Take Control of Apple Home Automation

Use Accessories

Now we get to the real meat of the book: doing stuff with all this fancy equipment you bought! Thankfully, that’s pretty easy. In this chapter, I talk about basic control of accessories; I get into more advanced HomeKit features in subsequent chapters.

Note: Unless you Set Up a Home Hub, you can control your HomeKit accessories only when in range of them, which means either Bluetooth range (roughly 30 feet) or connected to your Wi-Fi router.

Check Accessory Status

At the top of both the Home and Rooms screens in the Home app is a status bar with icons that display status messages (Figure 15).

Figure 15: Home’s status messages ...