HomeKit Compatible Aqara Cube Announced

Aqara seem to have overcome one obstacle with one of their more popular smart devices, The Aqara Cube, and seemingly managed to make it officially HomeKit Compatible! This shouldn’t be a surprise under normal circumstances, as there’s already a similar product that has been available for some time, namely the Nanoleaf remote, which can do similar things, albeit on a slightly more basic level.

If you’re not familiar with the Aqara Cube, it’s a trigger device that uses gyroscope technology to determine which way up the cube is (and therefore which of the six faces are placed downward) in order to then trigger an automation or scene. With the amount of control available with the Cube – flip (90º and 180º), push, rotate, and shake – then the result of getting it into HomeKit, to trigger scenes and automations, is all the more impressive. Still, it’s not clear as to whether these specific types of movement are exposed to HomeKit, and it could be the case that each side flipped registers with HomeKit, but specific movements like rotate, shake and slide could be reserved for the Aqara Home app alone.

The new Cube, dubbed the Aqara Cube T1 Pro, uses Zigbee 3.0 and as a result, will most likely only work with the newer Zigbee 3.0 hubs. The new cube, although on the surface, the same, now sports different markings on each of the six surfaces, with each marking resembling a series of dots you might find on a set of dice. This in itself will certainly make identifying the different sides easier.

The company states that a firmware upgrade to make the T1 Pro compatible with Apple HomeKit will be forthcoming, but as the Cube isn’t officially available yet, as well as what regions it will be available in, that’s not a big deal.

As we learn more about this new and updated product, we’ll add more to the article.