Always at home, wherever you are

• With the Smart Video Doorbell, don’t miss any more visitors or packages. Respond to visitors at your door immediately via your smartphone, whether you are at home, at the office or on the other side of the world.
• In this way you can tell the delivery person where to leave a package or welcome guests while still in the kitchen preparing dinner.
• Receive a video call immediately on your smartphone when someone rings your doorbell and choose whether or not to communicate with your visitors.

Your home, always protected

• Protect your home with the Smart Video Doorbell. Thanks to the people detection, you will be alerted in real-time on your smartphone if someone is lurking around the front of your home.
• Using the in-built microphone and speaker, you can even deter unwanted visitors.

Discover the app

• View videos of past calls and events in the app on any device. Scroll through the clips and download the ones that interest you.

No subscription fee

All the functions of the Doorbell are available for free, including storage of your videos:

• Local storage of your videos on the included microSD card.
• Choose to automatically save your videos in your personal Dropbox or FTP server.

Detection of attempted theft
For added protection, the Doorbell alerts you immediately on your smartphone when someone attempts to deactivate it.

Entirely weatherproof
The Doorbell is fully resistant to all weather conditions (rain, snow, humidity) as well as dust and dirt thanks to HZO technology, a thin-film coating solution.

The latest encryption
Your data is protected by an encrypted connection that guarantees the highest level of privacy.

The post Netatmo Smart Video Doorbell appeared first on Homekit News and Reviews.

I don’t want to be generic here, but Netatmo uses very shippable, very stylish packaging.  It’s no shock that they were just purchased by a pro installer company. As a ‘startup’, they come off as a sleek, really forward thinking, consumer-based company. Since this isn’t my first Netatmo product, I expected set up to be straightforward, and it was. The following steps were pretty simple: 

• Download the app.  
• Press ‘add products’ and follow the instructions (which include turning it upside down so that it knows you are in set up mode).  
• Follow the other instructions.

It is a wi-fi and ethernet device, so it will ask for the appropriate permissions to share that info from your iOS device, if it’s not connected via the ethernet port. It will then walk you slowly and steadily through understanding how it works. Finally it will give you some tips, once everything is successful.

The “Welcome” camera, as it is called, is not as large a device as you’d expect it to be, and it looks great. It looks almost identical in form to one of it’s siblings – the Healthy Home Coach. It weighs 200g/7oz and stands at 165mm/6.5″ tall. As for video quality, it is on a par with other 1080p cams, however, in my opinion, it has more “color honesty” than some of the other cameras I have. Having said that, it does trade “color honesty” for less field-of-view, so it is limited to 130-degrees, which while nothing to sneeze at, does not compete with some of the other cameras that aren’t as expensive.

The Netatmo Welcome, and in fact the entire platform in their range of “Security” products, are very similar in the way they are set up. All cameras have the options of whether to record based on the type of artificial intelligence that particular camera possesses. All cameras only store video locally by default, and come with an SD card pre-installed, unless the end-user decides to use the built-in features to do otherwise, which include uploading your recordings to a cloud service (Dropbox etc) or some FTP-based service. Only tiles, (identifiers that are user-chosen and in this case editable) based on the type of artificial intelligence the camera has, are stored on Netatmo’s servers. How, when and why they are recorded are pretty granular and extremely user controllable. This is not just an app, it is indeed a platform. 

For example, the Welcome camera has options to record when no one is home, based on it seeing a face it doesn’t recognise. It can also record when you are at home if it sees a person it doesn’t recognise. The Dropbox and FTP sections in the settings can also be configured as to how and when to hand off those recordings. It can record based on pets or not, or motion or not, and once again you have a decent amount of choices on how it handles that data, and the company doesn’t try to acquire it ever, or charge a subscription fee. I personally use it with Dropbox to store my recordings. It was easy to link, and it tells you on the “timeline” when it has successfully uploaded the first video from any camera to your Dropbox account. When the internal card is full, it overwrites the local storage with the latest video.  Other timeline settings issues it will warn you about include:  

• Any SD card issue
• Any interruption to connectivity
• Any reconnection of power
• Most reconnections of connectivity
• Welcome Facial Recognition & Profile

As previously mentioned, facial recognition is one of the main features baked into both the iOS app and camera firmware for all the current Netatmo cameras (Netatmo Presence for example). Once these start working together on the platform, you have quite an impressive, low-power usage, security infrastructure. It almost makes obsolete the old style “let’s record 24-7” video cameras. The way the indoor cameras work is that when an unknown person is seen, you are notified and asked to create a profile. Over time it then learns to recognise that person and when it can’t identify the person, asks you to help until it sort of ‘video game-style’ levels up. At that point it doesn’t fail often. It even tells you “Welcome Home!” like the good Jetson’s level machine it was meant to be. Profiles are editable on how often you want to be notified in terms of time of day by person. Pictures are editable after a profile has been created. In other words, I can make the pic in the profile look nice, and I know when and if anyone in my home that is profiled comes home by name.  

For extra fun you can take your wife’s favorite TV show and make it learn those faces (assuming it is able to see the TV, I do not recommend this if you are annoyed by a lot of notifications or don’t set them accordingly), which brings me to my next point; the camera only memorizes 32 faces. So you can’t really do a massive show and or you need to think about who you want it to profile. When it senses a face it can’t identify your options are: 

• Forget
• Identity (create new profile if you have faces left) 
• Not a face

If it senses a face it “knows” and gets it wrong, you can long push on the “tile” in the timeline and correct the artificial intelligence. It’s one of the coolest features of any product I’ve ever paid for. While this should be obvious once you’ve spent some time in the app, I do want to state that the tabs at the top of the app are:  

1. smoke alarm
2. home
3. away

So you can statically check who is home or away. This uses the app (on iOS) to decide, or a one-hour timer if the human who isn’t there is away. You can force an away function if you are nervous and want to make sure you know for sure exactly when a human arrives. I’m not sure that will ever happen to me, but the function is there.  

Finally, if it sees several faces or you wait a long time to help educate the artificial intelligence, the final dot on the bottom of the away tap on in the app holds “the wheel of unknowns”.  The purpose of this functionality is to allow you to forget all of those and keep your “timeline” more clutter free. That is, the app never really nags you much, only once in a while, and even then it is easily ignored.  

There was a time when I was waiting for HomeKit support. I was blowing up forums, and just in general sad about a lack of it for my two indoor “Welcome” security cams. There is an age-old piece of wisdom around the HomeKit community. Don’t buy it if it doesn’t have it. I think that’s fair. I think you should be careful. Having said that, of the 3 devices Netatmo promised me support on, they have delivered with updates or HomeKit support every time. In this case my two cameras were updated automatically and I logged in and found them to be updated on different days, firmware-wise. I then just clicked the Siri HomeKit settings button and added them fairly easily. They warn you to print or save the HomeKit code (which you need to do). Having said that, if the HomeKit add fails it did allow me to generate a new code. Note I did not say if it succeeds – it will; there are strict security guidelines outlined by apple and agreed upon by companies. 

Once you have it in the home app it behaves as 3 devices.  

1. A motion sensor (very fast one)
2. An occupancy sensor
3. A Camera

Those behave how you would expect. Having said that, I didn’t know how an occupancy sensor worked in HomeKit, since I didn’t previously have one. I decided to reach out to Netatmo, who told me (I’m paraphrasing):

“We really appreciate you reaching out. The sensor is activated in the Home app by using the firmware ability to discern whether when motion happens it’s by a human. It becomes reactivated for 5 minutes until it doesn’t see a human anymore. After that it becomes inactive.”  

I tested this, and it indeed worked that way and it served to replace a motion sensor in the living room since what I really wanted was a “person sensor” for the automation there. So ultimately, when all was said and done… I think this is one of my favorite HomeKit products. It also supports Google’s platform and the Alexa platform by Amazon.

I’ve found sometimes when you want quality, you have to wait and have a little faith. Netatmo hit it out of the park on this one. I’m impatient, but this product is top of its class and I’m glad I bought it. Welcome to the new world in technology for home users!

The post Netatmo Welcome Camera (review) appeared first on Homekit News and Reviews.

I’m gonna do the long version of the story. Unfortunately, the hottest of the hot smoke detectors by both Eve and Netatmo were not available in the USA, so I had to think outside the box if I wanted to get one in my hands. I started with trying to order the Eve ‘Smoke’ from companies in countries that sell it. These companies refused to ship to me. Then in October, Netatmo announced that it would be shipping its product, in the US soon.  

Now, I’m a huge fan of Netatmo because of their outside cameras working so well with HomeKit, so I couldn’t wait to try out the detector. When it didn’t arrive in October to US markets, I tried to get one shipped from Denmark. Once again, no company would ship to me. As it happens though, a school teacher living in Denmark was willing to help get one for me. He even sent some goodies. So here we are.  

“NETATMO!” Sorry for yelling, but they have great packaging. Nice, slick Chanel style (I’m more of a Dolce & Gabana guy) packaging. As for initial installation, the set up was easier than I anticipated. The smoke alarm itself comes as two pieces: a holding panel that fits to the ceiling, and of course the main body, or brains of smoke alarm itself, with the batteries. I want to note, that any idiot can do this installation, but I had three things planned, so my buddy just dry wall screwed it in for me. The usual install process is take the plate, scribble out the holes in the ceiling plate up against the ceiling and then pre-drill, then install the dry wall mounts and fit the screws in to those. You then twist the plate to fit onto the ceiling screws, drill them down tight and attach the smoke detector to the plate. A monkey using drugs could do it.

The instructions are very well laid out, and the HomeKit code is both on the inside of the smoke detector and the last page of the instructions. In terms of the batteries they are pre-installed. Netatmo claim a 10 year battery life, which is effectively the lifespan of the device itself, and as such is not replaceable. This may seem odd, but it is recommended that smoke alarms of any type should be replaced after 10 years anyway.

I do need to warn you that when you connect it to the Netatmo security app, which is standard to their platform, you will need to wait a minute for the firmware update. When I say a minute or so. Once your firmware is up-to-date, the software walks you through learning to use the device in a way anyone could understand. You add it under settings > add product and then smoke detector (in the iOS app). I don’t have an android device, but I’m told the security app works almost exactly the same on that platform too.

Once you have it added to the Netatmo app, and the firmware is updated, you can add it quickly to HomeKit in the usual manner with the provided HomeKit code. This device uses wi-fi as its main method of communication, which also allows for remote access when you’re not at home, but it also has built-in Bluetooth capabilities, which allows for remote control of the hush feature, should you not be able to reach the physical button on the device, or if your wi-fi network happens to go down at the same time that the alarm sounds. The smoke detector constantly does a self check, monitoring its battery, the smoke sensor and the wi-fi connection, and will report back if any of these three become an issue. As for the smoke alarm itself, you can actually set monthly checks to make sure the alarm itself works – after all, there’s no point in sensing smoke if it can’t let you know – the alarm is very capable, producing an 85db alarm sound.

On a day-to-day level there isn’t much to think about, since we don’t set off fires often enough to notice that sort of thing. However, I did try some simple automations. For example, I’ve created ab automation so that when smoke is detected, HomeKit turns the lights on and unlocks the doors. As mentioned before, as the alarm is capable of 85db of sound, when the detector goes off it is extremely loud and pretty high-pitched. Once you press the button on the detector, it “hushes it” for 15 minutes which shows up on the Netatmo security timeline. It can be turned back on via the app or pushing the same button if you are certain you are done burning the lasagna.

In HomeKit, which is how we automate the devices in these parts, it shows up as a single smoke sensor, so automating it couldn’t be easier. As always you can’t automate “secure” automations outside of Apple’s main home app, however all other automations seem to play nice with the device. I honestly wish I had another smoke alarm that was HomeKit compliant that I could sort of ‘pit’ this one against, but that isn’t the case.  Having said that, It has been a fun device and it is a way better looking and efficient device than any of the other smoke alarms I cheated on… 

The post Netatmo Smoke Alarm (review) appeared first on Homekit News and Reviews.

My first impressions are like that of any other Netatmo product I’ve seen so far, in that this French company has a flair for design, and their packaging – and products – reflect that. I did think the device would be thicker and more obtrusive, but it’s not. The device is very sleek and slim.

Once you get it all hooked up to power and you’ve downloaded the Netatmo app, you will be asked to create an account. The app will walk you through how to get the device set up for both using it via their app and via HomeKit. You will be asked for home access first, but it does require a manual wi-fi connection, unlike a lot of other HomeKit-based devices which take your wi-fi information via a much more simpler process. Once connected to wi-fi, you’ll probably be presented with a quick firmware update. You’ll then get connected to your HomeKit ‘home’ where you use the HomeKit code on the device.  

The device uses four sensors to log data in its application and/or send notifications, depending on your settings and connectivity to monitor these different areas.  

• Humidity
• Temperature
• CO2
• Sound/Noise

The device monitors all of these things continually but there’s also a button at the top of the device, which once pressed allows the device to update and add data to the app, which will display the updated information in the form of graphs. This is great for ensuring that the device is not only working, but also great for monitoring fast changes that the four sensors measure. The sound sensor has a range of 35 – 120dB. Within the Netatmo app there are preset profiles for your convenience for ‘baby’, ‘person with asthma’ and ‘general’, which makes it easy to get the relevant settings on the fly. These set various levels at which you would get alerts or notifications, depending on the chosen profile.

The Netatmo app teaches you how to understand, and get the best out of the different sensors by giving you a 5-star rating system to work off. Within the graph display, you can see the data from any one sensor at a time. You can select the graphs for the different sensors by clicking on the top right-hand of the graph drop down menu.

In terms of HomeKit, it looks and behaves as you would expect. All sensors except for the sound sensor appear as tiles in the Home app, so the three sensors that do link to the Home app are humidity, CO2, and Temperature. It’s important to note the well documented shortcomings of the official Home app, as the missing Sound sensor does appear in other 3rd party HomeKit compatible apps. I suspect that with the forthcoming iOS12, we shall see some of these oversights addressed. Aside from that, the notifications appear as standard, and the device seems to be quite responsive. If you rely on knowing the levels of humidity or CO2 then this could be a very useful tool for monitoring and consequently controlling these levels. For example, a guitar builder will usually make sure his aged wood doesn’t ever have more than 50 percent humidity in their aging room, to make sure the wood doesn’t react in a negative way. Bob Taylor from Taylor guitars would tell you his wood is worth as much as gold, and aging it correctly and safely with alerts is the best way.  

My overall impressions with this device are that the sensors are great for both the specific and everyday user alike. I love the design, and the only downer is that I don’t get that sound sensor in the Home app. 

The post Netatmo Healthy Home Coach (review) appeared first on Homekit News and Reviews.

Away from home?
It doesn’t matter how loud a powerful 85dB alarm is when you’re away – how will you hear it? The Netatmo Smart Smoke Alarm eliminates this worry by providing smoke alert notifications in real-time, whenever the alarm is set off, straight to you and your family’s smartphones.

Did you know many fires occur in homes where the smoke alarm batteries have run out?
The Netatmo Smart Smoke Alarm is equipped with a unique 10-year built-in battery meaning you’re protected and secure right up to the recommended 10-year alarm replacement deadline. With a battery that won’t let you or your home down, the Netatmo Smart Smoke Alarm keeps you protected for the full lifetime of the product.

Losing sleep to annoying battery alerts from your smoke alarm at night?
Sleep easier without worrying about batteries thanks to the Netatmo Smart Smoke Alarm’s full 10-year lifetime battery.

Do you ever need re-assuring that your smoke alarm is working correctly?
The Netatmo Smart Smoke Alarm constantly performs autonomous battery and overall performance tests, generating self-check reports that are sent directly to your smartphone to read at your convenience.

Burned toast set the alarm off by accident?
No more rushing to turn the alarm off manually – simply silence the alarm from your smartphone.

Create smart home scenarios with HomeKit
Switch on all your smart lights when smoke is detected to make sure the whole house is alerted.

Effortless to install
No more worrying about wiring alarms in. Simply screw the Smart Smoke Alarm into the ceiling wherever you need it, and you’re ready to protect your home. Simple.

The Smoke Alarm for complete peace of mind

• 85DB ALARM
• WI-FI FOR REMOTE ALERTS
• BUILT-IN BATTERIES WITH A 10-YEAR LIFE SPAN
• INTEGRATED LED FOR STATUS INFORMATION
• BLUETOOTH LOW ENERGY FOR HUSH FUNCTION AND HOMEKIT COMPATIBILITY

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* HomeKit support now rolling out to Welcome owners via an OTA update.

The post Netatmo Welcome Camera appeared first on Homekit News and Reviews.

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