This is Technology Bytes, episode 9 for May 7th, 2023.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share my brief insights on an interesting technology.
My name is Joel.
Enjoy.
And here we go.
To continue our conversation from last week, we remain in the realm of HomeKit in the Apple world.
As you know now, that’s where I live in the Apple world.
Most of my technology is wrapped up in what Apple does as a company and their products, and then the peripheral of their products, and HomeKit is right in that ballpark.
And so last week I just gave a bit of an introduction on how do we set up HomeKit, what does it look like, what is it used for.
And so this week I want to dive into the first thing I set up in the house that I just moved into, and what is often the easiest thing as an entry point to HomeKit and devices that talk to a smart device like a HomePod or an iPhone or something like that.
I think the most simple addition to a smart home, a great place to start, is with lights.
We use lights in our home, every room in our home.
Light switches are abundant and we control the lights.
If you remember when you were kids, you probably often got in trouble for not turning off the lights.
Now in the LED world, maybe we are a little less worried about that because the energy consumption has been reduced.
But lights are a big part of who our home is and what our home looks like, and the presentation of it to our guests and family.
So there are really two basic ways to set up lights in your smart home and in HomeKit.
Not necessarily two ways, but two paths I guess.
One is using a bridge, something that all of the lights talk to, some unit that all of the lights talk to and then you talk to that unit to talk to all of your lights.
It almost sets up a mesh network of lights so that your lights on all the different areas of your home can kind of speak to each other and then get back to the main hub.
The other option you have is to set up independent lights where they all talk to your wireless home network.
In that instance, your network has to be strong throughout your entire house for those lights to be properly functioning most of the time.
With a home hub, then you have lights talking to lights and so you kind of have the ability to spread that signal a little bit stronger and a little bit farther from your wireless router if you only have one in your home.
So I’m going to start with what I did, which is using the Hue system of lights and using their bridge to set up most of the lights in my home.
I have used wireless options in single lights and throughout a home just to see how those worked in comparison, but more often than not I’m using Hue lights that work in conjunction with the hub.
So the first thing we have to do, or that I had to do, was set up the hub and make sure it spoke to my home network.
And the way that I do that is fairly simple.
You plug it into your home router with a network cable and then it speaks to all of the lights in the system remotely or wirelessly.
And so you plug it into your router, you plug it into the wall.
In this case you have to start with the Hue app, I believe, at least to set up the hub you must.
And then once that hub is talking to your network, then you can start adding lights.
And that process is, I was going to say fairly simple, but there are complications in that mode as well and I’ll talk about that.
In my case I was using the Hue system and so I just kept the Hue app open, went to all the places I was putting in bulbs, turned them on and let the Hue app find them and define what room they were going to be in.
And in the Hue app you can set living room, bedroom, kitchen, whatever you want to do.
And then in the Hue app you also go into the smart home settings and you turn on the smart home that you want to use.
And of course they have the three that are the main systems and that’s HomeKit through Siri.
They have Google Voice and they have the A-Lady.
And so those are ways that you can tie the Hue app to your actual home.
So what I did is set up a couple lights, turned on the HomeKit integration, and then every other light that I added I did it through HomeKit.
And would just say find the light.
Sometimes it’s more easy than others.
If your lights all have a scannable barcode on them then that adds to the ease of doing it.
I have some older bulbs that I’ve had for years so those I actually had to set up with the Hue system and then go into the HomeKit and set it up.
And they’re supposed to sync, but I’ve always had trouble with that.
And even now, this many years later, setting up a brand new place, I still have trouble with that.
If I figure it out I will let you know, but in the meantime I make the homes and the lights and the rooms and everything work in HomeKit.
So basically what I do there is go into HomeKit, I add rooms, and so I add bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, living room, home theater room, whatever rooms you have available, office, those kind of things, guest rooms, and then as I set my lights up in all of those places, I would in the HomeKit app make sure those lights were placed in those rooms.
Often times when you start a new light, HomeKit will put it in what they call the default room, and you can set the default to be whatever you want, but then I just go into settings and say what room it’s in and then set it for that room.
And so at the moment I’ve got three lights in the bedroom, I’ve got a light in the bathroom, I’ve got a light in the living room, I’ve got two lights in the TV room, I’ve got a light in the kitchen, I’ve got a light in the guest room, and then once I have all of those rooms and lights set up, I can do a little bit of automation.
So I’m just going to talk about real simple automation that I do at the moment, and those are things you can set up in the HomeKit app, and you go to automation and it says you want to set up something by times of day, by people arriving, by people leaving, lots of ways you can choose how you want your lights to react.
So one real basic one that I’ll tell you that I use is 30 minutes before sunset I turn at least one light on in every room of the house, and that way things are lit up if you’re coming home late or after dark, then your house has lights, and if you have lights on the outside you can set those up similarly, and it’s a fairly simple automation.
The other thing you can do is set it up for events that happen.
So when I turn my alarm off in the morning, then a light turns on in the bathroom because that’s the first place I’m going to go, and a light turns on in the living room because that’s the second place I’m going to go, and I could also turn on a light in the kitchen, but there are lots of automations that you can do with those lights, and I’ll probably hit HomeKit automation as its own microcast at some point through this conversation, but I thought I’d just cover some basics right now.
So that’s the basics for setting up your home automation, and setting up a smart home starting with lights, and how you might be able to do that, and it’s not super complicated, just buying the lights that you’d like to use, making sure that you can recognize them with your HomeKit app, but also probably often having to use the third-party app to get that initial start going, but it’s a great place to start, not very expensive, and you can set up just a couple lights to get going, and see how simple it is to have your house react to where you are, to what you’re doing, and to times of day.
You have been listening to the TechnologyBytes microcast.
Until next time, continue enjoying your technology.
