- If you're looking to start a smart home
in the Apple ecosystem using HomeKit,
then this is the video for you.
In this video today we're gonna be going over these steps
for starting a HomeKit smart home in 2021.
So stay tuned.
(upbeat music)
Hey everybody, welcome back to another video.
My name is Steve from the YouTube channel, Steve Does,
and I wanna thank you for joining me here at reviews.org.
Now, I have years of experience with smart homes.
I've been an Alexa user for years now,
probably a Google smart home user
for about a year, year and a half
and just recently I have dove into Apple's HomeKit.
Now, if you saw our video last week,
I picked up my first home pod mini
to start testing out
and I got to say, I've been very impressed with it.
And not because of the amount of devices
that are compatible with HomeKit,
because honestly there aren't really that many
compared to the other big ones.
I read in an article that there were about 450 devices
that work with Apple's HomeKit.
Where for the Amazon Alexa smart home environment,
there are actually 85,000 devices.
And in this case, fewer devices is actually a good thing
because Apple is so adamant about your privacy
which we'll be talking about a little later.
Now, in this video
I'm gonna be going over what HomeKit is,
what devices you need to get started with.
We'll actually even go through the app,
show you how to get started
with setting up some of those devices.
We'll go through setting up scenes
and setting up automations.
Now, before we get started,
don't forget to subscribe and hit that notification bell
so you don't miss out on future videos like this one.
With that said, let's get started.
So what is HomeKit?
Well, HomeKit is a software framework created by Apple
that allows you to configure, communicate
and control your smart home devices in one app
and that app is the home app.
In addition to that, you can use voice commands to Siri
to control those devices
and also run scenes and automations.
So whether you're on your iPhone, your iPad,
your Mac book, or your iMac,
you're gonna have full control of your smart home
from those devices.
Now, one of the biggest benefits of HomeKit
is that you're gonna be able to control
everything within that home app.
You don't need to jump from one app to another app,
to another app to control your lights,
your thermostats, your cameras.
It's all gonna be centralized into that one app
and as long as the devices, say, work with HomeKit,
then you're good to go.
Another cool thing that you can do in the home app
is you can control multiple homes
and invite other people to have control of your home also.
So whether it's family and friends
that you wanna control your home,
or maybe you have a vacation house
that you want to get access to
when somebody is renting it out,
you can do all of that through the home app
Now, one of the biggest draws to Apple HomeKit is privacy.
Apple takes your privacy very seriously,
and they do so by not having
any of your devices connect to the cloud.
So instead of connecting to the cloud
they're actually all going to connect
to the hub in your house.
And with that provide end to end encryption
for each of your devices.
So with that encryption only you have access
to your devices.
Apple can't view your cameras.
They can't see the status
of any of the devices in your house.
That is all locally saved onto your hub for your control
- Okay?
- Speaking of hubs, to be able to control your devices
from anywhere in the world
you're gonna need a HomeKit hub in your house.
Now, a hub can be the home pod or the home pod mini.
You can also use an Apple TV
or an iPad if you keep that at home.
Now, as far as the Apple TV and the iPad go
you probably have to go
into the settings to activate it as a hub.
So why do you actually need a hub?
Well, remember we said,
HomeKit uses end to end encryption.
So to locally control all of that encryption
you need the hub to be able to communicate,
to all of your devices
and store all of that information locally on a device.
So because of that, you're gonna need a hub to be
a center point to your smart home.
This is going to allow you and your friends and family
to be able to control your smart home
without you walking away
with your phone and taking that control with you.
- Okay, now Let's take a look at the Home App.
If you're like me and you got your first accessory
this is where you're going to start.
So I'm gonna go ahead and grab my iPhone.
And they're gonna be a couple
of ways that we can access the home app.
So if we see on my screen here
up in the top left corner,
we see the second one down says home.
So that's going to be the Home app.
You can put it on your screen,
but if you want to quickly access it from the control center
you're gonna have to set that up.
So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to settings,
I'm gonna scroll down to where just under General,
it says Control Center.
And then if you look at these second toggle down,
Show Home Control.
So I'm gonna tap on that to show home controls
and then I'm also going to scroll down
and look for home
click on the Plus sign next to that,
it's gonna add it to the Include Controls.
And then I can go ahead and back out of here.
Now, what that did is
that for my iPhone 12,
if I grabbed the top right corner of my screen
and dragged down,
it's gonna bring up my control center.
So you see right here it says,
Home favorites right in the center.
And then I've got my office home pods.
So those are the controls they brought up
and if I scroll all the way down to the bottom,
I can now see that I've also got the Home button down there.
So I'm gonna go ahead and tap on that.
It's gonna show the favorites that I have for my home.
And then if I tap on the Home icon again,
it actually gonna bring up the Home app for me.
So at the very bottom,
in the bottom left hand corner,
I'm gonna click on Home
and this is probably what you're gonna see.
Right now, I only have my HomePod mini in there.
And I did that intentionally.
I actually went through and I removed everything
because I wanted to show you guys what a clean
looking HomeKit is going to look like
so we can set some things up from scratch.
Now, something that I would recommend doing first
is setting up different rooms in your house.
So in the very bottom tab, it says Rooms.
I'm gonna go ahead and click on this.
We've got Master Bedroom.
up in the top left corner is the little house icon.
I'm gonna go ahead and click on that House icon.
I'm gonna click on Room Settings
and then at the very top, in the top left corner
you see the arrow with the rooms,
I'm gonna click on that
and that is going bring up the different rooms.
I'm gonna add a few more rooms into here.
I'm gonna add the Living Room.
Okay. So we've got those listed in there.
Once I've gone through
and I've added the different rooms that I have on my house
where I'm gonna have a smart device,
I can go ahead and click on it done.
And then when I click onto the Home
up in that corner again,
it's gonna give me all of the rooms listed.
Another thing that I can do
is I can either swipe left or right
to just quickly go through the different rooms also.
All right, now we're gonna go ahead
and set up our first device in HomeKits.
Up in the top right corner,
I'm gonna go ahead and click on the Plus sign.
We're gonna click on Add Accessory
and it's going to ask me to scan the setup code.
So what we're gonna do is
I'm actually going to
use the Phillips hue.
We've got that box right here
and inside of the box
is where I have my code.
So I'm gonna go ahead and scan that right now.
All right, now that that has been scanned.
It popped up here.
I'm gonna go ahead
and say to select my Phillips hue bridge.
So right now it is connecting to the bridge.
The bridge is located in the office.
So that looks good.
Phillips hue, I'm gonna rename this
because I want to know what it is,
we're gonna say Phillips hue bridge,
So that way I specifically know which I'm connecting to
and the Phillips hue bridge
has been added to my HomeKit.
Somebody hadn't clicked continue
and it found five devices.
So if you see down there
it says one of five lights connected.
Now this is because I've already connected my five lights
to the hue back when I was using the Phillips hue app
and my Amazon Alexa smart home.
So all of my lights are already connected to the bridge.
So by connecting to the bridge,
it now brought all of those lights
in it to the HomeKit app for me.
So I'm gonna go ahead and click on Continue
and I'm gonna go ahead and finish putting these
different lights in different rooms.
Okay. Now look, how many devices
I now have in the Home app right here.
So we've got our master hue dimmer switch.
So it also found the accessories that I have for you
which is gonna be there
on a dimmer switch and then also their motion sensor.
Okay. Now the next thing that I wanna do is
I actually want to add a camera system into here.
Now, UV cameras are a great camera choice
for you to pick up for your home.
And that HomeKit integration actually came
after the device was added.
So I've already added those devices into their app.
So I'm gonna load up the Eufy app right here,
and I've set up a base station that I've called
HomeBase HomeKit
cause I know this one's going to be connecting to HomeKit.
So I'm gonna click onto the settings for this one.
I'm gonna say HomeKit Setup right here,
I'm gonna say a HomeKit authentication.
So we're gonna go ahead and authenticate
and add the accessories.
We're gonna add the Backyard one, that looks good.
So it is adding the authentication right now to my HomeKit
At a bridge click continue,
Add to Home.
That looks good.
This one's gonna be located
in the office right next to me.
And so we've got the Eufy home-based too connected
to HomeBridge hat looks good.
And then it also found a one camera.
So I'm gonna say yes,
that camera is in the Backyard.
So let's go ahead and add a new room.
This room is gonna be called Backyard.
Continue and this is going to be
EufyCam 2C pro.
So the Eufycam 2c pro ahead and click continue on that.
Choose when this camera streams and records
we're gonna say all the time,
that looks good and done.
All right, someone go ahead and close out of this.
We're gonna go back to the home app
and if I scroll down to the bottom,
there is now my camera set up
so I can go ahead and tap on that to get a live view
in the bottom right-hand corner.
I can tap on at different accessories nearby
which I don't have any right now you got the live view.
If I tap again
and we can bring up the different options right here
because the battery level, if it's charging
we can set up recording options at face recognition.
All of that through the settings of this camera right here.
Okay. Now that we've got a few accessories added
to our HomeKit, let's go ahead
and set up some scenes and automations.
All right, there are two ways that we can add
scenes in here.
So clicking onto the plus sign up in the top corner.
We can add a scene there,
or we see scenes right here
underneath a home where it has my thermostat
and stuff like that.
I'm gonna go ahead and click it ad scene right here.
So what we're gonna do is I'm gonna say
let's go ahead and create a custom scene
and I'm gonna say a good morning scene.
All right,
So we've named it a good morning
I'm gonna go ahead and add accessories.
So, what I want to happen in the good morning scene
is I want both of the master bedroom lights to turn on
and I want my home pod to start to playing some music.
So click done,
and I'm gonna go ahead
and tap on both of the lights right here.
So we're gonna say, we want them to turn on
and then we've got my home pod.
We're gonna want it to say, to play music.
So as far as media, I'm gonna click on play media.
We're gonna go down to choose audio.
So I'm gonna ahead and click on listen now.
Now I'm gonna go ahead
and just select one of these right here.
We're gonna go back to new scene.
That all looks good
and then we go ahead and click on it done.
Okay, so now we've got our morning scene set up right here,
so I'm gonna go ahead and click on morning.
We saw that both lights turned on it to 30%
and the home pod started playing music right over there.
So I'm gonna go ahead and turn these guys off
but that is how you can set up different scenes.
Now, in addition to scenes,
you can set up automations also.
So I'm gonna do is down at the very bottom corner,
i'm gonna click on automations,
create a new automation.
And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna set up.
let's say, when people leave the house
so your location is determined by your iPhone.
So I'm gonna say location is home time is any
I'm gonna go ahead and click on next.
And it says, when you leave the house
so what I want to do is I want to make sure
that all the lights
and let's see my eco B.
So I'm gonna click on here.
We're gonna say, when you leave the house,
turn off all to the house
that have done HomeKit
so all are being turned off
and that my thermostat is gonna get turned
off when I leave the house.
So go ahead and click on it done.
And we've got our first automation set up
but there are a ton of different scenes
and automations that you can set up in here.
And if you guys want to know more about that
let us know in the comments below
and we can make a video dedicated just to that.
We have covered a lot in today's video
from what HomeKit is and how to set it up
to what is all involved with using the home app.
If you want to know anything more about the Apple ecosystem
and HomeKit, check out the link below to reviews.org.
If you guys want to see more for me
check out my YouTube channel.
Steve does where I do a lot of cool tech reviews.
If this video is helpful,
give it a thumbs up let me know that you liked it.
As always,
I want to thank you for joining me here@reviews.org
as and I'll see you in the next video.