Happy Sunday everyone! All pretty good here this week, doubling down on a new program of mine that will teach people how to make money out of the smart home space, so super busy on that front and all the other stuff as well. Still in lockdown here in Ireland, but kids were back in school this week, which makes the mornings busier at the O’Driscoll’s smart home! 🏠
Here are this week’s big smart home stories:
Lidl and Apple Maybe Friends 🛒
Think I mentioned before in this newsletter about Lidl’s aspirations to enter the smart home space. Well, since we last spoke Lidl does indeed have a range of smart home devices available on their shelves. But the first tranche of products did not support HomeKit. Although not the end of the world, it always helps to accommodate the billion-plus Apple smartphone users out there. Which, brings me to my first newest story, this week, Lidl is thinking about embracing HomeKit!, which is cool and a good move. While we wait for the HomeKit stuff, here are some notable features of Lidl smart home devices:
- The products used version 3.0 of the Zigbee protocol
- They sell some smart bulbs with E27, GU10, and E14 bases
- Remotes, motion sensors, smart plugs, and light strips also form part of the Lidl smart home product family.
Availability is a bit scattered throughout its supermarkets, however, the latest HomeKit rumors show that the retail giant is serious about the smart home marketplace.
New Google Smart Displays
Lots of smart displays here at the O’Driscoll household including some Google Nest hubs. As of this week, Google has announced version two of the hub device. Although it looks similar to version one of the device, however, it is packed with some interesting new technologies and features, namely:
- Includes a radar technology called Soli, which can be leveraged to track your sleep.
- Soli is also used to allow hand motion gestures in front of the display. ‘Handy’ if for whatever reason, you want to control music and videos without touching the screen.
- Improved bass sound levels.
- Thread is included.
- Increased number of far-field microphones in this latest version.
- Four color variants
That’s a quick rundown; if looking for more in-depth detail, then check out this article.
Google Nest Wi-Fi Gets Visual
More news from a giant Smart Home device provider, namely Google has released some software updates. The feature that caught my eye, while skimming multiple articles across the Interwebs is the availability of usage graphs for Google’s Nest Wi-Fi mesh system.
Of personal interest, since I recently installed this product during the smart home in 8 weeks challenge and it runs pretty well. With the new feature, I should be able to see cool animations of bandwidth consumed at the O’Driscoll household. Between homeworking, remote schooling, and entertainment, expect to see lots of peak usage 🙂 If you’re looking for some pictures of the graphs, then head over to here.
Weekly Smart Home Voice Command! 🎤
Hey, Google, play party music for 30 minutes
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– Gerard