Do you have an old tablet or iPad at home that you are no longer using? That was also my case, so I decided I could bring it to life again.

Having many smart home devices and controlling them using your phone is a good experience. Turning them on/off by voice commands it’s cool when there isn’t noise or you actually have Google Home or Alexa. 

But what about guests who are willing to play with your home? Or what about when you forgot your phone into another room but you still want to turn on/off your lights?

Your old tablet can help you to face up to this situation. We are going to turn our old tablet into a smatr home remote control.

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Creating a home control tablet

To create our home control tablet interface we will need:

• An old tablet (You can also use a new one)
• Yeti for Android tablets | Yeti for iPads
• Smart home devices to control (Check our list of compatible products)

Step 1: Clean and charge your tablet

Probably, your tablet has been in a drawer, so clean and full charge it can be a good starter point.

Step 2: Install Yeti

Go to the Store and look for Yeti Smart Home. Download and Install it.

• For Android tablets
• For iPads
• For Amazon fire tablet see this guide about how to install the PlayStore on it

Yeti is compatible with a wide range of Android, Apple and Amazon tablets. If yours doesn’t seem to be compatible, let us now in the comments.

Step 3: Let Yeti scan your home

Once you have installed Yeti on your tablet, open the app and follow the steps so Yeti can find all your devices. In my case, I have Philips Hue Lights, Lifx and Yeelight and also a Sonos Speaker.

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Home automation on tablet

After Yeti has found your devices, your tablet will become the main control center for your home. You can hang it on the wall or let it be in any room you wish.

Now it’s time to control and organize your devices in Yeti!

Easy control for your devices

In the home screen, try to tap your devices. That's how you run what we call "a simple action". It can be turn on/off for lights and plugs or play/pause for speakers.

Now if you hold tap in the widget, you will access to the advanced device controller. For example, see the following image showing how the color light controller looks like:

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Organize your devices by rooms

I have devices in the living room, kitchen and bedroom, so I can organize and control them easier.

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Premium Features to empower you automated home

Yeti is a free to use app but it also has some premium features you will enable after you upgrade your Yeti account to premium. These features are: charms, routines, alexa...and many more.  Click here to read more about the premium version of Yeti

Create routines to automate your devices based on time or location

You can create routines to automate when your devices turn on/off or even customize behaviour to turn on with an specific color or make your sonos play a song. You can also create routines based on location.

• I like to wake up at sunrise (around 8 am) and having my lights in the living room turned on

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Use charms to create scenes and set ambiances with a tap

Using charms you are able to configure many devices at the same time instead of going one by one

• I’ll place my tablet at the entrance, so I will create a charm saying “Leaving home”. Then every time I leave home I will make sure all my devices turn off before leaving.

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Recommendations

Leave Yeti in the background of your tablet and never kill the app. So we can make sure that the communication between Yeti and your devices has been successful.

Don’t hang your tablet permanently on your wall unless you have a way to charge it.

What’s next?

Now that you have upgraded your tablet into a smart home remote control

We are always improving Yeti and adding new features. We’ll soon integrate new brands and we will include new triggers for routines apart from time. Stay tuned!

If you have a great table set up at home share it in the comments below! We want to know them!