Connect your home
Everybody got very excited when Apple announced HomeKit, a home-automation system. That was back in June 2014. Then nothing happened. Then nothing happened some more.
To be fair, a few months is nothing in the history of home automation. It’s been a computer-industry theme since the 1980s, after Tomorrow’s World imagined it in the 1970s. But adverts were promising it in the 1940s. The Victorians had a mechanical contraption for every task. And mostly we were all just reinventing the Romans’ ideas, with their running water, clocks and under-floor heating.
The ancient Greeks, meanwhile, left us the Antikythera mechanism (see Wikipedia page: www.snipca.com/18396), which looks very much like a modern central-heating timer. Of course, nobody knows its exact function… unlike the Antikythera mechanism. Boom! Boom!
Anyway, a mere 2,000-odd years later, the first products built to work with HomeKit have started to appear. Elgato’s Eve isn’t so much about automating your home as quantifying it, much like fitness accessories quantify your health. Eve Room (£70) measures humidity and air quality indoors. By ‘air quality’ it means the presence of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). These can come from all kinds of activities: a new carpet, painting your nails, smoking, cooking dinner. So the significance of the level is vague, but if it’s high you might want to open a window.
What if you remember after going to bed that you might have left it open? Eve Door & Window (£35) will tell you whether a door or window is open or shut. Finally, Eve Weather (£45) takes temperature, humidity and air pressure (like a barometer). Logically enough, this one’s splashproof.
The Eve app, which only works on Apple devices, records all the information from whichever of these units you have, at intervals from hourly to monthly. You can look at its neat charts, or just ask Siri (Apple’s voice assistant), for the latest info. It’s all quite clever, but it only works when the device running the app, such as your iPhone, is within Bluetooth Smart wireless range of the sensors. That means you have to be at home.
To communicate with the Eve units remotely, you need a HomeKit ‘hub’ to connect them to the internet. So far, the only one is the Apple TV (either the recent third-generation model or the brand new one with the fancy remote control). Eve is much more useful when you can access it from afar, but it still won’t send you notifications when something changes; you have to check in. Even then, you can’t actually do anything about it from the app.
If, say, the humidity in your bedroom is high, you might want to turn on a dehumidifier before heading for home. The ultimate goal of home automation – as an integral part of what’s now called ‘the internet of things’ – is for this to be done from the app, without you even necessarily having to do anything. That won’t really be possible until every appliance is ‘smart’, which in turn doesn’t seem likely unless everyone agrees on a standard system, rather than one like HomeKit that’s proprietary to a company like Apple. Hmm.
But the Eve Energy module, coming to the UK soon, gets you half-way there. It’s an adapter that will sit between the mains plug and an appliance – such as a humidifier – and turn it on or off when the app tells it to. It also measures how much energy is used, so you can balance comfort against efficiency.
You’d need lots of them to change your life, and they’re too expensive for that. But the Eve units are well made and give a hint of what HomeKit can do.
VERDICT
It’s still too soon to invest in HomeKit with confidence, but Eve could be a contender when things start getting interesting.
SPECIFICATIONS
Bluetooth 4.0 Smart wireless connection • Internetenabled via Apple TV • Requires iPhone, iPad or iPod touch with iOS 8.4 or later (future options may require iOS 9) • One-year warranty