If you’ve been following along, you know ecobee is working on a variety of new products. While the company will expand their reach into the smart home later this year with (at least) an indoor camera and contact sensor, an updated ecobee thermostat and sensor is expected any day now. And, thanks to Lowe’s, all … Read more
Alexa Routines have become increasingly powerful and Amazon just upped the virtual hub ante with sunrise/sunset triggers. As shown in the video, we can use those ever shifting times to put a variety of smart home devices into action. In my case, I’m migrating three less elegant Hue lighting routines into two Alexa routines given … Read more
What if you could take the Arlo Pro 2 1080p cameras, run on standard AA batteries instead of proprietary, significantly lower the price of entry, and potentially have a 2-year camera charge? You’d have the new Blink XT2! At least that’s the Blink sales pitch — and it could be close. Amazon-owned Blink announced the … Read more
I’ve long been a fan of Hue lighting wall dimmers. But those days are about over given the Lutron Aurora. Years ago, the Hue dimmer bridged the analog and digital environments, allowing all household members to easily control room lighting via a more traditional switch. While the dimmers go well beyond simplistic brightness controls with … Read more
If you’ve been following our smart home tracker, you already knew Wyze bulbs were launching “soon” … and now I can provide even more precision: they go on sale next week. Further, due to what looks like some premature web publishing, we seemingly have all the details. Unlike Hue and IKEA lighting, Wyze is going … Read more
Back in January, we broke the news of upcoming Ring outdoor smart lighting and related accessories. This new system was described at CES as a means to extend your existing Ring ecosystem by not only allowing for wireless lighting, but also motion detection. Both can then be integrated with Ring cameras to help capture any … Read more
Announced many months ago, the first cut of Alexa Guard has finally arrived. The gist of Alexa Guard is to centralize select monitoring functions withing a single area, utilizing the traditional home/away security system approach and bringing Amazon closer to our dream of a virtual hub … that Siri hasn’t quite managed to achieve. Initial … Read more
Ring announced DoorBell Pro HomeKit support way back in June 2016. And, over the years, the company has continually stated that they have been eagerly waiting to release HomeKit compatibility (us, too). Anyone who’s followed the Ring account on Twitter has been greeted with the following response time and time again. Our priority is to … Read more
