The smart home was once a far-flung pipe dream, but it is now a reality. Wherever you live, your home is ground zero for some of the most interesting tech available right now, and tech that’s yet to come. Best of all, it doesn’t have to cost a fortune to get your home up and running with smart hardware and services.
Home security and monitoring solutions can alert you to a burglary, smoke, fire, or just simple motion activity. There are plenty of options with a range of capabilities, from smart doorbells and smart locks to indoor and outdoor cameras that can see in the dark.
Smart speakers, like the Google Home, Amazon Echo, and Apple HomePod each play a big role in helping you out, too. In the kitchen, they can read out recipes, or if you’re cleaning, you can call out to them to change the song on the fly. If you buy smart light bulbs, for instance, you can turn them on and off by using your voice.
Ring’s Super Bowl ad focused on how its cameras could be networked to find a missing dog, but for a lot of people, it highlighted the surveillance power hiding in those devices. Now Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) has sent a letter to Amazon saying, “Get this creepy technology away from our homes.”
You can read it in full here, but here’s a snippet:
The Search Party ad showed Jamie Siminoff’s vision of what connected cameras can do, and it seems to suggest they will only use that power to find lost dogs.
I used ESPHome and LVGL to make my living room a little bit more like the USS Enterprise
Texas Instruments (TI) has agreed to purchase Silicon Labs, a leading designer of smart home radios and SoCs, including Z-Wave, Bluetooth, Zigbee, Thread, Amazon Sidewalk, and Matter. TI, which is building wafer fabs in Texas and Utah, also just announced a partnership to supply MCUs for The Home Depot’s Hubspace smart home line.
[Silicon Labs Newsroom]
It won’t clean your whole house, but it’s the perfect companion to your robot vacuum
After years of trying to switch to Home Assistant, Claude Code got me (mostly) there in one afternoon.
While robot vacuums are getting fancier and more sophisticated (there’s now one that can climb stairs!), there are lots of great budget bots you can get for just a couple of hundred bucks that will keep your floors swept and mopped.
Check out my top picks for the best budget robot vacuum and mop in my updated buying guide.
8
Verge Score
I should want this, but don’t.
The French smart home brand has announced the Thermostat Original (€149.99) and the Radiator Thermostat Original (coming soon). Both will work with Matter through an included Thermo Hub.
The Thermostat is Netatmo’s first product to work with Matter. Designed for European homes, it supports boilers, air-water heat pumps, and wood/pellet stoves.
As first spotted by Matter Alpha, the Chinese drone manufacturer has joined the Connectivity Standards Alliance, the organization behind Matter.
This means it could potentially add Matter support to its new Romo robot vacuum line, allowing the robot to work with Apple Home, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, or any other Matter ecosystem.
Better prices, better features, and Matter support made this a standout year for the connected home.
The company calls it Senso, and it’s cute! Detachable heads and charger so you can leave the probe in soil. Light, temperature, humidity, and soil moisture, plus a whole AI pitch I’m not quite buying. I’d be more tempted if it weren’t a Kickstarter and had a local smart home API. (YouTube version here.)
Smart lights that know where they’re placed in a room, wild designs for next-gen routers, and a glowing inedible donut.
Rollable laptops, twice-folding phones, and a ‘longevity station.’ This is the CES tech we come back for.
The CleverK9 is one of the first, if not the first, smart pet crates on the market. As you’d expect from anything with the word “smart” in the title, it has an app for opening the doors, and you can even automate it so they’ll unlock in the event that smoke or CO2 is detected.
Unsurprisingly, the CleverK9 won’t be cheap, starting at $600 and going up to $2,000 based on size. But hey, at least there’s no subscription.
The Wi-Fi 8 spec isn’t finalized, but Asus is showing a ROG NeoCore concept router at CES. Buying a router based on an unfinished reference design spec sounds risky, but I do hope this d20-like styling sets a trend.
The clear spider-like version you see here is Asus’s Wi-Fi 8 test model. A rep told me the NeoCore internalizes the antennas, which are the edges of the polyhedron. Neat.
