Eve Room 3 review, Twinkly lights review, and more on the HomeKit Insider Podcast

In the latest episode of the HomeKit Insider podcast, your hosts review both the new Thread-enabled Eve Room and the newly-updated festive Twinkly lights.

We've continued to see more discussion surrounding Matter, including its ramifications on Apple HomeKit. This week The Verge went in-depth to discuss the larger picture, though we still have unanswered questions.

OmniBlinds, in its partnership with Eve Systems, has announced that its Thread-enabled HomeKit blinds are now available to order. The blinds are built-to-order and may have a large lead time as initial orders roll out.

Level Lock also looks to be getting a physical keypad add-on in January 2022. Announced to existing customers, the Level touch pad can be mounted outside your door frame as an additional means of gaining into your house.

News aside, much of the episode this week revolved around a pair of reviews ahead of the holidays. Last week Eve released the new Eve Room 3 sensor. We got our hands on one and took a look at how it held up. Most of the design is the same, but the legacy Micro USB port has caught our ire.

The second review was of the Twinkly string lights that recently received an over-the-air firmware update to bring support for Apple's smart home platform. We installed them outside our house and were very impressed with the lights themselves, as well as camera-based mapping process.

Links from the show

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1 Comment

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stageofhistory 11 Years · 57 comments

About 3 years ago

I’ve not listened to the podcast yet, so haven’t heard the review about the Twinkly lights, but took a punt on a set of RGB Clusters to replace a set of every-day fairy lights in our kitchen after they mentioned the brand on a previous episode. Absolutely love them, to the point where we immediately bought another two sets for the Christmas tree this year!

Some quirks with loading patterns if you cycle through them too quickly and HK only allows control of solid colours, as well as Siri not always playing nice with both sets in a linked pair (despite the HK app not having any trouble), but otherwise highly recommended.

Not cheap, though… Need to save up enough for a few sets for the front of the house next year!