Today I want to talk to you about the smart watches for children of Xplora. Well, they’re not really smart watches, you can’t install messaging apps or games or anything like that… see, there’s some way to flash it and change the original firmware… just like at some point I’m planning to get you into HAA or Mongolose or something so sure you can… but the thing is, These watches are very interesting for children who are still too small to give you a mobile phone but we want you to be able to call us at some point, know their location and so on… but the best of all is that you pu
You integrate with Home Assistant and from there pass it to HomeKit. I tell you more in detail:
Introduction of the Problem
As you know, I I have hundreds of children.. The eldest is 18 years old, the next 12… but the youngest are 11 and 9, respectively. The two older people already have their own mobile phone with the relevant Apple Use Time restrictions, the ban under threat of paternal couple do not register on social networks until the 14 that I remind you is the minimum age in Spain so that a minor can give up his personal data say what the social network says… and the truth is that all this at home I take him to rajatabla, surely for many years working in CyberSecurity and writing articles about privacy
d. This I do not know if I have told you, but for a lot of years I have been writing articles on cybersecurity and privacy focused on parents in the Internet portal Safe Vodafone. But, anyway, this article is not a collaboration paid for either by Vodafone or by the people of Xplora.
The thing is, when we go down to the street with my little kids, as we live in a relatively safe and quiet area both here and in Valencia’s apartment, the children go to the park to play and we stay in the cafeteria for a drink. And well, it’s true that they come from time to time, but if you don’t see them going past the table, you worry a little bit, especially when it starts to get dark and people start going little by little from the park.
Sometimes I’ve even left an AirTag for them to carry in their pocket and have them located, which more or less saw their location if someone was passing by with a mobile phone, but We bought them some walkie talkies last summer and now we get them every time we go down.. They’re really useful and they go great to talk to them, to let them know that we get home and so on. Walkies go to batteries and use standard radio frequency, they’re not children’s walkies, much less, they’re one of those recommended for mountain trips and things like that.
But of course, If they get too far away or run out of batteries… because you don’t hear them.. There in Valencia, in the urbanization where we have the apartment is the beach, near the sports where we play the paddle and so on and sometimes we are at one point and they are at another and the radio coverage of the walkie does not reach.
The thing is, by any chance, A few months ago I gave with the devices of Xplora who spoke to you. It’s not really a smart watch because you can’t do anything about it, but This is a digital bracelet watch with a mobile phone SIM. This SIM allows you to make life-long calls via GSM telephony and send text messages to the Xplora app, not even using GSM technology to send SMS or something, but the messages reach the Xplora app. The watch itself is a digital watch as I told you before with a mont?
? n of watchfaces you can customize, you can change colors, put a background photo, it has Wifi connectivity for when you’re home or in a known wifi and you don’t want to spend data, etc.,
Apart from this, it carries the message app that I was telling you, an app that tells you how long it’s going to make, a very useful little calculator if your son or daughter doesn’t learn the multiplication tables… and nothing else. Can’t install anything on the watch with the original firmware nor can anyone be added to the contact list, which is what is most cool: this contact list is managed by you who are the father, mother, tutor, tutor, tutor from your mobile, so if you just add your phone and your partner’s phone on the contact list, you’re only gonna be able to call you, anyone else. It’s like the walkie- talkie but with Movistar coverage in my ca
So he can call you wherever he is.
In addition, the device shares the location with the Xplora app, so from the app you can see at all times where your child’s device is.
He has others. interesting functions like ‘school mode’ where you can configure that you don’t receive calls or messages or anything. Or just get calls from you in case anything happens, but it’s normal for you to call school in any case… During school mode you can also not open the calculator or the small chusquera camera it carries, it is all locked, it has the digital watch and little more. He’s also counting the steps. You can put movement challenges on your son who’s getting medals like Apple Watch and little more. You can define safe geolocation areas so that if our son comes out of
that safe area, the park or whatever, automatically sends us a warning, which can be useful. It’s a bit of a threat to your privacy, it reminds me of the anklets that come out in the movies that explode if you leave the perimeter allowed, but good.
Oh, and He’s got an alarm. of the others, of which they make an alarm, which is interesting for the management of the notices of their out-of-school, wakes up in the morning, etc. Okay. and has IP68 protection So you can take a shower with it or dive it up to and a half feet deep for a maximum of 30 minutes… but what you want me to tell you, the best thing is to take it off to take a bath in the pool or in the sea just in case… and, in addition, under the water, you know the waves don’t spread, so we won’t have a real-time location or we can easily call it.
In any case, in the Xplora app there are two models, the XGo3 which is the most basic of the connected watches and which costs about €80 and the X6Play that costs about €140. My daughter was brought with her majesties by the east magi kings, the one of 140 €, good thing they brought it and I didn’t have to pay it. At the moment, they are cheaper on the official Xplora website than Amazon or any other site.
For me, The most interesting thing was to be able to call them if we’re in the park or if they take you away somewhere, but the truth is that what I’m using most right now is the real-time location… and I’m using it because I’ve integrated it with Home Assistant.
There is integration into HACS, you know, the Home Assistant’s unofficial alternative supplement shop that, once installed, allows us to login on the Xplora portal and access the clock data. It is not a local integration, here neither MQTT nor bluetooth tracker or milks, it only connects to the device through the Xplora service, but the truth is that integration works very well. It brings all the clock information to Home Assistant, so We can see the battery left to the device. and send an alert to us
if you have little battery left as we have already spoken, I remind you that we already talked about automation to receive a notification when we have some low battery device in both Home Assistant and HomeKit, we can also see the steps he’s made, whether he’s in a safe area or not and, more importantly, the location where you are, so we get that Home Assistant Map tab and we can see in real time where our child’s device is.
You know that I use Home Assistant as a universal bridge until Apple touches my nose But, when I integrate some new mess like this, I like to leave it all perfect in case at some point I have to manage it from this platform, so I have added the device to the low battery notifications and I have added on the map all the usual areas where my children can be so from a quick look it tells me if they are at school, at home, at paddle or wherever, you do not need to open the map to see it. Very cool, I’m telling you.
Once we have it in Home Assistant, it’s very easy to take it to HomeKit as if it were a light bulb, so in HomeKit I have put the name Carla and I have put it in the fake room I have called People, so I ‘light’ between quotes that light bulb when Carla is at home and I turn it off when she’s out of home, so if I’m out, with a simple look at the house app, I see the lights I have on in the house app with the family names and I know if they are at home or not.
Yeah, some of you will think privacy… already if that. But I’m fucking the father. Well, at least I love them as if they were mine. I already have the elders in Apple’s Search Service and they are perfectly aware, in fact they also use it and they have ever presented one of my children in a Get Ready With Me that I already told you about or while my wife and I were having a coffee on the street to see if he could sit down, No one has ever complained about privacy… not even Yago, the eldest, who is this year 17 years old and that the Search service has ever helped us to get his mobile back when he had been olvid
or on not what paddle track. When you are of age I will give you the chance to leave the family group to keep your privacy safe I wouldn’t have liked my father to show up somewhere dark where he was in the back seat of my Motoretta bike with my girlfriend, but if they decided to get out they know they’d run out of iCloud Family services and have to pay for their own shopping and backup. I’m like the parents’ Google, I give you all this in exchange for your data.
I’m telling you, the device itself is not cheap but it can save us some disgust. Don’t buy it because if you don’t have the real need, huh? In my case, my children have quite a lot of autonomy and freedom and sometimes they say they go down to the Chinese to buy a card, but I know it’s not the case in all the families and it may not solve any need for you.
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