Hi,
Morning everyone; hope all is well, no major news here; the weather is a little overcast this Sunday morning ☁️. On the smart home front, received a new HomeKit smart smoke detector compliments of Amazon this week. And looking forward to setting up and posting the video into the ‘smart homes in 8 weeks’ course. With regards to some gossip; here are the breaking stories for the week:
HomeKit Adaptive Lighting 💡
When the family sits down for dinner in the evenings; the color temperature of the Hue smart bulb over the dining room table changes automatically. It was a bit weird at the start and is the result of Apple’s HomeKit adaptive lighting feature. Not sure if I mentioned adaptive lighting here in the newsletter previously, but it allows various smart lighting devices to align their color temperatures with the time of the day. So warm yellow during mornings, moving to cool white when the sun is high in the sky, and finishing off the day with a softer yellow temperature. That’s the background and the story (drum roll….) is that smart home product supplier Aqara has implemented this feature in its hubs and smart bulbs. Take a look here yourself at this Reddit thread to learn some more on this.
Sonos IKEA Symfonisk 🎹
Two awesome brands collided a couple of years back and created the IKEA Symfonisk speaker. Considered to be a ‘gateway buy’! into the world of Sonos sophisticated audio systems, the Symfonisk has sold well. In fact well enough to create rumors that Sonos and IKEA are quietly working on a new set of Sonos Ikea Symfonisk speakers. So purely rumors at the moment and co-incidentally, we published an article about Sonos speakers on the blog earlier in the week. If interested in reading about the Sonos multi-room music speaker family, then click here.
New Blog Post
Honeywell Home is one of the biggest players in the smart home industry, whose main goal is to provide safety, comfort, and energy-efficient solutions to your smart home. The company has been able to live up to this word for years now by providing some of the most reliable and energy-efficient products in the smart home market. Honeywell Home manufactures basic smart products that are essential for any smart home. The best thing about Honeywell Home smart products is that they come in both DIY and Pro installation methods….. Read the complete article on the blog
This Week’s Words of Wisdom 😊
Ring Bird’s Eye Radar 🐦
So amongst the plethora of smart home devices attached to the walls of the O’Driscoll household, we have some Ring cameras (Ring spotlight cams). With Ring, I noticed that the company is always refining, fine-tuning, and improving their product ranges. Which, brings me to the announcement this week from Ring that they are introducing an all-new floodlight cam wired pro. And furthermore, it will support some cutting edge features, namely:
- 3D Motion Detection – Uses radar technologies to creates a visual representation of the path traveled once a visitor crosses the selected threshold.
- Bird’s eye view functionality
- A 110db siren
- Colored night vision
- The improved microphone that supports enhanced audio and echo cancellation
All the details about this new ‘super duper’ smart camera can be found on the Business Wire site.
Aqara and IFTTT
Not sure if you’ve heard of IFTTT but it’s a cool service that allows you to interconnect different smart home devices. I subscribed to their paid service a few months back. Not got around to fully utilizing it in the O’Driscolls smart household, but on the list, especially as it costs money! This brings me to the news clip from Aqara that they are embracing IFTTT in North America and Asia. Not major news but good to hear from this up-and-coming smart home brand. Read here if you want to learn how to make a smart home with Aqara devices.
Tiny HomeKit Update
For those of you on the HomeKit train, came across this app, which might be of interest. It’s called HomePaper and as the name suggests it allows you to add ‘beautiful’ (Not my wording its part of the app description :-)) to the home app. Here is the link if interested in downloading.
Weekly Smart Home Voice Command! 🎤
Set my reading scene
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– Gerard