Remote access to smart kit
Turn your iPad or Apple TV into a remote–controlled home hub
REQUIRES
You’ll need an iPad or Apple TV and your iPhone
YOU WILL LEARN
How to remotely control your smart home tech
IT WILL TAKE
10 minutes
THE HOME APP may be even more clever than you first thought… If you’ve got one, several or many HomeKit– enabled devices and an Apple TV or iPad that’s running the latest version of its operating system, you can control your home from your iPhone or even your Apple Watch. And you don’t even need to be in your home to make it happen. The trick is to turn your Apple TV or iPad into a home hub.
It works brilliantly but there are a couple of caveats. First, your home hub device must be on your home Wi–Fi network and it needs to be powered on: A hub can’t make things happen if it’s unreachable. And if your HomeKit devices connect via Bluetooth instead of Wi–Fi, you might need to move them or your hub: Bluetooth is a relatively short–range technology and some devices need to be fairly close to the hub in order to communicate with it.
In this tutorial, we’ll show you the steps for setting up your iPad as a HomeKit home hub and creating some automation. Setting up your Apple TV as a home hub is even simpler — go into its Settings > User Accounts, make sure you’re signed into iCloud with the same Apple ID as your iOS device, and your Apple TV will do the rest. We’d also recommend disabling sleep mode on your Apple TV; officially it shouldn’t make any difference, but we have found that Apple TV doesn’t respond to our remote requests when it’s having a nap.