First Look: For Now, Elgato’s Eve Smart-Home Gadgets Are More Intriguing Than Useful

In 2014 Apple announced HomeKit, the company’s smart-home platform that’s deeply integrated into iOS. Apple promised the ability to control lights, thermostats, locks, and even window shades, all from your iOS device using Siri.

But after that announcement, nothing seemed to happen: The platform seemed to stall for its first year, with almost no HomeKit products actually hitting the market. Now, finally, in the latter half of 2015, we’re beginning to see a trickle of new HomeKit-compatible accessories and devices.

For the past three weeks, I’ve lived with a few of them.

Specifically, I installed Elgato’s Eve Room ($80) in my living room, Eve Weather ($50) on my back porch, and Eve Door & Window ($40) on the door to my office. The first two devices are essentially mini weather stations, reporting on everything from humidity levels and current temperature to air quality (Eve Room) and atmospheric pressure (Eve Weather). Eve Door & Window keeps track of whether a door or window is open or closed.

In other words, they’re sensors that let you know what’s going on inside and outside your home. Trouble is, that’s about all they do.

Setup

To begin the setup process, you first need to download and install Elgato’s Eve app from the App Store.

That done, you can place the devices in your desired locations. Eve Room and Eve Weather can be placed on a flat surface, without the need of glue or nails; the door sensor requires (and comes with) some adhesive strips.

When things are in place and you launch the Eve app for the first time, it scans for nearby accessories using a Bluetooth connection. Once a compatible Eve device is discovered, you tap on its name to select it. You’re then asked to scan a HomeKit accessory code using the camera on your iOS device; that unique eight-digit code enables iOS to link it to your HomeKit account. You repeat the process for each accessory you’d like to add, naming and designating the room each one is in during the process.

This isn’t an onerous procedure: I was up and running with all three accessories within 10 minutes — and most of that time was spent deciding where to place the devices.

It’s all about the data

Once everything’s set up, the Eve app will display a list of all of the HomeKit accessories connected to your Apple ID — those made by Elgato and other manufacturers alike.

For example, I was able to see whether my Lutron Caséta lamp dimmers were on or off just as easily as I could view the current temperature in my living room as reported by the Eve Room, and all without having to open both the Eve and Lutron apps. But I could do the same thing with Lutron’s app; having access to all of your HomeKit devices — regardless of the specific app you’re using — is a key selling point for Apple’s platform.

Tapping on any listed item allows me to view more details (in the case of Elgato’s products) or toggle lights on or off (in the case of my Lutron accessories).

The Elgato app also tracks historical data for its accessories. For the Eve Room, I could view a graph of the temperature, air quality, and humidity in a room by hour, day, week, and month. That graph can also plot recent data against historical trends, enabling you to analyze and adjust accordingly.

For example, I always knew our living room was colder than the rest of the house during the colder months. But it wasn’t until I began using Eve Room that I realized it was sometimes four to five degrees colder than the hallway where our Nest thermostat resides. (Luckily, our living room also happens to be where our fireplace is; when a fire is going, it can get up to eight degrees warmer than the hall.)

Eve Room also measures air quality (in terms of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) as well as CO2. High levels of VOCs can lead to headaches or eye irritation, according to Elgato. And, indeed, if the warmer temperature wasn’t a sufficient indicator that the fireplace was burning, the fall in air quality from Excellent to Good would confirm it.

Using the Eve Weather, I was able to chart the outside temperature and compare it to the iOS weather app. It was convenient — fun, even — to know the temperature at my house and not at some weather station a few miles away.

I installed the $40 Eve Door & Window sensor on my office door to see how many times I enter or leave throughout the day. My findings: On average, my office door opens and closes 10 times during a typical workday. I’m not sure what to make of that number, other than I tend to open the door more frequently in the morning to refill my coffee mug.

Siri and remote access

Elgato opted to rely on Bluetooth connectivity for communications between your iOS device and the Eve hardware. The benefit is that you don’t have to install a special hub near your home network’s router, as other smart-home systems do. The downside is that devices must be within Bluetooth’s short range — Elgato claims that’s around 150 feet — in order to communicate with your iPhone or iPad.

The choice of using Bluetooth makes a difference when you try to access your Eve accessories when you’re away from home. As with other HomeKit accessories, such remote access requires a third-generation (or newer) Apple TV. In the case of Bluetooth-based accessories, that means they must be situated within Bluetooth range of the Apple TV.

I had a problem with that latter restriction. Sometimes I was able to ask Siri to tell me the current temperature at my house while I was out and about. But at other times, Siri had to ask me to try again later. This isn’t necessarily an issue with Elgato’s products; it’s more of an issue of kinks in HomeKit itself — I’ve had similar problems with Lutron’s accessories, even though they rely on one of those hubs.

The bottom line

If you’re fully invested in the HomeKit platform, Elgato’s Eve products could make fine additions to your smart home. But if you’re like me, with a mishmash of products ranging from WeMo to Nest, it’s frustrating that Eve is one more smart-home product that can’t talk to others.

For example, I’d love it if my Nest thermostat could talk to Eve Room and Eve Weather to gauge the temperature outside of the hallway where my Nest thermostat is located. But that’s just not possible right now, and may never be.

In fact, while the Eve app can receive data from other HomeKit devices, it (and the Eve hardware) can’t talk to them. When I asked an Elgato representative about this limitation, I was told an update with this added functionality is scheduled for the first quarter of 2016. Once such an update is released, you should be able to create events in other HomeKit devices, based on the status of an Eve device.

(It’s worth mentioning that Elgato has one product — Eve Energy — that’s more interactive, in the sense that it can turn anything that plugs in on or off. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to test Eve Energy, as it’s currently available only in Europe. Still, Eve Energy will be limited in functionality until the upcoming update.)

In the meantime, the Eve lineup can provide valuable data about your household. And, yes, it’s fun being able to ask Siri what the temperate is at your house. But until other HomeKit devices are able to use that data to automate other aspects of my home without any interaction from me, I’m not sold.