Anyone who doesn’t have a smart home of their own will be used to getting up and walking to a nearby switch, so this is really the same thing.īut the magnetic mount means that they can also easily remove the iPad from the bookshelf and keep it next to them on the sofa, just as long as they remember to put it back on to charge afterwards.
The location of the control panel – between living room and winter garden – makes it as convenient as normal light switches. The only way out is to triple-click it again and enter the passcode, so if they don’t know that, the Home app is all they can use. You then just open the Home app and triple-click the Home button to lock it into the app. This lets you set a passcode (which I kept the same as the iPad one). Settings > General > Scroll down to Learning > Guided Access > On. Third, I set the iPad to never power down: Settings > Display & Brightness > Auto-Lock > Never.įourth, I made sure the Favorites in the Home app only had things they will actually need to control, which means that all Scenes and devices are visible on a single screen.įinally, I wanted to ensure visitors could only use the Home app, so I used Guided Access to achieve this. If I were wall-mounting it instead, I’d have used a cable raceway to hide the cable from site, but in this case it was already hidden by the bookshelf. Second, I needed a 10-foot long Lightning cable, to reach from the nearest power socket and go behind the bookshelf. This has a metallic sticker you affix to the back of the iPad, and a magnet you fix to the wall. Set upįirst, I got a magnetic mounting kit to attach the iPad to a wall – or, in our case, the end of a bookshelf. They aren’t worth that much these days, so that made it a pretty economic option to repurpose it as a home control panel. Which was when I realised we had a spare iPad. When I got my 12.9-inch iPad, Steph inherited my 10.5-inch one – leaving her old iPad Air surplus to requirements.
Which means we may not be here when they arrive, leading to the potential that – for whatever reason – they find they can’t control anything. To add to the complications, we’re planning on doing either apartment swaps for holidays, or using a service like Trusted Housesitters to have someone take care of the cats while we’re away. And even if they have an iPhone, you need to authorize them and de-authorize them afterwards.
They of course need an Apple device to run it, so Android owners are out of luck. Then when we want a lot of light, aka the overhead lights, we can just say ‘Siri, switch on the dining room lights.’Įqually, setting up guests with access to the Home app isn’t entirely straightforward. We also had to invent some non-existent rooms to assist.įor example, we have a lot of Hue lighting in the living room, so for the two overhead lights we decided to put them in a fictitious room called the Dining Room (which in reality is combined with the living room). And we have a lot of them!Įven for us, it took some effort and experimentation in naming lights before we could reliably remember what they were all called. Siri is tricky for guests because you have to know what all the devices are called. I mostly control smart home devices via Siri, and even Steph has become a convert to the idea since we got HomePods.īut while both Siri and the Home app make things very simple for us, things are trickier for guests – which is why I decided to put an old iPad to work …