Hiya,
Happy Sunday everyone, welcome to our weekly digest of smart home stories, grab a coffee or tea and enjoy!
Virtual Smart Home Perimeters
Geofencing is a major pillar of any smart home and guess who has added this functionality? Ring! Yes, they are pretty much in the news every week and this is a great addition to the Ring app. The feature enables you to introduce automations that take into account a virtual boundary around your home. Furthermore, the announcements over at Rings blog alleviates any privacy concerns that people may have with the new functionality. I like this improvement and looking forward to using it on the variety of Ring products installed at the O’Driscoll household!
Smart Home Cuckoos 🦉
The innovators of bringing voice technologies to the masses are back in business this week with a surprise announcement! Amazon is floating the idea of making three concept smart home products using a Kickstarter type campaign ending March 19th. If there is uptake from the general public, then Amazon will go ahead and build the following:
- A smart cuckoo clock
- A smart nutrition scale
- A smart sticky note printer
Of course, all three concept smart devices are Alexa enabled. If any of these items float your boat, then more details can be found on the Amazon Website.
Smart Home Gif of the Week
Here is the weekly Gif took from one of the modules included in my recently updated Smart Home in 8 Weeks Course.
More Smart Switches
There are some hints on the Interwebs that smart home device manufacturer Aqara is designing smart light switches that fit into EU homes.
This has always been a challenge for smart lighting product suppliers to make their switch products compatible with a myriad of backbox sizes around the globe. Will provide further updates if the rumors come to fruition.
Multiple HomeKit Cameras 📸
Currently, Apple’s Home app is limited to viewing a single live feed from a Homekit secure video camera. If the ability to view multiple cameras live at once is important then the latest release of the HomeCam for HomeKit app can support the same. All the details about the app can be found in the App store.
Ring Bird’s and 3D
Yep, yet another development over at Ring Doorbell this week, in fairness they keep us busy writing about them most weeks. So towards the end of this week, they posted a feature update on Twitter that includes two enhancements, namely:
- 3D Motion detection – From what I can make out they seem to be refining the existing motion alerting system built into their doorbells. With notifications, it’s all about relevancy, and Ring continues to double down on this.
- Birds Eye View – This feature complements 3D motion detection functionality and provides Ring smart homes with the exact location and time that a motion event took place and an aerial view of the movement on your property
Both features require a radar sensor, which is built into the wired Ring Video Doorbell Pro 2. We only have the standard Ring doorbell installed at the O’Driscoll household, so won’t be able to get a birds-eye view of the house 😥
You can check out their blog post here.
Weekly Smart Home Voice Command! 🎤
Ok Google, watch [Movie Name]
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– Gerard