Tim
Brilliant, a company that’s been producing smart home-related goods for nearly 10 years now, introduced a new gadget this week designed to turn your apartment into a smart apartment. I cringe saying that, but it’s actually pretty sweet. Let me explain.
Brilliant’s new plug-in Smart Home Control Panel requires no wiring, so it’s perfect if you rent, your home was built before neutral wires were commonplace (pre-1985), or if you’re simply uncomfortable with electrical work. All are justifiable reasons not to want to deal with it. With this new control panel, you’ll plug it into a wall outlet and get all of the same great benefits, which are as follows.
The list of services that are supported by this panel is long. It supports Ring devices, Sonos, Philips Hue, Google’s Nest products, Wemo, Samsung’s SmartThings, ecobee, TP-Link, Apple’s HomeKit, and more. Within those ecosystems are thousands of products, so a buyer is free to use whichever things they enjoy the most. They should all work perfectly fine via this panel.
The panel itself looks super slick. It has a dedicated touchscreen for accessing features and having a video camera’s feed stream to it. You can also set automations for your services on the panel. On the side, you have touch sliders for both volume controls when playing music and light brightness controls. There’s also a built-in camera and mic for intercom options should you really want to built out the experience.
The only real downside here is the cost of entry. It’s $399, which isn’t cheap. However, should the convenience of having zero installation be enticing, maybe it’s worth it.
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