Belkin’s WeMo is a pretty decent set of home automation kit that covers light bulbs, switches, cameras, motion sensors and energy monitoring gear. It is possible to get it to play nicely with other equipment if you’re prepared to tinker with IFTTT but the company has finally released a new device, the WeMo Bridge, that lets you link various WeMo devices to Apple’s HomeKit ecosystem.
I’ve been road testing a bunch of home automation gear recently and have several WeMo devices around the house. But getting different flavours of home automation gear to play nicely instal that easy. Belkin has been talking about the WeMo Bridge for some time as demand for HomeKit-friendly gear has slowly ramped up.
The WeMo Bridge (currently listed on Belkin’s US site for US$39.99) connects to your router using an Ethernet connection and bridges the various devices into HomeKit. This is because the out-of-the-box WeMo kit doesn’t support HomeKit and can’t be firmware updated to achieve compliance.
There’s no word on local pricing yet but if you’ve already got some WeMo gear and are looking to integrate it with other HomeKit equipment this looks like a far easier solution than IFTTT or other automation platforms.
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