This is Technology Bytes, Episode 8 for April 30, 2023.
Intro Music Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share my brief insights on an interesting technology.
My name is Joel.
Enjoy and here we go.
This week and probably for the next couple maybe, I want to talk about Apple’s HomeKit.
And this is the automation of our home.
This is where everything starts.
In the next days I will be moving to a new place and I will be adding my automation and HomeKit things that I have to this home that I will be moving to.
I might not go all in because at the moment we are in a temporary state at this place and so I will wait until we are more permanent to install everything that I like in a home.
But at least I will get a start.
And what I really want to do in the next couple of these microcasts is to share with my audience how HomeKit works.
How you start and what it looks like, how you add accessories.
So this week it is really more of just an introduction.
As an introduction, the first place that we have to start with HomeKit is in the Home app from Apple.
Sometimes with accessories you may have to use a third party app to initially introduce the accessory to your home.
But I will get into that a little bit later when I talk about adding accessories and actually go through those steps.
But the first place to start is just to add a home.
And it is fairly simple.
In the app you can go to the plus button and say add a new home.
So this will end up being the third home that I am a part of because my son has invited me to be part of his home.
My daughter has a home and I am a part of that home for when I visit to control the accessories of both of those places.
And now my wife and I are starting a third home.
And so I will invite both of my children to be part of that home so that when they are there they can do the things that I have set up in an automated sense.
So setting up that home, making sure that the system understands what it is, giving it a name, setting up the backgrounds, all those things that you want your home to look like and then you would start adding accessories.
Whether they be lights or door locks or whatever happens to be part of the automation then you can do that.
In my first initial setup I will have an Apple TV, I will have a couple of home pods, I will have a number of lights based on which room that I can put them in and that will be the start.
I am not sure if I will go farther than that.
My daughter’s home has an automated lock which I really like and so I may try to do something like this.
But this home is not mine, I am just borrowing it for a little while while I find a more permanent position, living space.
So I have to be a little bit cautious of what I do in that space because it is not mine.
But it is a fairly simple operation to start, it is a fairly simple thing to get going.
You don’t need much, we have, like I said, lights.
I may take a couple of my switch controls because that will help me control some other things in the house as well.
And I will go through over the next couple podcasts and share how I set that up and what it looks like and what the process is.
So that if you are looking to do the same thing then you have some insight into how that works.
So again, a simple starting spot, using the Home app, adding a home, giving it a name, making the screen look the way you want it to look.
You end up setting up different rooms to put accessories in and you can either do that while you are doing the accessory or you can do that beforehand.
And then you just go about adding accessories.
I find that you will probably want the third party app because that makes it work a little bit better.
But then after you get the initial setup, I never open the third party apps again.
I just use the Home kit and the Home app to control everything that is in my home.
It makes it very simple.
I get to talk to the air and let Siri take care of much of what I set up.
And I can do some automation for times of day with lights and those kind of things.
So I will go over some of that as well in the weeks to come.
And then you can make the home interact with you exactly as you would like it to and to actually do things for you while you are not even there.
So over the next couple weeks I will continue this conversation.
If you are in a home where you want to look at doing some Home kit and some Home automation things, it is becoming more simple with more accessories at your fingertips with Apple and Google and Amazon adopting a standard so to speak so that they can work together and it gives you a wider variety of things you can put in your home.
And so I will go over what I put in my home, how it worked, how I set it up in the next couple of weeks.
You have been listening to the TechnologyBytes microcast.
Until next time, continue enjoying your technology.
