Ok, basically everyone knows how a smart home hub or controller works. You connect stuff and control it via an app. In the case of “Homey” that’s true – but it can do a lot more.
Homey can give visual feedback via the LED ring
Homey from the Dutch start-up Athom is a smart control for your electronic devices and unlike some other smart home hubs it has a lot of unique features to love which make it a perfect fit for most homes.
First and for many of us most importantly it has 7 wireless modules that work on various frequencies and protocols:
- Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n
- Bluetooth 4.0
- NFC
- ZigBee
- Z-Wave
- 433.92 MHz
- nrf24l01+
- Infrared
The last one, infrared, is probably the oldest but also one of the most important ones. How many of us own a TV, a sound system or old record player which uses this age old technology for its remote control? All of you that answer yes: Your devices will work with Homey… Yes, you may throw away all your remotes now.
Homey can control almost any devices in your home
In fact if you use Homey for the first time, it already knows how to talk with most of your devices. In the event that you own a device that Homey isn’t yet familiar with, like your older television, you can easily learn Homey how to talk to it using your remote. As a bonus, these device codes are then shared to other Homey owners, so that everyone that owns the same device can profit instantly.
The next really cool feature besides all the connectivity is the voice control which is based on Google’s speech recognition and works astonishingly well. However, if you are in the kitchen you don’t have to shout as you can still use an app to configure and control your devices.
The 11 cm diameter measuring sphere works with a huge variety of devices used out there and you can easily create your own, preferred set-ups using commands in the well-known if-this-than-that style. Homey enhances this function by also connecting to your other accounts and applications such like mail, calendar or weather forecast to be the smartest assistant possible.
Turning down your lights, locking your doors, reminding you to take an umbrella with you and opening your garage when you leave the house in the morning? Homey does it! Coming home stopping at a grocery store and don’t know what ingredients for the planned spaghetti sauce are already in the fridge? Homey asks your smart fridge and tells you. Arriving at your apartment, the oven is pre-heated, the music you love for cooking turns on… you get the picture!? Life could be so easy.
Atom makes it easy for developers to create new apps and ideas
And it is especially easy for developers who can download the dev kit here and write apps in JavaScript. An app written for Athom’s cool house keeper “can do various things, such as controlling one of Homey’s hardware modules, use the Internet, make another app smarter or tell you a Chuck Norris joke when you ask for it” say the inventors.
The company behind Homey
Athom lately collected 1 million euros of funding after having already launched the project on Kickstarter with great success in 2014. Since the online crowdfunding campaign the small team has expanded and became a healthy organisation according to Stefan Witkamp, the commercial director of the young business.
Well then, stop searching for your remote and tell Homey to lock the doors because it’s summer and you really should get outside and enjoy!*
*Don’t have one yet? Pre-order here.
