“If Elgato’s HomeKit kit products aren’t an homage to the movie Wall-E, I’ll eat my hat,” Jon L. Jacobi writes for TechHive. “It would be a baseball hat, and my least favorite, but I don’t think I have to worry.”
“If you don’t know what the heck I’m talking about, Elgato’s environmental and door/window sensors and its remote on/off switch are styled much like EVE, the robotic love interest in the animated Pixar movie; they’re clean and gloss white with just a hint of green,” Jacobi writes. “Okay, there’s blue in the movie as well and the green flashes, but…. Then of course there’s the name. It’s all-caps in the movie, but those are about the only things that aren’t note-for-note. I’m dishing out compliments here. They look nice. And unobtrusive in my largely white-walled rooms and hallways.”
“Elgato sent me all four devices pictured [below]: The $50 Eve Energy, a smart power receptacle; The $40 Eve Door & Window, which is a door/window sensor; the $80 Eve Room, which tells you the temperature, humidity, and air quality of any space; and the $50 Eve Weather, which does largely the same thing outdoors (with the exception of barometric readings replacing the air-quality function),” Jacobi writes. “Missing from Elgato’s connected-home collection: A motion sensor (the company does offer a smart LED light bulb, which is not part of this review).”
Read more in the full review here.
MacDailyNews Take: That 25-foot range might work for a small apartment, but that’s about it.
The Eve Weather works well for a backyard thermometer, humidity, and barometric pressure gauge. I mounted mine on the fence in the shade on the other side of the wall to my living room, well within 25 feet of my Apple TV 4. This setup also allows me to use Siri on my Apple Watch for checking on the backyard temperature, at home and away using the HomeKit connectivity via the Apple TV. The iPhone app also allows local and remote access to the Eve sensor’s other humidity and barometric pressure readings. Unfortunately, barometric pressure is not supported by Siri for HomeKit. While humidity is, it only worked with the Siri interface sporadically after I initially set it up. Siri works well getting the sensor to report the outside temperature, however.
Save your money and your sanity. Your manual thermostat works fine, doesn’t nag you at work, isn’t prone to internet hacking or giving away your home/away schedules, and doesn’t f-up because a spider or dust got into it making the sensor(s) read false.
This is a set of Iot (Internet of Things) devices, but uses stupid Bluetooth for device interaction. FAIL.
Why don’t they think, you wonder…..
great article