All About Xiaomi's Mi Smart Home App

Note : All features, descriptions and screen captured for this write-ups are accurate at the time of writing, but are subject to changes due to the high pace of App changes and new devices being added, some features may no longer work, or some newly added.

About the App





Mi Smart Home app is your home intelligent hardware management platform. You can interact your Smart Phone with all the Xiaomi smart hardware and achieve inter-operability between them, and experience the convenience of intelligent life.

Mi Smart home Apps currently can manage the following Mi Ecosystem products : Air purifier Gen 1 & 2, Water Purifier, MiWiFi routers, Master Remote controller, MiTV, alll versions of MiBoxes,  Mi Smart Home Kits, Yi IP Cam, Yeelight LED Bulb, Smart Plug, Power Strip Panel, Internet Radio, Midea Air Conditioner, Aux Air conditioner, Junxing Air Conditioner and Philips Eyecare Lamp.

All the devices and settings are currently store on Mi Clouds, where you can easily backup and retrieve. Simply sign-in to the Mi Cloud with your Mi Account on a mobile phones, and all the saved configurations and settings are all retrieved on the new Smart Phones. 

Major Features Overview

a) Smart Links

The App is able to add new Mi Ecosystems intelligent devices in a simple manner for themselves
 


b) Device Control


The APP control all smart home appliances, and can be accessed from anywhere, as long as you have Internet access.
 


c) Share your family

You can share access to some of these device to family and friends and enjoy the convenience of a warm intelligent life together.

 


d) Intelligent Scene


You can go through simple setup to configure various easy and fun intelligent scenarios with other Mi ecosystems products.




New Features

1) Selecting your Hosting regions

In the past, Xiaomi only provide their Cloud hostings in China and users of the Mi Smart Home App outside China regularly facing "time-out" or "connection problems" whenever they are registering for new devices under the App. This is mostly due to the great China Firewall or DNS settings in local ISPs.

Starting from 2016, Xiaomi had added 3 more cloud locations for some of their major markets outside China, these locations are Singapore, Taiwan and India. You can now decide where to host your Smart Home App, where all your settings and configurations will be back up ONLY* to the cloud location that you had selected.

To choose the Mi Cloud location, you must logout first, then select the location, and log in again.

* Please note, your settings will only be saved on the cloud servers that you had selected, i.e if you initially select your location as Chinese Mainland, if you later log in and select Singapore, your settings will not be available as they are never saved on Singapore servers.

Note : At the time of this writing, not all regions support all devices released from Xiaomi, if you are buying products only available in China market, you'll probably still need to select Chinese mainland as the region. But due to the unpredictable China firewall, sometimes you may not be able to register and save your configuration & settings on Mi Cloud during the initial setup.

What is the minimum Android and iOS version supported for this app?

At the time of this write-up the minimum version of the major two mobile OS supported are as follow:
      Android - 4.0 and above
      iOS - 7.0 and above

But with the increasing addition of new Smart devices under Xiaomi's Mi Ecosystem product series, the Apps are continuously being updated by Xiaomi, whether they will withdraw support for certain older OS


Where to get and install the Mi Smart Home App?

You can access the latest version of the App at the official App site - http://home.mi.com/index.html, which is only available in Chinese interface, or download them by scanning the QR code below.


You can also get them from the respective official app stores.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.xiaomi.smarthome

https://itunes.apple.com/EN/app/xiao-mi-zhi-neng-jia-ting/id957323480?mt=8




** Please make sure you are downloading ONLY the official Apps and not from third party sources.


Further info

You can also visit their official Forum site for latest discussion and releases for Mi Smart Home App, but this site is only available in Chinese

http://bbs.xiaomi.cn/f-363

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How to clear the cache and free up storage space on your MiBox

As we had mentioned earlier that a new MiBox (both the 4K and Mini version) has only 1.7 GB of storage space available when you first open up the new box.

This 1.7 GB of storage should be sufficient to be use for both caching and buffering of streaming media contents, however, you you install lots of other third apps, it will take up most of the 1.7 Gb storage, and you may end up having only a few hundred MB of storage space left.

Most streaming contents do not stream on-the-go in real time, some would require caching by pre-download the contents to build up enough buffers before streaming can run smoothly on your screen.

Once you run out of free storage, you will likely get error message asking you to clear up storage space, or in some cases, you can't even start a particular app.

The following are the major storage taken up, after you had run the box for a period of time:

a) Caching contents for streaming media, some app do not perform house-keeping by auto deleting these files after exiting the app;

b) Installation files, e.g. apks, since Apps were updated almost every week, where new versions of apps were downloaded and later updated, there are lots of temporary files left behind;

c) Temporary files downloaded for EPG, playlist etc

How to clean up these files?

The following are 3 major ways to clear up these files and free up your storage:

1) Clean Master (pre-installed for all MiBox)

Clean Master is all-in-one Android Apps that have the cleaning and optimizing tools and maintenance tools in a single place. Clean master is the one of the best clean and maintenance tool for Android. It will help you to clean app cache , unused files, residual files, search history and uninstalling apps. Compare to other apps in this category, it has more tools in one environment to easy to use.

Clean Master comes pre-installed on any MiBox, you can find it with a "Bloom" icon as shown above, click on it to start.

 It will auto detect what kind of files can be optimised or deleted.

Click to start the optimising process.

Optimisation completed

Process completed

2) Shafa Market (Third party installed for all MiBox)

Shafa Market is a third party aggregated App store plus maintenance tools App widely used. In this write-up, we will only concentrate on the "Maintenance tools" part

Click on the Shafa Market icon to start the app

Navigate to the "My Apps" header menu, and choose "Junk Files" on the left side bar

It will start scanning and detecting all temporary files...

Press "OK" to delete all these temporary files

Apart from these temporary files, there are bigger chunks of larger files that need to be deleted, select the "Clean big file" option

It will start scanning for files larger than 10MB, most of these are temporary transit files for updates, and new updates.

Confirm the deletion by selecting "Clean"

After the house-keeping above, you can check on the new space availability by selecting the "Uninstall" option under "Tools"

You can see the space available on the top right hand corner, if there are still not enough space for you, you may want to consider uninstall some of the apps that you seldom use. 

3) Kodi Maintenance Add-on (pre-installed for all MiBox)

Kodi’s “Maintenance Tools” is an Add-on that allows you to keep your setup constantly optimized, while giving you a wide array of functionality that’ll keep your Kodi up-to-date and running awesomely.

 To access Maintenance Tools, go to Video -> Add ons

 

Click on the XunityTalk Maintenance

 Select "Maintenance"

You will see a list of utility options

First select "Clean Video / Music Libraries"

Cleaning in progress

Cleaning completed!

Select "Remove Addons" if you want to remove any seldom used Add-ons

 Select the "Add-ons" that you wish to remove

 Select Yes" to remove

Select "Delete My Cache"

Cleaning completed

Select "Delete Packages" to delete some of the temporary packaging cache files

Select "Yes" to confirm

Delete complete

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Configuring and setting up a Xiaomi USB-RJ45 converter

Original USB to RJ45 UTP Ethernet cable for Xiaomi TV MiBox 

MiBox Gen 3 4K Edition does not come with an UTP network port, if you need to connect to the MiBox using network cable, you can purchase this optional item to convert your USB port for the MiBox to be a UTP port to connect via network cable to your LAN.

Setting Up

Go to "settings" of MiBox, as in picture below:                                  

If you are currently connected to the network via WiFi, you should see the WiFi icon on the Top Left hand corner of the screen.

The USB-to-UTP connector is a plug-and-play device, when you connect the USB port at the MiBox, and network UTP cable at the other end, the led light on the connector should start blinking, and once connected, it would stop blinking.

When UTP network cable is connected, it will disable the WiFi.

Under "Connected" you should see a Network port item instead of the Wireless icon.

Click onto "Connected", you should see "WiFi" is disabled, and under "Ethernet",

For most network, it should be running DHCP, which would automatically assign IP to your connector, you just plug in the RJ45-UTP adapter, it should start working, no configurations required.

If you are running DHCP in your network, it should auto assign an IP to your USB-to-UTP adapter, else, you will need to set settings of "Static IP" to "Turn Off" and enter your IP address and other info manually.

What if no Network can be detected?

When the converter is plug into the USB port, with the other end connected to a valid UTP cable, it should automatically grey out and disable the WiFi connection when the UTP cable is inserted, if it does not, there are a few possibilities

a) The USB port of your MiBox could be faulty 

Try mounting a USB thumb drive or USB hard-disk to the USB  port, if it works, then the USB port should be working;

b) Is the light on the converter blinking when a UTP cable is inserted into the UTP port?

If it does blink, but no IP being assigned, the possibilities is that your network router / switch may be configured with:

i) limited devices can be connected to the router, and the maximum devices had connected to it, and all IPs had been assigned, OR

ii you router may be configured to allow only certain Mac Address to access the network, and the converter's Mac address may not had been added to the allowed list;

c) Is the Converter Faulty?

Try connecting the converter to a PC, and then connect to a valid network cable, if it works, then the converter should be ok.

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Installing Apps on MiBox 4K & MiBox Mini

1) How to install a new app on MiBox

a) If you are having a MiBox 4K (Black colour) you can install using the USB thumbdrive, 

b) If you are having a mibox Mini (white), you need to use Remote Install (2) below

c) Copy the new app file (xxx.apk) onto your USB drive

d) Insert the USB drive into the USB port on the TV Box

e) A pop-up message will come onto the screen, asking you to browse the USB drive

f) select the APK that you want to install from the USB drive folder

g) Press"Home" button to go back to main menu, and start the newly installed app

2) How to install APP remotely using your PC

Please make sure your TV Box and PC are connected to the same Wifi network

a) Start "Shafa Market"

b) Use your remote to move the top menu to "Tools"

c) Navigate to "Remote Install"

d) You should see the IP address to access the TV Box, something like http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:8899

e) Open the browser of your PC, key in the above IP address

f) Click the green "Upload" button and browse the APK that you want to install from your PC folder

g) Install the APK

h) Exit to the TV Box main menu by pressing "HOME" button

i) The new app should now be installed, click on the app to start 


How to Uninstall Apps from your TV Box

To uninstall any of thh Apps from your TV Box, again use the "Shafa Market"

Launch "Shafa Market", Goto "Tools" and select "Uninstall"

Select the app that you want to uninstall, after uninstall, you will see the space available on your TV Box will increase

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