There was a broken light switch in the upstairs hall.\u00a0 Since I knew I was going to go through the trouble of replacing the switch, I decided to get another fancy smart switch.\u00a0 This time I went with the TP-Link Smart Wi-Fi Light Switch.<\/p>\n
The TP-Link switch is a lot like the WeMo switch (see part 2<\/a>).\u00a0 In fact, it was an accident that I got that switch–I intended to get another WeMo, but wasn’t paying attention and bought the TP-Link instead.\u00a0 It took awhile for me to notice that things were different.<\/p>\n The wiring of the switch was simple and pretty much identical to what I did for the WeMo.\u00a0 I did notice that the switch packaging was different, and the switch was slightly different, but the differences are so minor that I initially assumed I had a slightly different model of the same thing.<\/p>\n It wasn’t until I started trying to connect the TP-Link switch to the Echo that I ran into problems.\u00a0 Most of the problems stemmed from the fact that I was going through the same steps I did for the WeMo.\u00a0 Once I realized that the switch was different, it wasn’t immediately obvious where to find instructions (there was nothing helpful in the box).\u00a0 After searching online, I discovered that the setup is a bit more complicated and required installing the TP-Link Kasa app, creating a Kasa account, installing a special Alexa skill, and linking the accounts.<\/p>\n Now that everything is set up and working, there’s no different from the WeMo in terms of functionality.\u00a0 The switch works like a switch and the lights can also be voice activated via Alexa.\u00a0 The thing that I like least about the switch was that the setup was comparably more complicated, but some of that was due to incorrect assumptions on my part.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There was a broken light switch in the upstairs hall.\u00a0 Since I knew I was going to go through the trouble of replacing the switch, I decided to get another fancy smart switch.\u00a0 This time I went with the TP-Link Smart Wi-Fi Light Switch. The TP-Link switch is a lot like the WeMo switch (see … Continue reading “Let there be light (again)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=371"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":386,"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371\/revisions\/386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}