HomePod OS 16.3 Has Been Released And It Activates Hidden Climate Sensors… Here’s What That Looks Like For You
Today Apple released HomePod OS 16.3. And part of that release includes code to active climate sensors that have been hidden in the HomePod mini since the day that they were released in 2020. I believe that Apple intends that these will be used to monitor the temperature and humidity in rooms, and run automations based on that. I just updated my HomePod minis and here’s what I saw.
First of all, I noted that it took about 30 minutes per HomePod mini to update which is a bit longer than I was used to. I have four HomePod minis and I did the update on all of them at the same time to save some time. During the update, I noted a new tab was added to the Home app:
There’s now a Climate tab that allows you to see what the HomePod mini is detecting in terms of temperature and humidity. But once the update was completed, I wasn’t able to use this right away. Instead I saw this:
All the temperature and humidity sensors were in a “calibrating” state. That took about 30 minutes to complete. After that, I was able see this:
Now I don’t have anything like HomeKit compatible fans or anything of the sort. So I can’t use for anything useful myself. Other than perhaps ask Siri what the temperature is in a room. But if you have a HomeKit compatible fan or something of the sort, you can leverage that to turn on a fan if the temperature is too high, or turn on a HomeKit compatible humidifier if the humidity is too low. For what it’s worth, this information will also show up in widgets on the Home Screen in a summary format. Finally, I should note that the new HomePod that Apple is releasing shortly, which I can’t figure out why it exists, has similar functionality. And it is a safe bet that those will ship with 16.3 installed from the factory.
So is this new functionality in the HomePod mini something that you will leverage? Please leave a comment and share your thoughts.
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