If you’ve been getting seriously into HomeKit, and have found yourself exploring all the possibilities, you’ll quite probably be aware of HomeBridge or HomeAssistant, which for want of a better word, are platforms that allow many non-HomeKit devices to be exposed to HomeKit, albeit unofficially.
Now, despite the fact that many of these devices are not officially meant to work with HomeKit, a lot of people love the challenge of ‘shoehorning’ something into Apple’s smart home platform for a variety of reasons, not least for being able to control these devices from the Home app, but also to add functionality to a device that Apple doesn’t currently support, like robot vacuums. Others simply love the hardware they have that doesn’t happen to work with HomeKit, like Nest thermostats or Ring video doorbells. Going one step further, there are some companies, like Sonoff for example, that produce a series of devices that can have firmware added to them to make them HomeKit compatible without even the need for HomeBridge. They’re still not certified of course.
One other such company is Shelly, Based in Sofia, Bulgaria, who produce a massive variety of devices, all of which can work with HomeKit via HomeBridge, and even carry ‘official’ support via the HOOBS application, which is in essence, an interface that makes using HomeBridge easier to navigate.
As already mentioned, Shelly make a lot of products, many of which are of the relay type of product, but for this review, they were kind enough to send both their Shelly H&T, an humidity and temperature sensor (hence the name), and the Shelly Door/Window – a contact sensor with built-in light sensor. For this review, I’ll be focussing on the H&T.
Some of you may be happy to hear I’m not going to spend a lot of time on the packaging on this occasion, simply because it’s cheap but just about functional. There’s very little in the way of protection, although the inside foam holds the device in place well enough. The top simply tells you what the product is, and one side gives you a list of features;
Read the full article here.
