Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Smart Home

Nanoleaf adds Thread to HomeKit support for Shapes, Elements, and Lines smart lights

Simon Sage
By

Nanoleaf is patching its Thread-capable smart lights to include support for Apple HomeKit. The update is rolling out today for the company’s Shapes, Elements, and Lines products. Now you can manage the Thread network through your iPhone, iPad, or Mac using HomeKit.

Beyond Apple, the addition of Thread over HomeKit to the Nanoleaf suite also sets the stage for Matter, a smart home application layer that will span multiple manufacturers. This whole update is good news for interoperability.

Thread is a mesh wireless standard that aims to reduce response times and ditch separate hardware hubs in the smart home. Thread is built on IPv6, so it’s using the same language your Wi-Fi router is already talking in. The mesh nature of the network means the more Thread devices you have at home, the stronger the network gets. Messages hop from one device to the next until they reach their destination. If one device leaves the network, it’s no biggie as data can just flow through another. The standard is built very specifically for low-energy, always-on devices, even those that are battery-powered.

Related

These three families of Nanoleaf lights already had Thread border routing as of a few months ago. This allows them to effectively be the hubs that connect the rest of your Thread smart home devices to your home Wi-Fi network. To exist at all, Thread networks need a border router to do this job, and the pool of devices able to do it is still relatively small. Having a few extra border routers is helpful for redundancy.  There’s a lot more to how Thread works, if you’re curious.

Recommended Videos

On the whole, being able to manage your Thread network through HomeKit should offer quite a bit of convenience. To update your existing Nanoleaf lights, tap the More icon in the bottom-right of the Nanoleaf app, and check Firmware Updates.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Simon Sage
Simon Sage
Contributor
Simon has been publishing in tech since before the first iPhone was released. When he's not busy lighting a candle for the…
6 HomeKit settings you should disable (or adjust) right now
A white HomePod mini sitting on a desk.

With the Homepod Mini being so accessible and rumors swirling that a new version of the Homepod may be coming soon, HomeKit has started to grow in popularity. Apple is typically touted as one of the better companies for keeping information secure, but you can always do more.

Whenever you ask Siri a question or to make a command, information is sent to Apple concerning your request. While Apple does its best to hide unique information about you, it still collects contact information, music preferences, smart home usage statistics, and more. Although Apple even goes as far as to delete information it collects from you after six months, there are settings you can disable (or adjust) to minimize the amount of personal data Apple has access to.

Read more
HomeKit Secure Video: Why it’s great and why you should use it
Customers inspect the new Apple HomePod at an Apple Store on February 9, 2018 in San Francisco, California.

Apple's HomeKit Secure Video is a year or two late to the smart security party, but the company made sure it arrived with plenty of skills, customizations, and algorithmic expertise.

Jumping on the HomeKit bandwagon, HomeKit Secure Video is an Apple-exclusive monitoring suite that you can get access to through an iCloud+ subscription. Offering a range of impressive surveillance features, instant notifications, and geofencing abilities, HomeKit Secure Video checks all the boxes when it comes to safeguarding your home, business, and personal data.

Read more
Apple’s Home app redesign is just what HomeKit needs
Apple HomeKit ecosystem

One of the biggest announcements of WWDC 2022 is that the Apple Home app is getting a much-needed ground-up redesign.

The new app changes how you navigate through the app and organize accessories, but the most important change is that you can now see your entire home from a single view. There's no more jumping between menus to check things -- you can view every connected device, including multiple camera views, from within a single page.

Read more