HomePod alarm sound

We’ve mentioned on several occasions that Aqara’s bridge can act as a connected alarm. It’s not as robust and reliable an alarm as those from traditional security companies, but it can serve as a first line of defense against burglars. In this post we’ll see how to route the alarm sound through the HomePod so it sounds much louder. It’s clear that if the burglar is somewhat skilled and cuts the power the moment they get in (the circuit breakers are usually right next to the front door), well then there goes any sound or Internet connection you were counting on, although some people set up a Raspberry Pi with a 4G card and a UPS for this purpose… but what can I say, there’s nothing that valuable in my house to justify going through all that trouble. Even so, just with a few sensors, or with Aqara’s bridge and sensors, we can get it to work as a connected alarm, so we can arm the alarm when we leave home and, if some condition is met—like a door or window opening, or the motion sensor detecting something, etc.—the alarm will start blaring like crazy, and on top of that we’ll get a notification on our phone. If you’re podcast listeners, we already covered this topic and how to activate the alarm on Aqara’s bridge in episode 13 of the Domótica Compatible podcast.

The problem: Aqara’s M2 bridge only has an internal speaker

Activating the alarm with Aqara’s M1 and M1S bridge is a very simple task that works quite well since they come with a small built-in speaker that, while it won’t produce a 100-decibel blast, can still act as something of a deterrent for burglars. However, now that I have Aqara’s M2 bridge I’ve realized that its speaker is a joke, it’s not even external, so you can only hear the alarm if you’re right next to the thing and practically press your ear against it… which I doubt burglars would do, and if they did, instead of getting scared they’d probably crack up laughing. Buuut we have a solution for the alarm sound if we have this bridge: using the HomePod (either the classic or the mini) as the alarm speaker.

The solution: Routing the alarm sound through the HomePod

Actually we can use this method as long as we have some sensor that can act as a trigger, it doesn’t have to be Aqara’s bridge. If we have Philips Hue’s motion sensor which costs around €30, Eve’s which is a bit pricier but supposedly can detect pets, or the door/window sensors from Eve and Onvis respectively, we can make the HomePod sound an alarm if they detect something… but we could also make the alarm go off if, for example, a leak sensor detects that the sink pipe is leaking or that we’ve overfilled the pool (not my case, I only have bathtubs and they’re not that big), have the house lights turn blue and have the HomePod play ‘Singin’ in the rain’! Okay, I’m rambling, but we can make it go off with any sensor we have that’s HomeKit-compatible and shows up in the Home app. The setup is very simple, we just need to open the Home app, go to automations to create a new one, and for the condition set it to ‘When a Sensor Detects Something’. Here we’ll directly see the available sensors, in my case I get the smoke detector, the motion sensors, the door-open sensors, and the leak sensors. Clicking on the one we want, say the door sensor, will give us the option to choose whether we want the alarm to sound when the door opens or when the door closes… obviously when the door opens, I don’t see the point of the other option, but anyway… we can also set the ‘When’ here in case we only want to activate it at night for example, and the People condition, in case we only want it active when nobody’s home. Clicking Next will show us all our devices so we can choose what we want to happen when the previous action occurs, and here we select the HomePod… with which we can tell it ‘Play Audio’ and we’ll move on to a screen to choose the Sound. Obviously we’re not going to put on JoseLuis Perales when someone breaks into the house at night, no matter how sad his songs are, but the HomePod doesn’t give us the option to choose sound effects or alarms, only Apple Music tracks… but wait, there are some sound effect albums on Apple Music, so we just need to search for one of these albums. I usually use one called Alarms: Sound Effects, you can search for it directly in the window that opens for choosing music since it lets you choose from your library or search Apple Music. I’ve got one set called Alarm, Car which is that typical car alarm sound… there’s also that beep-beep sound old alarms used to make when you disarmed them from the remote… and I swear I want to use that one somewhere, but I still haven’t found where! These sounds are very shrill and last just a few seconds, so remember to select the Repeat option so it doesn’t stop, and the Custom Volume option, that way you can crank it up as loud as you want, always with your neighbors’ permission and their tolerance for heart attacks, of course. We can also tell it to turn off after X minutes just like we do in any other automation.

Watch out for the location!

The good thing about this automation is that you don’t have to arm and disarm it like a conventional alarm or like we do with Aqara’s bridge, you just need to set the conditions correctly. If we tell it to sound at night when nobody’s home, it means it’ll go off if the door opens at night and none of the devices belonging to the people we’ve added in the Home app are nearby. For example, I have my wife’s iPhone, my eldest son’s iPhone, and my other kids’ tablets. But what happens if, say, we go out to eat and the little ones’ iPads are at home? The alarm won’t sound because it thinks someone’s home… and what happens if I remove these iPads from the condition and tell it to only consider whether my iPhone and my wife’s are away from home? Well then, if one of my younger kids stayed behind with the grandparents, a babysitter, or I simply went down to take out the trash and the kid was left alone for that minute and a half… as soon as they open the door it’s going to start blaring like crazy. Keep in mind that the Home app doesn’t take ‘being home’ literally, for the Home app it means you’re within a zone that’s usually around 200m radius… so if we go down to the park below our house the app will probably still think we’re home, there’s no way to add a condition like being connected to the Wi-Fi. So, as soon as we all head home and enter the geographic area that Home considers «home,» the alarm will deactivate… or it should, because this doesn’t always work smoothly—if you’re driving, for example, and pull into the garage without coverage, it’s easy for it to not catch on, and as soon as you open the door your house turns into a light and sound show. We should also keep in mind that we can activate the notification directly on the sensor, not for the specific automation, so we can tell the door sensor, for example, to notify us if the door opens and we’re not home… this way we’ll know the alarm is going off because the door opened even if we don’t get a direct notification saying AAAH AAAH ALARM GOING OFF, WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!! Next week I’ll tell you how to do this with the Aqara, which gives us a bit more flexibility since we can link multiple sensors (say, door open plus motion sensor) and lets us arm and disarm the alarm in the classic way, even giving us a few seconds’ grace period to leave the house before the alarm activates.