With their intense 1600-lumen output (equivalent to 100 watts, with the actual usage being only 14W), these Matter-enabled smart light bulbs from Linkind are among the brightest you’ll find on the market, which is awesome when you’re trying to light a particularly large room or workshop and you still want all the latest bells and whistles the smart home industry can offer.

Like any smart lights worth their salt, Linkind’s A21-shaped (E26 base) bulbs can shine in 16 million potential colors, or you can set them to pure white light at any “temperature” between 1800K (warm) to 6500K (cool).

Either way, you have the option to dim them to anywhere from 1% to 100% via app or voice control (however, they don’t recommend using a traditional dimmer wall switch, as it can cause buzzing or flickering.) You can also set up automated schedules, create light “scenes,” and even have the lighting effects synced to the rhythm of your music.

Note: To use these bulbs with services like Apple Home, Alexa, Google Home, and SmartThings, you’ll need a Matter-compatible hub (HomePod, Echo, Nest, etc). However, if you use Linkind’s official AiDot app, no hub is required.

Get a pack of two bulbs for $23 on Amazon. Meanwhile, a pack of four is $42, so you save a few bucks there.

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Nanoleaf isn’t the only company releasing new smart lighting solutions this week. Today, Govee’s new Neon Rope Light 2 is hitting the market with a bang, offering an upgraded version of its predecessor with some exciting new features.

Retaining its signature flexibility in an even softer material than before — plus some upgraded bend clips that allow you to create your desired shape in advance — this highly customizable smart rope light is 14% more bendable than the previous version, so it can be all the more easily arranged into various shapes on your wall or elsewhere.

Once installed, it makes for some colorfully diffuse accent lighting behind your TV/workspace/gaming station, or it can become a vibrant outline around other objects, or whatever else your heart desires.

Be as creative and playful as you want:

…or simply tie the design into your interests in a cool way:

One of the most significant enhancements in version 2 is the addition of Matter support, allowing seamless integration with various smart home ecosystems. This expanded compatibility means you can effortlessly control your lighting setup via Siri/HomeKit, the Govee Home app, Alexa, or Google Assistant.

(It’s worth noting however that the light strip does not support 5G Wi-Fi.)

One thing I like about these flexible rope lights is that you can combine them with other light panel shapes to pull off some seriously sick designs:

Image: u/Ya_xie on Reddit, using the original Neon Rope Light a year ago.

Moreover, this innovative light strip boasts shape mapping and recognition technology. With the help of your smartphone camera, the app can apply various DIY lighting effects seamlessly across different lighting segments, allowing you to create a personalized ambiance tailored to your preferences.

Additionally, the AI Lighting Bot, which uses cutting-edge AI algorithms to take user input (from text, voice, and/or image data) to generate captivating lighting effects through extensive data training, ensuring a dynamic illumination experience.

Create the perfect atmosphere and illuminate your space in style with the Govee Neon Rope Light 2, which comes in two lengths and colorways:

• 16.4 feet: Black or White ($100 each)
• 9.8 feet: Black or White ($70 each)

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One day we will have the technology to fully recreate the enchanted ceiling from Hogwarts, but until then, we’ll have to make do with something a little less fantastical. However, that’s not to say we don’t already have some cool options to choose from.

While they can’t recreate an exact image of the outside sky, Nanoleaf’s new Skylight smart ceiling light panels do bring a sort of magic to your interior space. They’re a collection of modular square lights that flushly mount to your ceiling, with only one main controller panel needing to be hardwired and an additional 99 panels able to be connected to it.

Once installed, each of the panels offers soft and natural multi-point lighting that can be configured exactly as you like, with over 16 million colors to choose from, and whites that can run from cool to warm (2700K–6500K) in color.

From their January press release:

Seamlessly adjust colors and Scenes like “Gentle Rain” or “Sun Shower” to set the ideal ambience for morning to evening routines in the bedroom or focus time in office spaces. With Schedules, wake up to a gentle sunrise Scene filled with soft oranges and pinks to help energize you in the mornings, and ease yourself to sleep as you lay under a glimmering star effect when winding down for the evening.

These color palettes, automations, and dynamic scenes can all be controlled remotely via the Nanoleaf app, or you can connect it to your preferred smart home ecosystem and use voice controls. You can also turn the system off and on with a standard light switch, but it will automatically default to a warm white at 100% brightness.

The $250 “Smarter Kit” comes with three Skylight panels to get you started. An expansion pack should be coming to Amazon soon, but I don’t know exactly when.

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Ring is about to release its best battery-powered doorbell camera yet: the Battery Doorbell Pro, which promises enhanced visibility and more accurate motion detection, with the same wire-free convenience of previous editions.

As its name implies, the Battery Doorbell Pro runs off a rechargeable battery pack rather than being hardwired into your home’s electrical system. This is beneficial for renters and the like who aren’t able to make permanent modifications to their residences — or simply don’t want to mess with anything electrical — as well as anyone who wants to be able to move the device to different locations and needs a portable security solution.

In a first for its wireless offerings, Ring’s Battery Doorbell Pro incorporates radar-powered 3D motion detection, which itself powers the company’s famous Bird’s Eye View functionality that provides an aerial map view of motion events around your home, and sends you alerts on movements within custom-set zones.

Also new are enhanced imaging sensors that deliver clear colors and amazing head-to-toe video clarity even in low light conditions. Moreover, you get access to a full-color “pre-roll” recording feature that silently captures the four seconds prior to a given motion detection so you can see the lead-up to the event in question.

The Ring Battery Doorbell Pro ships on March 6th, 2024 and can be pre-ordered for $230 on Amazon.

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Anyone looking to upgrade their home into a smart one and prefers a more permanent energy management/monitoring solution than using a bunch of smart plugs should have a look at the new Energy Outlet by Eve.

Like those smart plugs, the Energy Outlet allows you to remotely monitor the power consumption of whatever’s plugged into either of its two outlets, control those things with voice commands, and set up automations and schedules that work with your lifestyle.

The main difference is that it’s actually hardwired into your home’s electrical system like a regular outlet, sitting flush with the surrounding wall instead of sticking out like a sore thumb.

Smart home aficionados will appreciate the inclusion of Matter (and by proxy, Thread) support. In case you’re not aware, this is the up-and-coming connectivity standard that unites a whole bunch of smart home platforms so you can seamlessly control the things in your home via any or all of these major hubs:

• For Apple: Apple TV 4K (2nd gen), Apple TV 4K (3rd gen, 128 GB), HomePod (2nd gen), HomePod mini
• For Samsung: SmartThings Hub v3, SmartThings Station
• For Amazon: Echo (4th gen), Echo Show 8 (3rd gen)
• For Google: Nest Hub (2nd gen), Nest Hub Max, Nest Wifi Pro

Get the Matter-enabled Eve Energy Outlet for $50 a pop on Amazon.

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The world of smart lighting has really come a long way in recent years, and there are loads of ways to customize most options on the market. However, one thing you don’t often find is the ability to change the shape of the lights themselves.

GE’s new Cync Neon-Shape Smart Light, on the other hand, is sort of like having a neon sign made of a flexible material that can be bent and curved into all sorts of designs:

Released as part of the company’s Dynamic Effects product line, the Neon-Shape Light is not only endlessly shapeable, but also controllable and highly customizable via the Cync app, which allows you to create multi-color light shows that operate on a schedule you set. The lights can also be synced to your favorite music to create the most dynamic environment possible and liven up any party or gaming session.

The light offers 16 million colors that can be adjusted on a segment-by-segment basis, or you can simply choose a white light anywhere between 2000K (warm/amber) and 7000K (cool/blue) in color. The only limit here is your imagination.

A 16-foot length of this light will run you $120 on Amazon. As of this writing (May 23rd, 2023) the 10-foot option is only available elsewhere.

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LaMetric’s TIME smart clock is a whooooole lot of things wrapped into one small package. At its most basic level, it’s a Wi-Fi connected clock that can be customized with different faces and charming pixel art icons.

It’s also a Bluetooth speaker that can display a visual equalizer as you stream music or internet radio. It’s also the front-end for an entire ecosystem of mini-apps. It’s also a personal readout display for things like phone notifications, weather forecasts, social media follower counts, calendar events, custom messages, and more.

Watch it in action:

This is one of those gadgets where the sky’s the limit on what you can do with it. You can have it count down the days to a special date, like that anniversary you’re always forgetting. You can have it display a stopwatch or timer as you do workouts. If you run a small food/retail business, you can set it on the counter and have it display your social media ‘like’ counters and encourage customers to follow you online.

I can only scratch the surface here. If this is the sort of endlessly useful gadget you’ve been needing in your life, get it for $211 on Amazon.

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If you’ve yet to spring for a robot vacuum cleaner for one reason or another, the new DEEBOT T10 Omni robovac from ECOVACS — released just this week alongside its lower-tier T9+ and N10+ siblings — could be the model that will finally get you in the game.

While it’s great that this automatic cleaning gizmo offers an impressive 5,000Pa of suction power and can perform double-duty as both a vacuum and a mop, what makes the T10 Omni truly special is…

1. Its AI-powered object recognition and path planning capabilities, which are aided by LIDAR and dToF sensors akin to the technologies self-driving cars use. This thing is stellar at mapping out everything it comes across in your home, identifying obstacles, flooring types, cords, and other hazards along the way — even in the dark.
2. The self-emptying dustbin, self-refilling mop water tank, and self-cleaning/heat-drying functionality after mopping, all of which are handled by its docking station.
3. The built-in voice assistant (“Yiko”) that can be given commands to clean specific spots in the house, leave or return to its base station, attend to self-cleaning tasks, re-map your home, give you verbal status updates about its battery level/current task/volume level/etc, and more.

There are plenty of other noteworthy bells and whistles I could get into — like the ability to remotely view your home through the vacuum’s front camera in real time so you can check on pets and things — but suffice to say this smart bot vacuum is an awesome investment.

You can get the ECOVACS T10 Omni for $900 on Amazon. There’s also a $1K starter kit that includes a number of accessories like replacement brushes, filters, mopping pads, and dust bags.

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Just because your goal is to have a smart home doesn’t mean that every item you own has to be smart. The same old lamps, fans, humidifiers, kitchen appliances, hair styling tools, and even water heating systems you’ve already got in your house can be made “smart” by plugging them into a Wi-Fi enabled smart outlet.

Essentially, what this smart plug does is let you control and monitor whatever device/appliance you’ve got connected to it, from anywhere you are in the world (provided you have internet). You can even use voice commands via Alexa or Google Assistant (using either your smartphone or an integrated device like the Amazon Echo) to turn things on or off without raising a finger.

Never again do you have to worry about being away from home and wondering whether you forgot to turn something off. You can check in on those kinds of things — along with energy consumption — anytime you like, or you can simply set up timers to customize exactly when things should be active. There’s also an ‘Away Mode’ you can activate while traveling that will randomly turn things on and off and potentially deter would-be home intruders.

As I write this on January 31st, 2023, the KP115 mini smart plug is temporarily out of stock on Amazon, but once it’s back, you can expect a price anywhere between $13–$20 per plug.

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Background photo above by Alan J. Hendry

While Apple’s official Home app does grant a unified interface for controlling all your HomeKit-enabled devices, it’s not exactly the nicest looking utility around.

Thankfully there are a number of quality third-party alternatives on the App Store that can be used in place of the vanilla UI, and today I’ll point your attention to HomeDash by developer Marcus Reul.

What HomeDash does is let you create beautiful custom dashboards and widgets for conveniently monitoring and controlling your HomeKit accessories. It sort of reminds me of Panic’s Status Board app that was sadly discontinued in 2016.

HomeDash looks particularly slick on iPad.

With HomeDash you can control and observe anything from a single device alone to entire rooms, zones, and/or groups of them. You have a number of displays and control types at your fingertips, including live camera views, light controls, scene management, access to smart door locks, battery statuses, and much more.

In theory, any HomeKit-enabled accessory should work with HomeDash, but they do have a list of specific devices that have been more extensively tested during its development, including Philips Hue, tado°, Ikea Tradfri, Elgato Eve, Netatmo Healthy Home Coach, D-Link Omna 180, Logitech, and so on.

You can even save up to 10 scenes to be made available from your Apple Watch. Controlling, say, your living room lighting for various situations with a mere tap on your wrist is one of those “whoa, the future is here” experiences.

As Federico Viticci put it back in 2018:

HomeDash makes Apple’s Home app look clunky, boring, and uninspired.

If you’re wanting a good-looking dashboard for your smart home, grab HomeDash for $13 on the iOS App Store.

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It only makes sense that one week after I wrote about the ecobee4 Alexa-enabled thermostat, the company would release a whole new model: the simply named ecobee SmartThermostat. Seems like they’re getting away from the numbering scheme, eh?

This fifth revision to their flagship device boasts a more premium outer build, with a slightly thinner body and a new crisp, glass-encased touchscreen display (versus the old plastic one) for better touch sensitivity, along with even more significant updates under the hood:

• Its new quad-core processor (Cortex A35 1.5GHz) offers better natural language processing and speech detection.
• The thermostat now includes dual-band Wi-Fi for better connectivity, adding support for 802.11 a/n/ac @ 5GHz on top of the 802.11 b/g/n @ 2.4GHz it had before.
• You know how the ecobee4 had a built-in speaker for interacting with smart assistants like Alexa, or — heaven help you — listening to music through your thermostat, of all things? The fifth-generation device features a new speaker with twice the intensity as before, so you could theoretically use your thermostat to listen to podcasts and such without hating what you’ve become, you monster.
• If using a thermostat speaker is still too much for your ego, you can always use the SmartThermostat’s new Bluetooth support to stream songs — from sources like Amazon Music, Pandora, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, and for the first time, Spotify — to any external speakers you’ve already got set up.

On top of the internal upgrades, the ecobee’s newly designed (almost to a cute degree) remote SmartSensors — one of which is included in the main package — have been overhauled to be more powerful than the previous generation, with wide-angle detection of motion and temperature, and a new Bluetooth pairing range of 60 feet.

If you’re ready for the latest and greatest in thermostat technology, you can get the ecobee SmartThermostat for $249 on Amazon.

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In the process of converting your abode into a smart home, two of the most common items beginners buy are some kind of smart thermostat and a starter voice assistant doodad (like the Echo Dot). The ecobee4 smart thermostat combines both functions into one device thanks to its built-in Alexa support — always conveniently accessible if your thermostat is centrally located — and it supports multi-zone heating and cooling.

After an easy installation/setup process and placement of the included wireless room sensor in another area, the ecobee4 will respectively manage hot and cold spots in your home so everyone’s favorite nooks are comfy as can be. The thermostat can pair with up to 32 sensors, which is definitely overkill for most homes. Common places to put them are the main living area, a home office (if you have one), and all bedrooms, with at least one sensor per floor if you have an upstairs space.

But what’s neat about the ecobee4 is that you can use your voice to do a bunch of tasks:

• “Alexa, set a timer for 30 seconds.”
• “Alexa, play jazz.”
• “Alexa, set my ecobee to 72 degrees.”
• “Alexa, give me a recipe.”
• “Alexa, add eggs to my shopping list.”

…all from your thermostat, of all things. We’re living in the future, folks.

Moreover, the ecobee4 works not only with Alexa, but also Apple HomeKit, Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana, Samsung SmartThings, Wink, IFTTT, Haiku Fans, Vera, Logitech Harmony, Control4, and more. If you’ve got smart gadgets in your home, chances are, this thermostat can link up with it.

The ecobee4 that includes one room sensor is currently $199 on Amazon (normally $249) as of June 1st, 2019. You can also pick up a model with two additional sensors (a total of 3) for $330.

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Ecobee4 is the newest model of the popular Wi-Fi enabled thermostat line. It supports Apple HomeKit, Samsung SmartThings, IFTTT and more. You can also control it from the Ecobee iOS app.

I’ve owned a Nest thermostat for the past few years. Sadly, one of them broke recently. I’ve got my eye on the Ecobee4 to replace it. The HomeKit compatibility will be mean I can use it along side my other HomeKit devices to create various home automation scenes (along with managing it from the Home app).

Another great feature of the Ecobee line is you can add additional room sensors to help the thermostat read temperates from other parts of the house vs just the location it’s in.

Buy it on Amazon for $249.99

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Glow is a new Kickstarter project by Ben Lachman and co. for a smart energy tracker designed to help you reduce energy use and environmental impact. It’s like a fitness tracker for your home that creates ambient real-time feedback of energy usage.

Watch their promo video to get an idea of what it does:

From the looks of it, Glow is easy to install: Just attach the wireless sensor to the outside of your utility meter box — no wiring necessary — and plug the in-home unit into your wall. From there, the outside sensor measures electricity as it flows into your home, sends that info to the unit inside, which analyzes the data and sends it along to the Glow app on your phone.

The in-home unit changes color (from green to amber to red, depending on the severity) to let you know when something needs your attention, like an oven being left on, a fridge door left open, or the A/C being cranked too high. You can even set energy usage goals in the app, and Glow will help you stay on track.

As of this writing (August 12th, 2017) the Kickstarter campaign has 33 days to go and they’ve got quite a ways to go to reach their funding goal. If you back the project at the $149 level or higher and it succeeds, you’ll get a Glow system of your own.

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