Category: Smart Home

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, writing at The Verge:

The Chamberlain Group — owners of the MyQ smart garage door controller tech — has announced it’s shut off all “unauthorized access” to its APIs. The move breaks the smart home integrations of thousands of users who relied on platforms such as Homebridge and Home Assistant to do things like shut the garage door when they lock their front door or flash a light if they leave their door open for 10 minutes, or whatever other control or automation they wanted to do with the device they bought and paid for.

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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my latest attempt to add my older garage door opener to HomeKit.

That project has been a huge hit with everyone in my household, so emboldened, I recently took on an additional HomeKit project: adding our driveway gate to the network.

When I first had the idea, I assumed that I would need to piece something together on my own, but then I came across a product called the ismartgate. After poking around the website for a few minutes, I came across this really great configuration page. After checking a few boxes, the website told me that the ismartgate LITE would work for my needs. $130 and a few days later, I was ready to go.

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Three years ago, I installed the Insignia Wi-Fi Garage Door Controller, which allowed me to check the status of my garage door — and control it — via HomeKit.

After that blog post was published, I heard from several people saying that they had done the same thing, just to be disappointed when the Insignia hardware failed on them within the first year or two of use.

I’m sad to say that the same thing happened to me, so for the last year or so, I’ve been opening my garage door with its old-school remote like an animal.

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Ben Lovejoy has the details, but this is about the worst thing that could happen when it comes to having cameras in or around your home. Thankfully, if you have these and have switched them over to using Apple’s HomeKit Secure Video platform, you should be good.

Update: Eufy has commented that this was due to a software bug on their servers.

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Last week, a beta version of firmware for the Logitech Circle 2 cameras enabled use with HomeKit Secure video. As the user of a couple of Nest cameras, I’ve been keeping an eye on this, as storing footage in my iCloud account is quite appealing. I bought a Circle 2 camera on Amazon and set it up over the weekend.

I didn’t get very far before bugging Zac Hall at 9to5 Mac, as he writes:

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In a recent stay with John Voorhees, I noticed him asking Siri to open his garage door. He told me he was using the Insignia Wi-Fi Garage Door Controller, which he reviewed for MacStories earlier this year.

As someone who frequently worries about having left the garage door up after leaving, I knew this was a device I needed to check out, so I ordered one on the spot.

The controller is actually two separate components. The first plugs into power and runs small wires into the garage door opener itself:

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Included is a connected radiator valve, door lock, window guard and more.

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Tim Hardwick at MacRumors is reporting that IKEA’s Trådfri smart lighting system now support Apple’s HomeKit.

The lights require a Ethernet-based gateway, not unlike the Philips Hue bridge, although Hardwick also reports that the Trådfri bulbs can work with a Hue bridge.

The bulbs run anywhere from $12 to $18 a pop, which is roughly what Philip’s dimmable LED bulbs cost. Update: Turns out, MacRumors was incorrect. IKEA says support is coming this fall.

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Sigh.

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Jacob Kastrenakes at The Verge:

Apple never shows up to CES, but the last couple years, it’s still managed to have a quiet presence through HomeKit. That’s true this year, too, but it’s been really quiet, failing to drum up anywhere near the excitement of something like Amazon’s Alexa.

[…]

CES is where that tends to change, as companies building HomeKit gadgets turn up to show off their newest products. This year, there are more than a dozen companies presenting HomeKit devices — but, for better or worse, they’re all pretty boring.

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