Hi,
Happy Easter everyone! Hope you are enjoying some Easter eggs! ๐ฅ The weather has been pretty nice in this part of the world and expected to stay with us for a few days. Here are the latest smart home stories this Sunday morning:
Smart Switches are Problematic – ๐ฆ
Yep, since the beginning of time, well in recent decades, the art of changing light switches is a bit of an art. And complexity increases depending on what wires are behind your dumb light switches. No neutral means, the number of options available to you decreases significantly. Furthermore, you are dabbling with high-voltage wiring, which can be challenging, and finally, the light switches form factors that vary between regions. So, the latest is that Apple is aspiring to fix the issue by researching modular wall units. The cunning plan by Apple was picked up by Apple Insider, who found a recently approved patent that outlines the proposed design.
Smart Home Robots – ๐ค
Well, it’s about time, Robots are around forever, but are pretty useless when it comes to our daily lives. Looks like Amazon has aspirations to re-work some robot technologies and deploy inside our smart homes. In fairness, if anybody has a chance of ‘mainstreaming robots’, then Amazon is towards the top of the list! So here’s the scoop, the project is codenamed Vesta, and prototyping is taking place at Amazonโs Lab126 hardware research center. Information about this up-and-coming smart home robot is scant as expected. But, we can predict that it will be jam-packed with cameras, sensors, and very complicated software. I Will report back when we hear some more. In the meantime, you can check Bloomberg’s full article for all the details if you want to read more.
New Blog Post
Homeowners have in recent years opted to use technology to control systems at home. The process involves using Internet-connected smart devices, smartphones, and Wi-Fi to control lighting, heating, and other features in their homes. Owners of Smart homes have embraced the recent technology because it is efficient, time-saving, and convenient to use.
Smart home automation is a complicated technology to install, especially when multiple devices are integrated together. In this post, we are going to discuss how you can start a smart home automation installation service……Read the complete article on the blog
This Week’s Words of Wisdom ๐
Aqara is Giving Me Some Good Vibrations
This product review caught my attention this week and relates to a vibration sensor that interoperates with HomeKit smart homes. Some nice features that I zoned in on include:
- Elegantly designed with a small form factor.
- The battery will reportedly last for two years.
- It’s Zigbee, which is good as it has the potential to become thread enabled.
- The setup seems easy, which is always a good selling point for me!
There’s plenty more golden advice in the iMore article. Give it a read here!
HomePod Mini Secrets ใ๏ธ
It has come to light this week that Apple may have some hidden treasure in the form of a sensor within its HomePod mini. According to a ‘teardown’ completed by iFixit, the sensor is able to measure temperature and possibly humidity. Although not activated, it could be very useful when Thread smart homes take off. So for instance, this information could be relayed to other thread smart devices such as smart thermostats, which in turn could activate the heating system. Interesting automation possibilities ahead! You can check out more speculative gossip here.
Weekly Smart Home Voice Command! ๐ค
Hey Google, run my sprinkler in a week at 7 PM
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– Gerard