Aqara’s smart home products have long been insider tips: they’re powerful, compatible with all common smart home platforms, and extremely affordable. But the insider status actually ended from February 2022 Amazon’s Aqara Store logged in An overview that includes a competition.
Aqara: smart home in good and cheap
The Aqara brand has been around since 2016. The name derives from the Latin words “acutulus” (intelligent) and “ara” (home). So Aqara means Smart Home. The parent company Lumi United Technology Co., Ltd. is a member of the Connectivity Standards Alliance, which developed the IoT Zigbee protocol and the Matter protocol, which will be even more universal in the future.
Aqara offers these products
Aqara Offers smart home components from the security camera with and without a hub to different types of sensors (motion, air quality, vibration) to light sources, door locks and switches to control other smart home components.
Aqara understands Apple HomeKit, Google Home and Amazon Alexa
Aqara components can be used through the internal Aqara Home platform, as long as they are hub from the manufacturer is available online. Alternatively, Aqara components can also be used via Apple (HomeKit), Google (Home) and Amazon (Alexa) platforms. Additionally, IFTTT, Alice, and Marusya IoT standards are supported.
Aqara Camera Hub G3: security camera with AI for 89.99 euros
A current highlight in the Aqara portfolio is the G3 camera hub for 89.99 euros. It’s an Aqara (Zigbee 3.0) home hub and security camera in one. With the integrated hub, up to 128 additional Aqara components can be integrated and the AI security camera always has an eye on the apartment, house or yard.
Cloud or local storage
The integrated camera records videos through a CMOS sensor (1/2.8″) in “2K” (1296p), 720p or VGA with 20 FPS (via HomeKit: 1080p). The field of view of the optics of f/2.0 aperture camera is 110° Users can not only upload the event-related 12-second video recordings to the cloud, but also store them locally on a microSD memory card with a capacity of up to 128 GB or on Synology NAS systems For European customers, data is stored in the EU in accordance with GDPR.
Because the camera can rotate on its mount (340° horizontally, 30° up, 15° down), the entire environment can be observed. Users can control the camera manually through the app or save up to five routes it follows. Recordings are also possible at night, thanks to the eight 940nm infrared lamps and optics.
Local AI recognizes people, animals and gestures
The Aqara Camera Hub G3 uses AI to detect and identify movements, people, faces, pets or sounds like a baby crying and can track people or pets with the camera. The security camera is not dependent on the cloud because the built-in SoC has two fast 1.2 GHz Cortex-A7 cores and a NPU coprocessor with 0.5 TOPS.
AI is not only used for targeted video recording, but can also trigger person-specific actions in the smart home: for example, turning off the alarm system when residents arrive home. Thanks to the infrared transmitter, the target of such an action does not necessarily have to be another smart home product: classic stereo systems, for example, can also be controlled via the Camera Hub G3, as long as the IR signal can reach they.
Win two Aqara Camera Hub G3
Aqara is offering two community members a chance to win an Aqara Camera Hub G3 security camera.
Anyone who announces in the comments thread up to and including May 16, 2022 which current smart home setup they would integrate the security camera into can throw their ticket into the pot. The post must include the hashtag. #Aqara Contains. Otherwise, ComputerBase’s general sweepstakes entry rules apply. Winners will be announced on May 17, 2022.
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