1Home Digest August ’26: 1Home Touch, Locks & Home Control
August brought plenty of movement in the smart home, starting with an important 1Home Touch update and a closer look at what it can do. We also cover smarter locks, voice control, presence detection, Apple’s plans for the home and battery-free IoT moving into large-scale retail. Let's get into it...
1Home Touch Update: New Features, Shipping
A wall panel only becomes useful when it fits the room around it. That is the idea behind 1Home Touch: an interface that adapts to the home, from the devices and layout to the colors and level of access.
Development of the 1Home Touch has also grown beyond its original plan, with several new features added along the way. Configurations can be reused across different rooms and installations, while shipping is now planned for the end of December.
Watch the latest 1Home Touch video
Dr. Smart Home Smart-Locks Himself In
There is a particular kind of confidence that makes you think you can replace a door lock after watching a few tutorials. Dr. Smart Home had that confidence. The result was a stuck anti-burglar door, a terrace exit, several very uncomfortable days, and a locksmith who eventually had to drill through the door.
The lesson is not that smart locks are a bad idea. Remote access, door-left-open alerts and leaving-home automations are genuinely useful. The lesson is that the door is not a light switch: when something goes wrong, the consequences are much more dramatic. For integrators, the cleanest approach may be to leave the physical fitting to the door specialist and take over once the hardware is correctly installed.
The Key May Be on Its Way Out
The Schlage Sense Pro review takes a look at the increasingly familiar idea of a smart lock that lets the key stay in the drawer. The interesting question is no longer whether a lock can open with a phone, code or another digital credential. It is whether the whole experience is dependable enough that people stop thinking about the lock at all.
That is the real standard for smart access: quick when you need it, clear when something goes wrong, and reliable when the phone is missing, the battery is low or the app decides to have a moment. Convenience is easy to demonstrate. Trust is what makes a smart lock worth living with.
The USS 1Homior Is Now Operational
Dr. Smart Home was not satisfied with a simple Sonos chime. After a new beta firmware added support for Matter air-quality sensors, the goal became more ambitious: make the home speak when the air gets stale.
A failed attempt with a free text-to-speech API eventually led to a much simpler solution using Google Translate's text-to-speech endpoint. The result: a Sonos Beam announcing elevated CO2 levels in a calm, slightly synthetic voice. It is delightfully nerdy, but there is a serious idea underneath it - smart homes should not only listen to people. Sometimes they should tell people what is happening, too.
The trick, naturally, is restraint. There is a fine line between a starship computer and a house that nags.
Read how the USS 1Homior came to life
Tiny Tags Give Walmart a New View of the Supply Chain
Wiliot is bringing ambient IoT to a very large stage. Its postage-stamp-sized, battery-free IoT Pixels harvest energy from surrounding radio signals and can track location, temperature, humidity, light exposure and movement.
Through its partnership with Walmart, Wiliot expects around 90 million tags to be deployed on pallets by the end of 2026, covering thousands of stores and more than 40 distribution centres. For perishable goods, this is more than a location system: it can provide a continuous environmental history of a shipment and help identify problems before food reaches the shelf. The smart home may get most of the attention, but the same combination of sensors, connectivity and automated decision-making is quietly reshaping logistics too.
Find out more about Wiliot and Walmart
Apple’s Big Home Overhaul Is Still Taking Shape
Apple's smart home ambitions have been a long-running story, but the latest reports suggest the company is still working toward a broader home strategy rather than another isolated HomePod accessory. The direction appears to involve new hardware, a stronger software layer and a more central role for the home as a place where Apple's services and intelligence meet.
The timing matters. Matter is making cross-platform control more realistic, while Google and Amazon continue to push conversational AI into the home. Apple has the devices, the user base and a strong privacy story. The open question is whether it can turn those ingredients into a home experience that feels genuinely useful rather than merely very Apple.
Apple Presence Finds Its Way onto the KNX Bus
Apple Home already knows which members of the household are home, but getting that information into KNX is not quite as straightforward. Dr. Smart Home's solution was to create a virtual socket in 1Home, expose it to Apple Home, and let Apple's presence automations switch it on or off.
A small mirror automation then copies that state to a virtual occupancy sensor on the KNX bus. It is a clever workaround that turns existing iPhones and HomePods into a presence input without adding another physical sensor. There are caveats, of course: guests without paired devices, dead phones and the usual unpredictability of geofencing mean this should not be the only input for anything safety-critical. Still, it is a neat example of how two ecosystems can cooperate when the official path is not quite there yet.
See the Apple Home and KNX setup
Can We Build a Universal Remote People Actually Want?
The universal remote has been trying to solve the same problem for decades: how do you control a collection of devices without turning the coffee table into a small electronics store? Logitech Harmony came close, but infrared commands could easily fall out of sync. Professional IP-based systems solved some of that problem, while also making control more expensive and, occasionally, more complicated than it needed to be.
The idea behind uControl Remote 2 is to bring the useful parts together without making the remote into a phone with buttons. Physical controls, local operation, no recurring subscription, and enough flexibility to handle a TV, amplifier, cinema, lighting or shades. It is planned for Kickstarter in September, with the team aiming to bring the price down significantly from the first version.
A good remote should not need a tutorial. That feels like a sensible place to start.
Read the case for a simpler universal remote
That's August done.
Thanks for reading along, see you next month!