What is going on everyone? It is Mike in and welcome back to
Tech 24/7 TV. available today, Eero, Eero Pro
and Eero Beacon routers now support Apple's homekit router
integration and this means they could be added into homekit
which enables fine-grained control of all the accessories
that you control in the home app. Now more
specifically you can control whether or not your smart home
accessory communicates with the outside world and if so to what
degree they can communicate with that and if you want to
you could even say that you want to have a traffic for a
specific accessories to solely remain on your network and
local to your home.
Now this feature is similar to a firewall networking
appliances found in you know typically more expensive
networking gear but at a much more simplified level.
Now let's talk about why it is important. in this day
and age when people are breaking into your network
right to go ahead and scare the bejesus out of your children
enabling the average consumer like me and you with the
ability to take control of their network is extremely
important and kudos to Apple for doing this. Now just to be
clear HomeKit routers doesn't take the place of using a
strong unique password for each of the different services that
you sign up for and it does not replace good network hygiene.
You still need to do these things on a regular basis.
Now like I mentioned in the beginning, this is going
to apply to Eero, Eero Plus, and Eero beacon, but there are
also Linkys us who announced support for their Velop routers
but no software update is available just yet. now enough
for all the talk. Let's actually set it up.
If you don't already have the iOS app for Eero, you're going
to need to download it. for me. I already have it but I will
need to update it on my iPad. Now once the Eero app is open,
along the bottom what's going to tap on discover on the
right-hand side and represent with three options.
Let's help out homekit. now from here.
We're gonna go ahead and tap on set up home kit and we're
presented with adding Wi-Fi router to home automatically
reconfigured the homekit accessory
for improved security. We're going to go through the
process of adding each of the Eero routers to the respective
rooms and inside the Eero app. We see that all three of the
routers are now enabled with home kit.
So now the natural question is how does it look and functions
inside the Home app. Well, let's go and open
the Home app. Then in the top left-hand corner lets tap on
the home glyph. Now scroll down and we're presented with a new
location that reads Wi-Fi and network routers.
Now let's tap there and it shows the routers that are
connected and the rooms they're located in. If we drill
down here on say any one of the routers it shows the details
for that router include the serial number, the name,
the firmware, and a link to the app if it's not installed.
Now if we go back one screen we see that home kit accessory
security has a toggle that is currently enabled right.
That makes sense. We turned it on along with the dialogue here
underneath this has imposed network security settings
for HomeKit accessories. Well you want that enabled
because we want to have our home be more secure now in the
final section the bottom.
Here we see all the accessories that are being managed by
HomeKit including my Ecobee thermostat, my
Circle 2 camera, and my hue lights. Let's drill
down into one of these and see what the different levels of
access control are. So first we have restrict a home which
makes sense right can be restricted to home. Secondly be
automatic where those rules are determined by Apple and the
third is going to be no restriction.
Now unfortunately at this time there's really no ability to
customize these network security rules but who knows
what a future version of iOS may bring. Let me know in
the comments below if you'd like to see this type of
customization in the future version of iOS 14 Hey WWDC is
right around the corner so you'd never know.
Now these settings can be changed at any time simply by
tapping on the desired level of access controls. Now I would
exercise just a little bit caution here because you might
get unexpected outcome if you modify your accessory to say
restrict from home but then wonder why you're not getting
software updates because that accessory is not communicating
with the Internet.
As for automation, I briefly poked around inside the
Shortcuts app the see if there were any scenes or automation
available for HomeKit routers such as "when my device
connects to the network start a scene" or "when my device
connects send me notification" because I think this would be
just a little bit more battery efficient than say a geofence
that's running all the time. But alas there
is nothing there. Now if for some reason you want to go and
remove your routers from HomeKit that's all done within
their respective Hero app. So today we talked about what
home kit routers are why they want it why it's important and
how to enable and disable it.
Now that it's going to wrap it up for me folks let me know in
the comment below what questions you have about
either HomeKit routers, HomeKit security or just maybe
about Eero in general. I am Mike and I will talk to you in
the next one