, which is hobbled by being limited to D-Link’s walled garden of devices... at this point, even support for D-Link’s network cameras is limited which could have theoretically sent a snap or a video clip whenever the camera detected motion, but at least that’s in the works.
Why Buy it?
It’s tempting to take D-Link’s affordable approach to smart homes, but you’re going to hit the boundaries of the system pretty quick, which stops us short of giving these devices an unqualified recommendation.
To be fair, they are a firmware update away from fixing all these issues, but it may just we worthwhile waiting it out and seeing how and when SmartThings, Samsung’s smart home business, makes a play for your home.
Read about smart lighting solutions for your home here.
(Tushar Kanwar is a technology columnist and commentator and has been contributing for the the past 15 years to India’s leading newspapers and magazines. He can be reached out on Twitter: @2shar.)
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