Best Smart Home — Curated from The Hiro Report

I've previously written about my SwitchBot device that I use for toggling dumb device switches via Siri and HomeKit. It works great. As a result, I'm pretty intrigued by their new smart lock offering that offers seven different ways to open the door— 3D face recognition, palm vein, fingerprint, PIN, app, voice assistant, and a physical key— all running Matter over WiFi with no hub, so it shows up natively in Apple Home, Alexa, Google Home, and Home Assistant on day one. It replaces a standard home front door lock with just a Phillips-head screwdriver and a fifteen-minute install. Its built-in 10,000 mAh battery is rated for 12 months, and there's a CR123A backup good for 500 emergency unlocks (and a 5-year standby at -4°F), plus a USB-C port that accepts any power bank if the lithium pack ever does fully run out. I just replaced my smart locks last year, so I think it's too soon to update, but I'm very curious about this one.

I've finally made the plunge and ordered the hardware to get Home Assistant up and running at home. While doing my research, I stumbled across HA Voice, something I've been wanting for years— it's an open-source, open-hardware dedicated smart home voice assistant that does fully local voice processing and execution of commands in your smart home. In other words, you can have your Home Assistant turn on the lights, or adjust the thermostat, without a recording of your voice being sent off to Apple / Google / Amazon for processing. The entire command and control stays in your house. You can also (optionally) hook it up to any of the major AI providers for more advanced conversational functionality. I couldn't resist adding it to my shopping cart and am eager to try it out.

I have been a big fan of Hue lights for a long time. I recently redid my whole office lighting setup with Hue bulbs, which has been fun for fine-tuning the exact color temperature and brightness I want while I work, when I switch over to video calls, etc. That said, I've been using the same home bridge for a little less than 10 years and I've been noticing a little lagginess. Sure enough, Hue now has a new "Pro" version of their bridge that supports over 150 lights at once and adds really cool motion sensor tech that basically triangulates wireless interference between the bulbs in the house to detect motion, which can then be used to trigger lights turning on/off as you pass from room to room. I will probably pick one of these up sooner than later.

Over the last couple of years, I've become sort of obsessed with air quality and have bought several air quality monitors for our house and backyard. While it's nice to know the very specific metrics, I honestly don't use them much more than "high number bad, low number good." This really cute and beautifully designed air quality monitor does the same simplification for you. When the birdie is standing upright, your air is good. When the birdie falls down, the air is bad and it's time to open a window. I'm putting this on my shopping list.

Thanks to my homie Bobby for sharing these great-looking smart home lights. If you're wanting to branch out of the Hue ecosystem, these simple accent lights and smart bulbs offer some pleasing-looking light, changing color temperatures over the course of the day, and control via Alexa and Google, with more smart home integrations apparently forthcoming.

We got one of these at Christmas, and I've been totally enamored with it. Apart from looking cute and almost having a personality of its own, it is the best robotic vacuum that I have seen. It easily handles all the obstacles and traps that you might expect to find in a home with two young children, including shoes and toys littered everywhere. Highly recommend it if you are thinking about moving away from the Roomba ecosystem like we have. FWIW, using my link should get you 6-12 months' supply of HEPA bags for free if you want to grab one.

My wife and I each have one of these on our nightstands—they’re good-looking, highly customizable lights that I automate via Apple’s HomeKit to turn on at bedtime to just the right tone of warm light. I’ve tried 3 or 4 lamps like this and these are by far the best.

I’ll spare you the details, but man is this thing nice, and one of those things you come to miss when you travel. Apart from the medical benefits of using a bidet, having a warm toilet seat alone is worth the price of admission.

I mentioned these last holiday season and thought I'd reshare them in case anyone is looking for a great Christmas light solution. These HomeKit-compatible lights are a fantastic year-round lighting set-up that let you pick from different lighting combinations for the different holidays, or make your own from scratch. I've had them up for over a year now and now a bunch of other houses in the neighborhood have been getting in on the action.

Like many families, our garage is more a cross between a gym and bulk storage space than a place for cars. As a result, we wind up walking in and out of it much more than driving in and out of it. Having this Siri-enabled smart garage attachment has been a huge help, letting us quickly open the garage by voice command or touch of a button from a homescreen widget on our iPhones. It's also nice for being able to quickly check the status of the garage to make sure it's closed when we're away from home… and if it's not, we can close it from wherever we are.

Give the gift of easy smart home automation with this do-it-all hub that lets you bring most any smart device into the Apple HomeKit ecosystem. $$$

This amazing smart sprinkler system has been a game changer for our lawn and garden care. $$$$

OK, let me start by acknowledging that this lamp is $300… but I really dig how it looks. It's also got two different lights built into it: a reading lamp that can be adjusted for warmer or cooler light, and a separate light in the back that can project beautiful color gradient patterns for mood lighting. It integrates with Siri/Alexa/Google Home, and best of all it has two programmable buttons on top that can be used for triggering smart home automations.

Aura released an interesting new take on their fantastic digital photo frames this week, this time using color e-ink in its display, giving a more analog, paper look to your photos. The large 13.3" e-paper frame looks to be pretty high resolution and can run for up to three months on a single charge, letting you mount it on a wall amongst your other pictures. We have had several different digital photo frames, but the ones from Aura have easily been our favorite.

This device features a small camera that captures whatever is on your TV screen, and then syncs colored LED lights mounted on the back of the TV to light up the wall behind it to match the on-screen visuals. In theory, it should create a much more immersive movie-watching experience. I've been wanting to try something like this for a while but have always been put off by the price for what is essentially a bit of a gimmick. This new entry from Govee has great reviews and costs way less than others I've looked at previously. I'll be putting it on my Christmas wish list.

A few years back, I installed smart dimmer light switches throughout the house, and have since suffered through all kinds of anomalous lighting issues that had the family wondering if maybe we'd accidentally invoked some lesser Goetic demon that communicated exclusively via flickering lights. Turns out, a bunch of our light fixtures are not compatible with dimmer switches. Whoops. Over the last month, I've been gradually switching all the troublesome lights over to these cheap smart switches from Kasa and have been very happy with them. They look nice, are compatible with Siri / Alexa / Google Assistant, all without a special hub thanks to their being Matter certified, and you can buy a 3-pack for just $45.

Last week one of our fire alarms went off in the middle of the night, woke everyone up (including our two very freaked out kids), and yet there was absolutely no smoke or fire. This was the second time it'd happened in a month. A month or two before that we had one of the fire alarms start chirping in the middle of the night indicating it needed a battery. It took 10 minutes just to figure out which fire alarm it was. I was fed up, and decided to go shopping. I wanted to get a "smart" alarm so that I could get notified of low battery on my phone rather than via chirping in the middle of the night, and I also wanted to be notified if an alarm is going off when I'm not home. The X-Sense checks all those boxes for way less than the now discontinued Nest Protect smoke alarms. Set-up was super quick and easy, and so far no false alarms!

I picked up one of these to do some experiments with for home automation. We have two young kiddos in the house who have been on a streak lately of getting up in the middle of the night. So I've been wanting to automate a few of our smart lights to turn on at a dim setting to light up their path when they are fumbling around in the dark. This is probably overkill for that solution. The FP2 uses mmWave radar to detect up to 5 people's movement in a space. You can also define zones within a space so that it can trigger distinct automations based off presence in specific parts of a room— i.e. When someone sits on the couch, turn on the lamp. I'm having a lot of fun playing with it and will probably pick up a few more.

- We're at an interesting intersection in home tech. An increasing number of our electronics are networked and can be controlled via app, voice, presence, and more. But what do we do with older tech that we want to automate that doesn't connect to the web? Well, this humble Smart Switch aims to help answer that dilemma. In short, it's a little physical flipper that you can attach to any device with a button or toggle that you'd like to be able to flip remotely. The flipper can be activated over Bluetooth out of the box, or with a SwitchBot hub, you can control it with Apple HomeKit / Alexa / Google Home. Personally, I picked one up to be able to automate turning on my low-tech espresso machine in the morning so that it's ready to brew by the time I stumble into the kitchen.

– I’ve written before about my love for Aura’s frames. We have an Aura Carver on the bar in our kitchen that we huddle around daily to coo over resurfaced memories from family trips or our kiddos' early childhoods. This week, Aura took everything I love about the Carver and improved it with the Aspen. It features a beautiful 12” display, and the frame body is so thin it could easily pass for a traditional picture frame from the side. I can’t wait to see one in person and check out how the photos look.

- When my most recent smart doorbell went completely unresponsive this week, I took the plunge and decided to try out this new one from Anker's home electronics subsidiary, eufy. It's early days still, but I'm loving it— It has an internal battery so it can be installed anywhere OR hardwired in to your existing doorbell with the battery as fallback in the event of blackouts, it also records and AI processes all video locally without sending anything to the cloud (unless you specifically turn on cloud back-ups) but it's still accessible for remote viewing via an end-to-end encrypted connection between your smart phone and the device. I find the video quality to be excellent and I appreciate that it has two cameras— one for showing you visitors as they approach, and one pointed down to show you packages and pets at your door. Caveat: Three years back, it was discovered that eufy was not encrypting its web streaming video feeds (while claiming they were), leading to a major showdown with The Verge. They have since gone to great lengths to amend, have brought in auditors, started a bug bounty program, and have doubled down on making everything local by default. I’m comfortable giving them a try now, but everyone should make their own considerations. *This is not sponsored, but I am using an Amazon Affiliate Link to support the site at no additional cost to you.

- We had the original windows replaced on our old home last year, and while we have appreciated the energy efficiency and having less road noise and dust in the house, we've also noticed the house getting stuffier after the change, correlating with what's felt like more headaches and worse sleep. My brilliant wife had the idea of getting some indoor air quality detectors to check out what's going on. We wound up getting this Govee PM2.5 monitor* to measure ultra fine particulates in the air and the Aranet4 CO2 detector to measure Carbon Dioxide. I'll spare you all of the sordid findings (although I will say they were shocking), but I've been super impressed with the Aranet4 in particular. It is pricey but is apparently very highly regarded and was effortless to set up. I particularly like the super legible e-ink display.

- I picked up an earlier generation of these a few years back and have them set up all over my office. They kick out a great amount of soft light with customizable temperature and color options via both the Hue app and Siri/Apple Home. I find them particularly great as fill lights for video calls (supplementing the Elgato Key Light*) and for adding fun accent lighting when pointed into a corner or placed against a wall. They’re pricey but have been rock-solid reliable for me.

I picked up a set of these over the holidays and have been thrilled with them. These string lights mount under the eaves of your house to project a pleasant downlight effect. They’re HomeKit-compatible thanks to Matter integration, making them fully programmable and automatable. I have them set to turn on at sunset, off at bedtime, and twinkle in holiday-themed colors and patterns on special days. Delightful!

I’m still digesting all the wild and often plain silly stuff announced at CES this year, but this smart window shade from Caseta leapt out as something I’ll likely wind up grabbing for myself. I have a bunch of Caseta smart light switches throughout the house, and they’ve worked impeccably with Siri/HomeKit for years. Being able to have Siri or various automations open/close our blinds would be amazing. I also appreciate that they offer custom sizes and blackout options.

- I am a stickler for good lighting. If a room is not lit enough or is lit poorly (e.g., too many different color temperatures from the various light sources), it makes me physically uncomfortable. I should probably talk to a specialist at some point about my affliction. All that said, I’ve been looking for good bedside lighting for a while, and after trying a lot of different options, this new Matter-enabled lamp from Govee is my strong favorite. It integrates handily with HomeKit, letting you control it with Siri and set up automations. It kicks out plenty of light and even has a bunch of fun RGB scenes that you can install.

This amazing, smart sprinkler system has been a game-changer for our lawn and garden care. $$$$

- You could make a horror movie for plants based on how many we've lured into our home and slowly murdered by over or under watering them. This admittedly low-tech Hygrometer solution has been a game-changer for us. Simply poke this little guy into the soil, and it instantly tells you the moisture level down by the roots. When used with an app like Planta, it becomes much easier to keep our little green friends alive. *Amazon Affiliate link

- I’ve been through quite a few “smart garage” openers, and I’ve finally found one that works consistently—this Meross model plugs into your existing garage opener and connects with Siri/HomeKit. You can check in the Home app from anywhere to see if you remembered to close the garage, tell Siri to open it for a delivery, or set an automation to make sure it’s closed every night. One less thing to worry about.

I need no further confirmation that I’ve reached middle age than the realization that this piece of lawn irrigation tech is one of the technologies our household has adopted this year that I’m most excited about. The Oto is a nifty little box you connect to your hose, and then program from your smartphone to use its incredibly precise spray nozzle to systematically water your lawn and garden with the frequency and schedule that you like, without over spraying any zones or watering the sidewalk. It also has liquid lawn fertilizer, anti-mosquito, and odor eliminator pods that you can have it mix in to its watering routines on a set schedule. I’m loving it. The link above has my “refer a buddy” code which should save you $25 at check out, if you want to give it a go.

I'm a lighting nerd, and dim, overly yellow bulbs bug the heck out of me. These LED bulbs have been a big hit in our household. They're super bright, have a great CRI, are dimmable, and have a long lifespan. The downside: they cost about $5/bulb. Not cheap, but also cheaper than some other bulbs I've tried out that have not been nearly as impressive.

We've been wanting a display to have in the kitchen that we could use to flag important family calendar events, show the weather and moon phases, track holidays, etc. Surprising no one who knows me, there was no way we were going to get a Google/Meta/Alexa device for it, and Apple sadly doesn't make any equivalent yet. So we settled on a Tidbyt. It's a really neat little 32x64 LED pixel display that you can customize the heck out of with various applets from your phone. Beyond running built in weather and clock apps, I've also built custom pixel art greetings for my kiddos each morning featuring drawings I've made of some of their favorite cartoon and video game characters. It's been a hit, and unlike some of the other offerings I've tried like the LaMetric Time, it's very responsive and has not had any connection timeouts.