Mac Format

Automate your smart home

Make your abode truly clever with automatic responses to events

- Alan Stonebridg­e

Make your home attend to your needs by itself

Connecting your smart home accessorie­s to the Home app gives you the ability to check the status of sensors and toggle devices on or off at will, but that’s just the foundation of making your home smarter.

Things get really clever when you use sensor data, the time of day or a change in your location to trigger behaviours, such as turning on a heater when you leave work so your home is warm when you arrive there.

The Home app’s Automation tab is the key to doing this. There you can define conditions that will cause an accessory or scene to turn on or off. Automation­s can change the status of a single accessory, or they can activate multiple scenes at once. For example, an automation might turn on lights in multiple rooms at sunset, and set the brightness level of each light to a suitable intensity to suit that time of day and their location, so that you aren’t dazzled if you happen to be home. Or, you might set one light to turn on along with your heating when you leave work, but only if the sun has set, suggesting that it’s winter.

You can disable automation­s to ensure they don’t run, say in summer or when you’re away, rather than deleting them and having to recreate them at a later date. The Home app marks those that are disabled as such, to help you find and turn them on again.

Third-party apps

In the tutorial on page 56 we mentioned it’s worth downloadin­g whatever apps the maker of your HomeKit accessorie­s provides, so you can receive firmware updates. Automation is another good reason to do so, as these apps may provide features that Home does not.

For example, Elgato’s Eve app shows historical sensor readings, and with the Eve Energy smart plug you can tell that app how much you pay for electricit­y to help keep track of how much an appliance is costing you. Day to day, Elgato’s app can more finely react to changes in numeric sensor readings than Home, such as humidity and temperatur­e, so you can set a dehumidifi­er, heater or fan to turn on if they drift outside your comfort zone.

Apple introduced the Home app in iOS 10. It hasn’t seen major changes in the months since then, so there are some aspects that are less than great. For automation­s, if you set up many of them, they become a little tedious to browse and manage – we’ve got some pointers to help you with that.

The Home app enables you to set the status of accessorie­s in response to data or events

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