Smart home accessory maker Netatmo today announced that its Weather Station now supports Apple HomeKit. With a firmware update, owners of the Weather Station since the 2016 model revision will be able to start interacting with their sensors in the Apple Home app and with Siri voice commands through the HomeKit integration.
The Weather Station exposes the following data to HomeKit: indoor and outdoor humidity, temperature, indoor CO2 level, and indoor air quality. If you have additional beacon modules for other rooms, that info will also be part of the HomeKit home.
As of iOS 13, all of these different sensor services will be grouped into a single tile. With iOS 13.2 currently in beta, users will be able to ungroup the services and represent each supported sensor inside the Netamo Weather Station with a separate tile of information.
In addition to viewing the data in the Home app, you can, of course, ask Siri for this information. You’ll be able to ask questions like ‘what is the temperature in the living room?’ to your iPhone, iPad, HomePod, Apple TV, and Apple Watch. Netatmo’s HomeKit integration also extends to automations. Users will be able to trigger automations based on changes to CO2 or air quality.
Due to limitations in the HomeKit protocol, some features of the Netatmo Weather Station cannot be exposed to HomeKit and users will still have to go to the Netatmo app to find out certain statistics. Sensors currently unavailable in HomeKit include noise levels, atmospheric pressure, wind, and rain. Netatmo is committed to adding support for these particular data metrics if and when the Apple Home app supports them.
HomeKit integration is supported by Netatmo Weather Stations manufactured since 2016. You can read about why it took so long to get it rolled out in the company’s blog post. The company had to make significant hardware and software modifications to the unit to be able to support the HomeKit protocol and be authorized by Apple.
