The first Thread-enabled motion sensor gives a glimpse of how much better the smart home can be

A smart home without sensors and automations is basically a remote controlled home. Using your voice or an app to turn on lights doesn’t get much easier (and in some cases more difficult) than flicking a light switch. Smart is when the light just turns on when you enter a room. But if you come in and she Not turn it on, that’s worse. That common smart home frustration is what the Eve Motion Sensor ($39.99) promises to fix with its shiny new onboard Thread protocol.

Thread is a mesh network protocol designed for the smart home. It claims to be faster, more reliable and more energy efficient than the current smart home protocols that most sensors run on – Bluetooth LE, Zigbee and Z-Wave. (Don’t buy Wi-Fi motion sensors. They’re no good.) While all of these protocols have mesh components, Thread’s selling point is that there’s no single point of failure in the form of a single hub or bridge that each device must have establish a connection.

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I have motion sensors all over my house from a number of manufacturers, all of which work to turn my lights on and off. I also use one to kickstart my morning routine. A sensor in my bedroom tells my kettle to start boiling, turns on the lights, plays my favorite radio station through a smart speaker, and adjusts the thermostat. I just have to get out of bed.

But my biggest complaints are that sometimes these sensors aren’t as fast as the flick of a switch, and sometimes they don’t work at all. This is often due to the way they communicate. In my two weeks with the Eve Motion I never had this problem. It worked quickly and responded reliably – as long as it was on my house’s thread network. When it switched to Bluetooth (which ran the previous Eve Motion), it was slower and less reliable.

The new Eve Motion is the second-generation motion sensor from the European smart home company. The biggest changes, aside from the addition of Thread, are size (it’s a lot smaller), price (it’s a bit cheaper), and a new additional sensor (it can now also measure light levels). It also uses two AAA batteries instead of two AAs, but battery life is still a year, according to Eve. It retains the previous model’s IPX3 water-resistant rating, so this is still a good option for use in a bathroom or covered porch.

Currently, Eve’s products only work on Apple’s HomeKit platform, so you’ll need an iPhone or iPad to set this up. You also need an Apple home hub (such as a HomePod or Apple TV) to create automations and scenes with Eve Motion. To use the new thread protocol, you need a HomePod Mini or Apple TV 4K (second generation or newer). Without one of these, the sensor works via Bluetooth LE.

When testing Eve Motion to trigger lights to turn on and off based on motion and lighting conditions in different rooms of my home—my laundry room, kitchen, dining room, and an upstairs hallway—the response time was impressive. It turned them on as soon as I walked in, even in the farthest corners of my home where Eve’s previous Bluetooth motion sensor struggled to keep up.

But while its responses were excellent, the Eve Motion isn’t noticeably faster than the Hue and Aqara motion sensors I’ve used. The big difference is that it has always worked. Both of these Zigbee-based sensors require a dedicated hub — that single point of failure I was talking about. Eve Motion uses thread, which – on a robust thread-mesh network – means it has backup options.

A threaded network can have multiple routers (smart plugs, smart bulbs) and border routers (Apple HomePod Mini, second-generation Apple TV 4K) working together to route messages to devices. If one goes down, the motion sensor can just talk to another. If my Hue bridge or Aqara hub gets disconnected or goes down, all my automations will stop working.

I tested Thread’s robustness by disabling and retesting the Eve Smart Plug and HomePod Mini that Eve Motion relied on. (I can see the Thread network topology in Eve’s app.) It kept working, and although the network took a few moments to reconfigure itself when a device went offline, I didn’t have to troubleshoot anything except a few times to wait seconds.

The only time I had other issues with Eve Motion was when I was disabled Everyone my thread devices. Then the sensor switched to Bluetooth and the reaction speed dropped dramatically – it took over five seconds in some places to react to movement.

Eve has announced that all of its Thread devices will support Matter when the smart home standard is released later this year. And when it arrives, there will be many more thread-border routers and devices Eve Motion can count on — including smart speakers from Google and Amazon. You can also use Eve’s motion sensor and its other Thread products with these smart home platforms when Matter launches. But for now, it’s just Apple HomeKit.

Setting up the Eve Motion was easy: open the Apple Home app or the Eve app and scan the HomeKit code. You can then set up automations with the sensor. The Home app will suggest a few for you depending on which room you placed them in. You can also create your own using Motion Detected or No Motion Detected as the trigger.

With the new LUX sensor in Eve Motion, you can also create automations based on the brightness in a room. For example, you can choose not to trigger lights on motion if the room is already bright enough. It can also be combined with smart blinds like Eve’s MotionBlinds to adjust the blinds based on the light level in the room.

Here I would have liked to see a temperature sensor – which is found in the Philips Hue sensor, this model’s closest competitor. I live in the south where it gets very hot and I like to create automations that close the blinds in a room when both the light level is high and the temperature rises above 78 degrees Fahrenheit. You could do this with Eve by adding an Eve Room or Eve Weather sensor, both of which detect temperature, but those cost $99 and $80 respectively, while the Hue motion sensor is $45.

Keep in mind that the more advanced automations work best when set up in the Eve app, since the Home app is limited in setting multiple conditions (unless you use the complicated Shortcuts workaround). The Eve app adds more options, e.g. B. triggering motions only when it’s dark, adjusting motion sensitivity (low/medium/high), and changing motion re-trigger time. The latter is helpful if you find that your lighting automations keep turning off earlier than you’d like.

Overall I was impressed with Eve Motion and can see how this kind of reliability and speed can make the smart home a better experience. But while there are more Thread Border Routers and compatible devices out there today than there were a year ago, there still aren’t enough to make this a definite recommendation. And thread border routers from different manufacturers still can’t talk to each other (although a fix is ​​coming).

If you don’t have a thread network set up at home, don’t buy this. Without a thread, Eve Motion falls back to Bluetooth LE, which isn’t nearly as fast or reliable as Zigbee or Thread. If you just want to toggle the lights on and off, you’re better off with the excellent Philips Hue Motion Sensor ($45 plus Hue Bridge). The Hue app offers much simpler automation options for lighting control and works with Apple’s HomeKit, Amazon Alexa, Google Home and Samsung SmartThings.

However, if like me you’re gearing your smart home up to work with Matter when the standard arrives later this year, this little device will be an excellent building block on which to build a truly smart home.

Photos by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge