I went a little Aqara crazy over the last few months. For years, I had a combination of Blink and Wyze cameras but as I moved fuirther itno the Apple system, I discovered HomeKit and Matter and decided that’s what I wanted for my home system.
This past fall, I jumped head first into Aqara products to intergrate with my Apple TV Thread Border Router. First, I grabbed a bunch of camera including two G5 Pro Cameras, three Y100 kits, five G100 cameras, and a G410 Doorbell camera. Most of these write to an SSD (or internal memory) that’s also connected externally to my USBSHARE port on my Synology NAS.
Since I didn’t want to suffer the resolution degradation that Apple imposes, I kept most of these cameras out of HomeKit and, of course. HKSV also. I have a nightly script that runs to push aqara video files from my Synology NAS to a local MAC where I’ll do my analysis and culling if needed.
Given that the cameras are not in HomeKit, I’m using GlanceCam on my MAC and a couple of different CCTV apps on my AppleTV to view the RTSP video feeds.
I also decided to grab the M3 Hub along with the U100 Smart Lock since I felt it was the best match for me.
Lightbulbs were next followed by a couple dozen sensors including a bunch of Aqara Temperature and Humidity Sensors, Weather Leak Sensors, and Magnetic Contact (Door and Window) sensors. And some Aqara mini-switches.
I’m surprisingly happy with everything. The connectivity issues were almost non-existant and everything been solid so far. I still need to get a couple of the new FP400 Presence sensors and I’m very excited to get a few of the new G350 cameras. Those will make nice replacements for my G3’s.
This has been expensive so far but lots of fun and I’m no longer limited by those prior systems that I am replacing.
