Aqara Smart Curtain Motor and Products
It's like having a pet robot 🤖 to open your curtains automatically and via Siri
I have quite a few home automation products. Since everyone in our home uses iOS devices and we have HomePod and AppleTV as our official entertainment devices, most of my home automation devices use Apple’s HomeKit standard.
This is both good and bad. Good because we can use one app to control everything in our house. Bad because different vendors or companies have varying levels of quality when it comes to their products and compatibility/reliability with HomeKit.
One company that is in the highly reliable category is Aqara, a Chinese home automation manufacturer. What makes their products reliable?
Aqara makes several products like
I have all these products. I love them all, the Cube Switch is particularly nifty as it’s a six-sided dice form factor and you can program each size to do a different action like a 6-button device.
Now, you must have a “Hub” to connect all these sensors and that hub acts as a bridge between Aqara devices and HomeKit. The Cameras are also all Hubs.
I don’t like Hubs. However, the Hubs are really what make this whole operation work with great battery life and reliability.
Unlike most HomeKit devices, Aqara uses a very battery-friendly standard called ZigBee which has been around for a long time. ZigBee uses a mesh network to allow devices to work far away from a Hub. All the Aqara AC-powered devices like the Plugs support repeating the signal.
The Hub has another benefit in that you can control the light, color, and noise. For example, I have the following:
The tilt and Vibration sensor is attached to my Mailbox, so when the mail is delivered the hub turns red - when I arrive home, I know there is mail to connect to. When I collect it the hub light turns off.
Door and Windows sensors can also control light or noise or send a push notification when opened. I use this with our exterior front and rear gate to be alerted if we have a delivery or guest. This is very handy as it also helps us train our dog to not lose his mind when there are people in our yard.
The Aqara cameras work with Apple HomeKit streaming and video storage and are extremely reliable - which has been a major issue with my Logitech cameras and devices. It tells me that Aqara has done a much better job integrating with HomeKit than Logitech.
But the cool device they make is the Smart Curtain Motor.
We have some traditional curtains in our bedroom, and for the past 10 years, we have been manually opening and closing them each morning and evening. No big deal but it would be nice to have them on a schedule - say open at 7 am and close at sunset (or by 7 pm).
Well, Aqara makes such a device and it’s incredible. You simply pop it on your curtain rod, program the direction, open and close, and then set a schedule or use Siri to say, “Open the curtains”.
Simply amazing. I never dreamed I’d be able to automate something so manual that really does not have a good automation solution. On the plus side, it has USB-C chargers and a 1-year battery life.
Have you tried any of the HomeKit gadgets that automate shades with a cord to pull them up and down? We have two of those that we'd love to not manage every morning and night—we've been spoiled by the Velux skylight blinds that we were able to put in a few years ago for another bedroom window.