Best Edison-style filament smart bulbs to make your home glow - The Ambient
Vintage-style filament bulbs from Hue, Bulbrite, Ikea and more tested and rated.
Read the full story here.
Recent articles on The Ambient
Click here to view my most recent work.
August halts shipping of View doorbell camera, offers customers refunds - The Ambient
Smart doorbell and lock maker August has announced it is halting shipping of its new August View doorbell camera, due to problems related to Wi-Fi connectivity.
As we noted in our review, the doorbell camera frequently disconnected from the Wi-Fi network, rendering it useless as a doorbell camera. August told us that it was using a new Wi-Fi chip in the View, specifically designed to run the battery-powered doorbell on low power until an event wakes it up.
Read the full story here.
Google kills Works with Nest as it prepares for a Google Assistant future
Works with Nest, the platform built to get smart home devices talking to Nest products, is shutting down, Google has announced. The service will close on 31 August and will be replaced by Works with Google Assistant, Google’s services-based developer platform that the search giant is evolving into a smart home ecosystem. As of the end of August, all Works with Nest integrations will stop operating and developers must either transition their products to the new platform or end their compatibility with Nest’s suite of smart home products.
Read the full post here.
Here's what happens to your smart home now that Works with Nest is ending - The Ambient
The Nest Thermostat was the golden child of the early DIY smart home. Finally, a polished, good-looking device that could be the centrepiece of a smart home. Sure, it wasn’t the perfect smart home hub we dreamed of, but the functionality it enabled was pretty magical.
Now, with the imminent demise of Works with Nest, our smart home dreams are crumbling, being replaced by a device we have to talk to, or use an app to control, the antithesis of Nest’s original ecosystem. According to Google, moving forward all smart home interactions will have to go through Works with Google Assistantand the Google Home app, which currently only has three triggers for Routines: voice, touch or schedule (it does promise more will come later though).
Read the full post here.
We turned our Alexa house into a Google home for a month – here's what happened - The Ambient
For almost five years now, my family has had a fifth member: Alexa. It's my kids’ buddy, telling them terrible jokes, sharing fart skills, playing Would You Rather and other games. Alexa has become something of a third parent, announcing every night at 7:15pm that there are 15 minutes of screen time left, dimming three lights during story time, and switching them off when the kids are asleep.
It's there in the morning, telling us the weather forecast, what’s on our jam-packed calendar for the day, and occasionally providing the kids with a fun fact to wow their classmates with. It was the only AI my children had ever known. And then it was gone.
Read the full article here.
August View Doorbell Camera review
The front door is a coveted spot for smart home companies these days, with seemingly everyone developing their own video doorbell to provide 'visual voicemail' for your home, as well as an always-watching smart security camera.
The convenience and security these devices offer is hard to quibble with, assuming you have an existing wired doorbell to replace. If you don’t, your battery-powered options have been limited. But now there’s a new kid on the block. August’s View is a completely wire-free doorbell camera that lets you know what’s happening at your front door wherever you are by streaming video to your smartphone.
Read the full review here.
How I trained my smart home to be a third parent
My tips for using the connected home with children
“Why would I want a smart home?” It’s a common question as connected devices become more ubiquitous and pressure on “normal people” to start buying internet-enabled products mounts. My answer is always, “Do you have a problem you’d like to solve?” Or, “Do you have kids?”
The smart home is manna from heaven for parents. It is literally the third parent (or second) we’ve been asking for since these tiny bundles of joy burst into our lives. As early as 2016, 70% of parents in the U.S. owned at least one IoT device, and more than a third wanted to buy another one because they believe smart devices make them better parents.
Read the full article here.
Smart home companies are turning us all into crime fighters - will it actually work? - The Ambinet
Why turning to social media might not make us safer
In 2015 Ring installed video doorbells in 10% of homes in the Wilshire Park neighborhood as part of a pilot program with the Los Angeles Police Department. According to the company, the LAPD saw a 55% decrease in home break-ins over the following six months. It made for a nice flashy number for Ring to point at, and undoubtedly helped it in its journey to getting snapped up by Amazon, even if there's some debate over the evidence.
It gave Ring a reason to hone in on the community angle, and now it's venturing into a new crime fighting space – social media. Will sharing what our smart home sees with our neighbors make us safer? Or will it redefine the term nosey neighbor?
Read the full article here.
Checking the cost: Do smart homes really save energy?
Do smart homes save energy? Are all our cool, connected gadgets really going to rescue the planet, one iconic design at a time? It’s an often-touted benefit of ditching your old, plastic white gadgets in favour of shiny new black ones. But is it accurate? Yes and no.
The sustainable living movement and the smart home have come of age together over the last few decades, enjoying a beneficial but sometimes uneasy partnership. Yes, smart home devices can save resources. No, not all of them will. Some, such as always-on smart speakers and connected cameras actually use more, because they’re not replacing an energy load, they’re adding one (although not a significant one). Others, including smart thermostats and AI-powered water and energy monitoring systems, are forging a path to a brighter, greener future – and saving us some cash along the way.
Read the full article here.
INSPIRATION Smart home tours: Lennar's ready-to-go South Carolina smart home - The Ambient
Do most people really want a smart home, they just don’t know it yet? That’s what Lennar, one of America’s largest homebuilders believes, and that is why the 65-year-old company announced last year that it would outfit all its new homes with home automation tech as standard.
Those new homes – equipped with Wi-Fi Certified home design, Alexa voice control, and a starter kit of smart home tech – have now started to roll on to the market. We went to check one out in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina.
Read the full story here.
August Doorbell Cam Pro Review - The Ambient
Smart doorbells are fast becoming the gateway drug to the smart home. Easy to install, insanely useful, and conveniently bypassing the privacy and security concerns of many smart home devices (because they’re outside the house), there really isn’t a good reason not to get one. So, the question is, which one?
Read the full article here.
Smart home wiring 101: A beginner's guide - The Ambient
The beauty of today’s smart home is that it’s mostly wire-free. Wireless protocols such as Zigbee, Z-Wave, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth LE have done away with the need to install complex and expensive whole-home electrical systems just to control your smart lights remotely.
In the modern smart home, all you need is a smartphone and a Wi-Fi router to unlock the power of connected devices. Most of the time.
There are still some key devices you are going to have to hardwire though. This is not so they can work with wireless smart home systems, but because they need to communicate with your “dumb” appliances, such as heating and air conditioning systems, irrigation pumps and the electrical wires running through your ceilings and walls.
Read the whole article here.