In November 2020, we began automating our new home. I searched for online communities where discussions occurred about successes and failures regular folks had implementing HomeKit devices in their own homes.
Reddit was a pretty hot place to look for user-generated content. So, I started looking for informative content there.
Reddit was organized into topic-specific communities known as Subreddits. Many different technologies have Subreddits dedicated to them.
Any registered user of Reddit can post. Posts may be moderated, but most are upvoted or downvoted. This often depends on the post’s relevance to the subreddit or the accuracy of the information presented.
/r/HomeKit
The first useful community I found on Reddit was /r/HomeKit.
I really like the HomeKit subreddit. I often hear about technical issues affecting specific HomeKit devices in it. /r/HomeKit also identifies quality assurance issues in beta versions of iOS, iPadOS, and tvOS.
/r/amazoneero
The Unofficial eero Support Community recently moved from /r/eero to /r/amazoneero.
This is the place on the Internet where the most recent eero Firmware Update is most quickly and deeply discussed. As far as I’m concerned, it just happens to be a subreddit.
I’ve always objected slightly to the public associating eero more closely with Amazon than eero itself does. But I realize that the switch to /r/amazoneero was the result of the admins of /r/eero temporarily locking users out of that subreddit. And I couldn’t follow why that was necessary.
In March 2023, I started replying to questions on /r/amazoneero, and this has resulted in threads which I expand upon on Operation Gadget:
- Upgrading from eero or eero Pro to a Newer eero discusses why someone who bought an eero Pro and Beacons two or three years ago might want to upgrade their Gateway Router to eero Pro 6 or Pro 6E, especially if the Home Broadband connection is 1 Gigabit per second or higher.
/r/shortcuts
I like /r/shortcuts a lot. Although I am not currently using iOS Shortcuts as a significant part of my Home Automation, much of what I get out of this subreddit is an estimate of the scope of an effort to script an automated solution to a problem that would not be part of the native functionality of a HomePod mini or an Automation within the Home app.
This article is a work-in-progress and is being updated and extended regularly. Last updated March 5, 2023.