My Experience with Xiaomi Smart Home
I’ve been meaning to write something like this for a long time to share my simple home network setup, but I kept putting it off. Now (2021-06-20 03:20:00), I’m having a bit of insomnia, so I’m making a start — no idea when I’ll finish, we’ll see. By the time I got further into it (June 21, 2021, 22:00), the topic had drifted anyway, so I decided to just rename this post to “My Experience with Xiaomi Smart Home.”
Scenarios & Experience
I rent a one-bedroom apartment with a living room, kitchen, and balcony — that’s essentially my entire world. During the day I’m either slouched on the sofa or sitting at my desk; at night I’m in bed, of course.
Let me start with the simplest room: the bedroom. The two most important things in there are the air conditioner and the bed. The AC is a brand I’d never heard of before — Zhigao — and it’s a bit old, so naturally it has no internet connectivity. Summers in Chengdu get pretty hot, and when I’d be working at my desk in the living room and start feeling the heat, I’d have to walk back to the bedroom, hunt down the remote, and turn on the AC. Slightly annoying, and it easily breaks your train of thought.
That’s where one device comes in — the Mi Smart Air Conditioner Companion 2. This little gadget can turn an ordinary AC into a smart one. In plain terms: anything the remote can do, it can do too, without you needing to be standing in front of it. You plug it into the AC’s wall socket, plug the AC into it, connect it to your home Wi-Fi, and then you can control the air conditioner through the Mi Home app. That’s step one — the remote can be tossed into some forgotten corner.
On a hot summer day, I’m at my desk typing away, the servers in the rack are humming along, the temperature is steadily climbing, and I’m feeling the heat. So I pull out my phone, open the Mi Home app, turn the AC on, and set it to 16°C — and slowly start to feel a hint of coolness. In short: when I’m sitting at my desk and the ambient temperature makes me feel hot, I turn on the AC in cooling mode and set it to 16°C. If I knew the exact temperature, I could quantify “makes me feel hot” as a specific number. So I needed a sensor to measure the temperature — enter the Xiaomi Temperature and Humidity Sensor. I also added a Xiaomi Human Body Sensor to detect movement, though it’s a bit limited: it checks once per minute, so if it detects you in the first minute and you stay completely still afterward, it won’t register any further movement. I then set up an automation in the Mi Home app:
1 | When BOTH: Xiaomi Human Body Sensor detects movement AND Xiaomi Temperature Sensor reads above 30°C |
After adding this, it takes a few minutes to kick in. When you’re feeling hot, just stand up and sit back down to trigger the rule. A little silly… can’t the motion sensor just tell whether someone is present?
For a while I tried leaving my phone out of the bedroom. That meant I needed an alarm clock to wake me up, and something to check the time if I woke up in the middle of the night. The Xiao Ai Touchscreen Speaker fit the bill perfectly — it can wake me at different times on weekdays versus weekends. Being the ultimate lazybones, I used to be forced to get up to turn off the light and then fumble back to bed in the dark (constantly bumping into things), because the bedroom only has one switch and it’s by the door. That changed the day I discovered the Mi Bedside Lamp 2 and immediately bought one. After that, life became: walk into the bedroom — “Xiao Ai, turn on the light”; lie down to sleep — “Xiao Ai, turn off the light.”
Once bitten, twice shy. On the early morning of September 7, 2018 (exact time unknown), during my third month back in Chengdu, my apartment was broken into. I filed a police report that day; there has been no result to this day, and I’ve more or less given up hope. That same day I bought door and window sensors, a human body sensor, and a Xiaomi security camera. Every window and door that could potentially be used to enter was fitted with a door/window sensor, and the balcony got a Xiaomi camera and an infrared sensor. The camera footage is also synced to my NAS, with multi-NAS redundancy and off-site backup. A small tip for renters: avoid ground-floor units, street-facing units, or units that are easily accessible from outside.
Living alone, I’m always worried about forgetting or losing my keys — no spare means no peace of mind. The Xiaomi Smart Door Lock solved that completely. It can also automatically trigger switching the camera off and activating the “home” mode on my Xiaomi Gateway when I arrive home.
Pain Points
What pain points have I run into?
I change my home Wi-Fi password fairly often — sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly, just whenever I feel like it. Every time I do, I have to reconnect all the smart home devices to the network, which is a massive amount of work.
Xiaomi’s proposed solution to the above is a new feature in their routers called “Smooth Connect.” In my own testing, it was useless, because none of my devices’ latest firmware supports it. Besides, Xiaomi’s router isn’t suited for my needs — heavy network users will quickly feel the pain of connection drops.
The Mi Home app is extremely difficult to use when you have a lot of devices. There’s no decent control center. I’m planning to try Home Assistant in the future — collect my own data, build my own dashboard, keep everything within the local network.
If your Xiaomi Gateway breaks, all I can say is: good luck. You’ll need to re-add every device and rename everything all over again — an incredibly tedious process.
Core components (like the Xiaomi Gateway) have no high-availability failover.
Closing Thoughts
In this wild era of the internet, aren’t we all just running naked?
If you’re not a public figure, when choosing a smart home platform, the only question you need to ask yourself is whether you trust it. While using it, try to minimize reliance on cloud storage, and when you’re home, switch off cameras whenever possible. Nothing matters more than living safely and healthily.
If you are a public figure: avoid smart home devices if you can. The payoff for attacking you far exceeds the cost.