My friend first introduced me to smart home automation by showing off his room, where as soon as you walk in, every light turns on automatically, and to me, it was a dream. He told me to check out the brand Aqara, and I’ve become addicted to Aqara products. I currently have everything running off two E1 hubs (I’ve ordered an M3 hub as an upgrade), and I have:
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Temperature sensors on each floor of my house and in my fridge and freezer (This will be important later)
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4 contact sensors on important doors in my house (And my safe, essentially making it a “smart safe”),
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LED strips under most of my furniture (Bed, desk, behind my monitor, bookshelves, etc.)
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Smart buttons in common places, and…
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An FP2 to accomplish my original dream of fully automated lighting.
I’ve integrated Aqara with Home Assistant so I can control my accessories with my Elgato Stream Deck, and everything has surprisingly low latency. Ive already invested in the Amazon Blink camera ecosystem before I was aware of Aqara, and I am considering switching over due to poor motion detection and low bitrate on the Blink cameras.
How Aqara saved my Thanksgiving
I had previously installed Aqara temperature sensors in my fridge and freezer and set up temperature notifications a while ago since the fridge kept getting left open, and I ended up forgetting about it for a while, until a few days before Thanksgiving. I had already put all of the food into the fridge, and then a while later I got a notification from the Aqara app telling me that my fridge and my freezer had gotten too warm. My fridge ended up being faulty, and had to be switched off and on again every 3-4 hours to keep it cold, so the Aqara reminders are very helpful to remind me to do this.
What I would use the G5 camera for
There have been a few times when random people have gone to the back of my house and used my garbage bin to throw trash out (Including needles and wrappers 
), but it wasn’t caught on camera since Blink’s motion detection isn’t very reliable, so I am hoping that an Aqara G5 Pro camera would address this issue.