I admittedly don’t know much about home automation so please bear with me. I’m in search of the best option for me and my wife to be able to control access to our kids TV’s and game consoles. My wife and I both have modern iPhones and our home WiFi is a Google WiFi mesh router system. We also have a few Alexa pods. I’m thinking of getting some kind of smart plug that the tvs and consoles plug into that we can access via app to setup time slots where they are allowed to play games and watch TV. In addition I want to be able to have a kill switch where I can shut them down if they aren’t behaving. I hear a little about homelink and have searched Amazon for smart plugs but the info is all a bit daunting. Do I need to buy a special hub of some type? How does it all work? Can I just buy smart plugs that are home link compliant? Admittedly confused here.
Google Wifi has a pretty good system built in. We set up a ‘group’ for each kid then turned WiFi off on a schedule. We could also pause Wifi for one or all 3 kids whenever we needed/wanted to by tapping on the app or by telling our Google Hub to pause the Wifi. Not impossible to bypass (hot spots on phones for example) but worked pretty well until they aged to control their own usage. You can also just go take a power cord or other unique component away for a while.