Good valentine’s morning, lots of wind and rain outside today here in Ireland, let’s hope it improves later!
🧪 Smart Home Laboratory
Looks like the Smart Home Hub grandpappy has added some lab functionality to its app. The new SmartThings feature is aimed at those of you who have already the Smartthings ecosystem and looking to get stuck into some new functionality. Here are some of the cool services to look forward to:
- Universal remote control functionality
- Virtual switching
- A TV control widget
All the details about the new smart home lab can be found at the Smarthings blog.
🧱 Wall Mounted Echoes
The word on the street is that Amazon’s secret lab unit is creating a new screen enabled voice assistant. Here are the rumors:
- It’s going to be skinnier than the existing Echo Show
- It will come with a larger touchscreen. Rumors suggest 10 or 13-inch displays.
- It’s purported that features such as video chat, a smart home control panel, and of course voice control.
The new unit is expected to be wall mountable, which puts it in direct competition with the likes of Control 4 panels and iPads.
You can check Bloomberg’s article for all the details if you want to read more
Smart Home Gif of the Week
Here is my weekly Gif took from one of the modules included in my Smart Home in 8 Weeks Course.
Nano Nano
No, not talking about Mork and Mindy, as some of you might recognize if of the safe vintage as me! Instead, I am referring to a pretty cool smart lighting company called Nanoleaf. Strong advocates of Apple HomeKit and this week announced two key updates as follows:
1. Brings adaptive lighting to its smart bulbs and light strips. Once deployed in a home, lighting color temperatures changes throughout the duration of the day.
2. Over the years, smart devices have utilized various types of protocols, we now have a new protocol kid on the block (Called Thread) and Nanoleaf supports it.
If you’re looking to dig in deeper, head over to the iMores blog post right here.
Lots of Smart Devices Stateside
Parks Associates are around for years and years; a great resource for statistics. This week; they told the world that 23 percent of US households own three-plus smart devices ranging from smart cameras to door locks and of course smart speakers. You can check the full release if you want to see a cool graph!
Weekly Smart Home Voice Command! 🎤
Hey Google, cancel my scheduled Actions
Thanks for reading. If you have colleagues that would benefit from knowing about smart home devices, please consider sharing it.
– Gerard