Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Aqara Camera Hub!”.
This video is sponsored by acara, the all-new iphone 12 lineup, officially out everyone’s talking about what accessories they’ll pick up, but there’s one must-have accessory that you might not have thought of, and it might be the most important one yet so weird flex, uh spidey’s a buddy Of mine uh, but he’s got other things to do then fly all the way out to california, to you know, check out my office, but security is like stupid, important, it’s something you don’t always think about until you need it, so i want to show you guys Some really cool things you can do to keep your place secure without breaking your bank, so some smart home products like generally make me laugh with just ridiculousness of them. I mean i’ve seen pans that are smart, that need software updates. Not everything in the home needs to be smart and the things that do sometimes can be a complicated, convoluted mess trying to figure out ecosystems how to get things to work. If you want to set up automations, you almost need to know scripting for some of these platforms. It can become just really complicated to figure out how to do and how to work.
It’S like homekit’s been a thing and it’s been growing and getting better, but with like the new iphone 12 lineup particular ios 14, i feel like homekit, has kind of grown up as a really solid, smart home platform. I think, especially when it comes to secure video. It’S almost unrivaled, so if you haven’t heard of akara, i think they’re becoming a pretty big household name. They’Re, really leaning into making a ginormous commitment to home.
Kits all their smart products are kind of ideal for pairing, with it they’re most known for their smart cameras and home security cameras that they have in home monitoring. You can substitute the akara setup for sort of other home kit things if you want, but showing you how powerful homekit can be acara sort of the perfect example. So first you’re going to need an icloud account. It’S going to sort of leverage that storage and if you’ve got the 200 gigabyte plan, and you want to store more than say, 10 hours of video and add more than one camera.
You’Re gon na have to upgrade to the two terabyte option: that’s 9.99 a month, but at least with that you won’t really have to worry about running out of storage. So also it’s worth noting that if you didn’t want to worry about cloud storage and wanted to just save everything locally, you do have the option to save everything, to a microsd card which just goes right into the bottom of the camera. So the list of homekit compatible cameras is growing, but for this example we’re going to use the acara camera hub g2h, it’s a super tiny camera allows you to record and stream a really crystal clear, 1080p image. Typically, with other cameras, you’ll see this sort of super choppy it’ll, look like crazy, low res, and sometimes it’s just not usable, especially if you want to see like somebody’s face about this you’re gon na be able to get a crystal clear picture in both daytime and Nighttime, due to the infrared sensor, that’s built in so, and just a heads up here as well, the cameras don’t have a battery in them, so you do have to plug them in with micro usb.
So i think another big perk to using a car over like the tons of other cameras out there, is that inside of the app they use an event timeline. It automatically will mark events for you so like if you pair this system with other car products like the door, sensors window, sensors motion, sensors flood detectors really anything like that. They work together to mark these events. You can conveniently just click on the dot and go right to the event having to sort of scrub through hours of footage.
So now, like i just mentioned, arcara, does sell other smartphone products, so you can just buy one kit to get everything started. So the appropriately named starter kit does come with a hub, but with their new g2h camera you don’t need a separate hub anymore, as actually the cameras act as their own hub for the entire cara suite or for other home kid enabled products. It’S all that high-res video is is great and fine, but you can find that anywhere and where i think the acara system and really where it leverages homekit and the strength of homekit uh is in the end-to-end encryption. I’M about you. But when i see these security cameras that are selling for 15 with a limited cloud recording, it raises red flags for me as to where the information and where my video is going so with homekit and the encryption you control, what the network sees and really as Far as you can trust, any company i feel like apple is one of the ones you can trust the most with your information, if you’re not familiar setting, all this up is really easy, and for most home kit stuff, you can set up right inside of the Home kit, app with your car stuff – that’s no exception, but you can also set them up. In addition, inside of the car app itself – and it’s really easy – it’s a qr code, you scan it and when you do that, you’ll also get additional features that are outside of sort of that home kit suite if you decide to use them so like, for example, You can use the camera as intercom speaker and, if you set it up inside of the acara app it’ll automatically be inside of your home kit app when you open that up. So all this stuff is awesome, but the big question, i think, is: why does it matter like? Why would somebody want this uh? The first answer is it’s really cool? I mean i’m like that’s true.
It’S fun to have all this stuff set up and and working and as somebody who’s had, let’s just say, security issues. I’Ve had my studio be robbed. A few years ago, at the old technobuffalo offices, my parents, home, got broken into last year.
There’S legitimate security concerns that this setup can help address. For example, a motion detector outside can trigger a light upstairs in your room that make potential robber or somebody with bad intentions, think somebody’s home. It could set off an alarm or it can alert you there’s a lot of practical uses for this as well. If you’ve got kids, it goes beyond a security being able to see if your kids are coming home from school. If they’re coming home on their own checking in on your dog, checking in on your grandparents, whatever it might be, it gives you extra functionality and it’s not just smart for smart sick. Like i said you can customize the system to work for you.
So for me i have outdoor cameras, i have indoor cameras, i have motion sensors and smart plugs at my house, and homekit makes it really easy to sort of set up those automations and those things that might seem complicated to set up are really simple. Inside of the homekit app that’s kind of why i’ve been drawn to what acara is offering and doing because integrates so easily with homekit. If you have no experience whatsoever with automations or smart home stuff, you can figure this out in just a matter of seconds and get your home and your office wherever you want to set this up, working and working really well, so whatever your home or work setup Is there’s some version of a smart home or some piece of kit? That’S going to make things easier and better for you, sort of the beauty of these platforms and one like home kit is that there’s so many options out there for different things? Maybe you just want a camera, maybe you want a motion sensor or a water detector, because your bathroom floods, whatever it might be, there’s a choice for you and sort of this misnomer that home automation is complicated and hard to do and also expensive is really no Longer the case, so i encourage you to check it out.
If you want to learn more about the acara products and stuff, i talked about here i’ll link to them all down below happy home setup. .