Start your smart home
Learn how to set up and control your HomeKit
Technology that enables you to control your home from your smartphone or tablet is becoming more common, and the range of such accessories that works with iOS devices is growing all the time. Among them are lighting, motion sensors, thermostats and much more. Apple provides a system that enables these devices to work together and be controlled from your iPhone or iPad. It’s called HomeKit, and you control accessories compatible with it in the Home app that’s included with iOS 10.
Perhaps you want to install smart lighting, environmental sensors to check temperature and humidity, smart plugs so you can switch devices such as lamps and heaters on or off in response to a sensor, or motion sensors to light your path if you get up during the night. You can control accessories in groups using “scenes,” and activate those using Siri by saying things like “Hey Siri, it’s film night.”
Initially, you’ll need to set up your accessories in the Home app, which acts as a hub to monitor and control them. Add accessories by scanning stickers on them (or their packaging or documentation), then optionally tell the app which room each accessory is located in to make things easier to manage.
Accessory compat ibility
When you’re buying smart accessories, look out for the “Works with Apple HomeKit” badge. The Home app only works with accessories that support HomeKit – this doesn’t mean you can’t use other kinds of smart accessory with iOS, only that you can’t control or automate them in Apple’s app, which is what we’re focussing on here.
Non-HomeKit devices are controlled in their own apps and some can be automated using services such as IFTTT.
com. However, some devices work with both HomeKit and other systems. Philips Hue is an example; it supports HomeKit through a bridge, a device that plugs into your router and relays commands that it receives from the Home app to the lights. Bridges also have to be added to Home, which enables the accessories they work with to also be added, despite not independently supporting HomeKit.
Here you’ll learn how to set up and manage your HomeKit accessories. When you’ve done that, turn to page 44 to find out how to make your home smarter than ever by setting up automated responses to events.