Today I want to talk to you about the integration of the domotics into some intelligent watches. It is clear that sIf you’re 100% into Apple’s ecosystem and you use the Home App, nothing like Apple Watch to manage your devices, in fact from the Apple Watch you can open the Home app and do whatever you want with your devices, launch environments, etc as if you were in front of the mobile… but what about Home Assistant? From which watches can we connect to Home Assistant and what is the level of integration? What if I have the Apple ecosystem but I have a Garmin or an Amazfit? Let’s see it in a little detail.
The problem: wanting to light a light from the clock
Almost. We all have a smart watch on our wrist., whether an Apple Watch, Huawei, Samsung Galaxy Watch, Amazfit etc or watches more focused on sport such as the Garmin, Suunto, Choirs, etc. Even if you’re poor and you live anchored in the past like the Mormons, you can wear a Polar.
Of course. in the pocket we also carry an iPhone or a mobile phone with Android, but often when we get home you leave your phone somewhere or loading or whatever and you need to light a light, know the temperature of the living room, run an environment… and there we have 2 options, do it from the voice assistant, from the clock… well 3 options, or look for the phone.. good 4, or use your own hands as if you were a troglodite.
The idea of going around the house I don’t like anything. If you have little kids, they may be sleeping. If you have teenagers like me, they may be studying or playing balls with too high music and the speaker won’t listen to you. If the house is silent, it’s not a good time to give a voice… or if you’re watching a movie, etc. And yes, I always say that the house has to interact alone, it has to know that if it’s going to be done at night and you’re home, it must light the lights. If it’s cold within a range of temperatures and we’re at home, you have to adjust the boiler… and all that’s great, in the end there are many tasks that you forget, I don’t remember when it was l
the last time I turned on the switch manually or told Siri or by taking the phone… the lamp in the living room, it always turns on alone when it’s necessary or when you don’t know it but it’s going to be necessary right away because a storm of those who put the black sky on as if it were at night even if it’s 4: 00 in the afternoon.
That part doesn’t concern me, with good automations that we’ve talked about many times you have it solved, but imagine that you want to go into the shower and you want to turn on the bathroom light and the heater to get the lights off before you go to take off your clothes… or you get into bed and you want to run the ‘Good night’ environment, but your partner is already sleeping and it’s not a plan to say ‘Hey Lola, good night!’ to turn the lights off, pass the key to the door and put the boiler in the night mode, and at that moment or you should take the mobile, to unlock the home, to get it off the simple, to get the home, to get the right, to get the right, to get the home, to get the right, to get the right, to get the right, to get the right, to get the right, to get the right, to get the right, to get the right, to get the right, to get the right, to get the right, and get the right, to get the right, and get the right, and get the right, to get the right, and get the right, and get the right, right,
or favorite and run it from the clock.
What is clear is that if, as we said before, your entire ecosystem is Apple, you have all your devices in the Home App because they are compatible with HomeKit or Matter and you have an Apple Watch, you can open the House App and access everything. If you have Home Assistant the same, simply tell Home Assistant what environments or devices you want to see in the Home Assistant app of the watch. As it is not an app as user- friendly as the Home app, you can organize the devices a little but it doesn’t make much sense to show on Home Assistant in the Apple Watch all the devices you have at home but just some favorite Ambients, some devices you have to have
interact and so on. Easy and fast. In fact, sometimes I open Home Assistant on the Apple Watch before the Home app because it refreshes the status of the devices faster… as I have less devices there and you don’t have to update the status of all, it gives me the information something faster. It’s not that with the Home app you have to wait 1 minutes to see how everything is at home, in a few seconds it has refreshed all the information, but with Home Assistant it’s something faster because you have only the favorite devices there.
If you’re hugging the Apple ecosystem but then you have a Garmin because you do sport but you don’t want an Apple Watch to be loaded every 2 days (see, I don’t want to open a melon in this podcast, to open melons of this type I already have the podcast of Running to NY where I spend my life scratching over sports watches, but today I think there are very few differences between an Apple Watch Ultra and a sports watch at the level of sensors and information. At the battery level it is clear, but at the connectivity level the Apple Watch Ultra is above all of them and allows you to go out to sport without carrying your mobile on and continue to connect and at the level of analysis and other t
We have apps for what we want), but the fact is if you want a round watch with which to do sport and not have to load every 2 days, you may have a Garmin on your wrist. And in that case, in ConnectIQ which is the Garmin app store there are several of them that support integration with Home Assistant. There are also some more specific ones like Philips Hue that allows you to turn on and off your lights, so if you have Philips Hue lights with your original bridge you can also manage them from there… but Home Assistant apps are interesting because they allow you to connect with your Home Assistant instance and see the devices you need. Like
with the Home Assistant app for the Apple Watch, you have to choose which devices you want to see in the Garmin app, but there are no problems and it works really well. The only but it has is that you must have the phone nearby, even if you have an 8 Pro Fenix with LTE connectivity or you are connected to the home wifi directly from the clock, if you don’t have the phone nearby it will not work as actually who makes the connection with Home Assistant is the phone.
I think this is a big shit. I’ve talked to some of the developers and they say it’s technically possible to do it by wifi but it would have a severe impact on the battery. It’s like the 8 Pro Phenix LTE, which is not only limited but if you go out without the phone to do sport and you are connected by LTE, the battery is reduced to 29 hours. Hey, 29 hours is more than the Apple Watch Ultra, but we’re not talking about weeks anymore, are we? Note that Apple certifies 14 hours in that same LTE + GPS mode… yes, 29 are double, but we are no longer talking about weeks with previous models. So, what does that mean of severe impact on the battery for having Home
Assistant always connected by wifi? Well, we don’t know, but you can’t, so you play fuck and have your phone close and on, of course.
The rest of the main brands of sports watches as can be Suunto, Choirs and Polar have no application store so it is not possible to manage the devices we have at home. We can get notifications from Home Assistant or Home because he’s gonna send us notifications from our phone but we can’t do anything with them.
Well, Suunto took out the Suunto 7 that Wear OS was wearing a few years ago and that was very annoying, as there’s a Home Assistant app for Wear OS… but it was kind of an experiment and it went off in the few years. If you still have it then congratulations as it is a very rare and difficult model to get, save it because in a few years it will be worth money, but it is true that the battery lasted very little for what is Suunto (even less than Apple Watch) and it seems that it did not have too many sales.
Polar doesn’t need to be told much more… but look, one thing that can be done with all of them is to integrate the clock data into the Home Assistant panel. It does not take them directly from the watch but from the corresponding website, Garmin Connect, Polar Flow, etc. This is useful for example to know if my Garmin is coming home and turning on the lights beyond being able to do it with your mobile phone, but you can also take data from the last training session and paint it on Home Assistant, daily steps, sleep hours, etc. A couple of years ago I published a chapter of the podcast where I told you how to change the alarm clock in Home Assistant that lights
I mean, if your watch said you didn’t sleep well and you didn’t load the batteries, I’d let you sleep a little more.
Pse, as a proof of concept can be interesting. I also integrated the BMW Connect data from my bike so that, if I was on reserve, I would sound the alarm clock 10 minutes before I had to go through the gas station before going to work. As proof of concept and see that it can be interesting, but you will already tell me why I want to have in Home Assistant the steps I have made today or the pulsations I have had in training this morning, it is a nonsense nonsense and prostitution the platform that should be focused on the management of the domotic devices.
Then we have the Amazfit sports watches, which is a new player in the market that is doing things very well. There are influences, youtubers and others that already use amazfit watches to train seriously. The Amazfit have a more Garmin-like battery duration and a very dynamic operating system called Zepp OS that is gaining a lot of ground and has an application store. For a couple of years, there is an official Home Assistant app for Zepp OS that can be installed for example on the TREX 3 PRO.
I hear this thing in the comparative is measured with the Phenix 8, huh? We’re not talking about a medium range but a watch with a sapphire and titanium screen of degree noseque, 1.5-inch screen, microphone, voice assistant, flashlight… all the shit we always ask for a sports watch with smartwach functions… but for 400 euretes, without paying the 1200 that costs the Phenix 8 Pro. You can also pay with it because it has NFC. With the Garmins too, but not with Suunto, Polar or Choirs. There is an NFC strap that can be put on any watch that uses 22mm straps, but it is not that you can pay with the watch if not with the strap, it is a cu implementation
It allows you to pay even if you don’t carry the cell, but in any case you’re not going to see the ticket on the watch or the paycheck or any of that.
In addition, the Amazfit are compatible with Alexa, so if you have devices connected to Alexa or have Alexa connected to Home Assistant using skills, you can also launch voice actions from the TREX or the models of the high-end Amazfit.
With the Samsung Galaxy Watch there are also not many problems as they wear Wear OS. Previously they had Tizen and there was some implementation based on connecting with Home Assistant through REST API, but with Wear OS there is no longer so much complication because there is official Home Assistant app for Wear OS. The same happens with other watches that use Wear OS such as the TickWatch, which in the sports world are not seen but had their market before Amazfit broke into the market as it is. I have a friend in Valencia who was planning to buy a TicWatch, but at the moment he’s wearing a Garmin Forerunner 965 because he’s become a gymbra.
I don’t know, as you can see… or listen, I don’t know how this is said in a podcast, there are Home Assistant integrations for many of the best-selling smartsticks. They have their limitations as not all have LTE connectivity in case you go out on the street without the mobile or have it off or whatever, they have their battery limitations, but with Home Assistant you can still integrate if you have a more or less common smartphone, especially with the Amazfit, Samsung, Garmin or any one with Wear OS.
However, if you don’t have Home Assistant and you only use HomeKit with the Apple House app or with Controller for Homeit, you need an Apple Watch. It’s clearly not the watch that the best battery has but as smartwatch is imbattile, for something it’s the most sold watch in the world.
In my case, that of running out in the morning without carrying keys and without the phone, being close to the portal and saying by the airpods without touching anything ‘Hey Lola, open the portal’ and that it opens… get to the door of home and it also opens… be locable in case something happens while I’m running, hear podcasts that are downloaded in real time by LTE, answer a message that comes to me while I’m running without touching the clock… that to me gives me life. And that said, today has nothing to envy a purely sports watch in terms of sensors, multi-band connectivity with GPS satlétites for route accuracy or apps to train and analyze the train
. So stop frying and, if you use HomeKit and the Home app, you start managing your home devices, Buy an Apple Watch.
