What you’re about to see is powered by a single smart home sensor and I believe it’s the most revolutionary sensor for smart homes since the idea of the connected home was conceived.
This strange of things reminiscent of experience is all powered by a single sensor, the Akara FP2 which can pinpoint my exact whereabouts inside any room. It’s small, it’s sleek but it brings the most powerful automations to my smart home and most importantly it has reignited that childish excitement I once had when I bought my first smart light bulbs many years ago.
Now this tiny little device is basically a miniature form of radar for your living room but instead of looking like this, it looks like this and instead of giving a picture like this it gives us a picture like this with a room layout and a small figure of a person that moves about when you move. But why do I think that this is so revolutionary? Well, as I showed at the beginning, each of those lights are being triggered to turn on when I walk to a certain point within the room. It’s not done by motion sensors or buttons or voice or anything else other than my exact whereabouts within the room so as I stand in front of a light it will turn on. Now although this is unlikely how people will use it in this particular way, I’ve set it up this way so that I can show exactly how accurate this is and determining where you are within the room and it’s all set up with zones within the app. These zones are what power the automations and what’s super cool here is that once set each zone actually appears as a separate motion trigger within third party services such as Amazon. Let me show you one example of how I’m currently using this device in a real world scenario. In the gallery I have two desks, one which I predominantly use for editing and the other for late night sessions dying to G Fuel snorting teenagers on call of duty.
But I have two zones set up within the app, one for each desk and therefore two triggers within the Amazon ecosystem. The first is that when I’m at the editing desk, the editing desk is on and the gaming desk is off. And then when I move to the gaming desk, the editing desk turns off and the gaming desk turns on and then the same routine vice versa. If I move back to the editing desk, the gaming desk turns off. This routine means that it will completely shut down the desk, turn it off monitors, connected speakers, lamps and any other peripheral attached to the smart blocks that are connected under the desk. This is just so futuristic that I can move between a desk and have everything turn on automatically whilst also turning off everything else on another desk. It’s incredible and it’s super fast too which is perhaps the most surprising thing. As you can see from the outtakes of the intro running past the lights, they actually turn on pretty bloody quickly. No, it’s not a media and there is a very, very short delay. So if you’re being chased by an axe-wielding murderer throughout your house, the lights may struggle to keep up. But if you’re just walking normally from room to room, this delay will almost be unnoticeable. Now another cool thing is that it can track multiple people too. So say I have my assistant working in the gallery on the gaming desk, it won’t turn off either desk until one of us moves away from it. How cool is that? It’s just so incredible and the positioning is really accurate even when there’s multiple people except once when it detected there was three people in the room. Detecting three people in there. I think it’s a ghost. It’s got to be. It says it’s by you mate. By me. I reckon it’s because I’m leaning forward and the back of my chair. What that was I don’t know, it could well have been a ghost or something. No, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a ghost. But to be honest I’m not really actually sure what caused it.
The only reason I noticed that it was picking up a third presence in the room was because I was testing and looking at the map. If I hadn’t spotted it I wouldn’t have known because nothing has ever triggered based off the routines on its own. Yet. So this gave me an idea. I wanted to see if I could trick the sensor into thinking that there was a human present to see how robust the detection is. So firstly to show it working it knows that I’m stood near this lamp and will turn on. Well let’s try and trick it. OK. So. I didn’t expect that. - No, hello, yes, you too please. No, no, it’s not Paul Hibbert this week, it’s Stuart of Stuart’s Reviews. Yes, an inflatable sex doll. Disgusting. - Do you know what, I genuinely didn’t expect that result. I thought that this would absolutely trigger the lamp to go on, but it didn’t. This was a big surprise ’cause I’d already resigned myself to thinking that it would fail this test simply because of how the thing works. Being a precise form of radar, I would have thought that something of a rough human size and shape would set it off. But I’m super, super surprised at this result and I’ve got to say that this is a massive gold star here when it comes to the detection accuracy for Akara. So, well done. (footsteps) I think you can be rest assured that is only gonna be picking up human presence unless of course your house is haunted. Now, the impact of being able to set routines triggered based on your location in a house, I think is gonna have such a massive impact. So not just how cool I look walking around my house like some sort of techno wizard with stuff turning on automatically. I also think that it will have a positive impact to our wallets, to our wellbeing and to many people’s daily lives.
On the subject of our wallets, the average user could end up saving an unbelievable amount of money on their energy bills. For example, imagine this. It’s a quiet evening and you’re sat at home watching a little bit of TV and then let’s say within this evening, you spend a total of 30 minutes out of the room whilst the TV’s paused making a brew, getting a beer, grabbing a snack or evacuating your bowels in the lavatory. I don’t know. Well, if this device was set to turn everything off in your living room, the moment you leave it, your speakers, your TV, any lights are on and then turn it all back on as you come back in, you’d be saving around 90p a month just from that one room, just from monitoring use during the evening. This is based on the assumption that your total running cost of all the devices while using energy within that room turns off, totals around 150 watts of energy. And that’s a really low estimate because some larger TVs use that amount of energy alone. Now imagine that every single room in the house is kitted out with one of these and it’s running every single day, automatically turning everything off every time the room in the house is vacant. And then you could even have things like smart radiator valves to turn down the radiators or even off when there’s no one in the room. That 90p a month will soon turn from 10 pounds a year in energy savings to hundreds and hundreds of the King’s Pounds taken directly from the energy company I put back into my pocket, which is incredible. And it consequently means that it will quite quickly pay for itself. Although it would be worth pointing out here that unlike other smart sensors, it does require a constant power connection. But it only draws two watts of power, meaning that it costs around 48p per month to run. But I think the benefits actually run far deeper than just the monetary benefits. I think from a disability standpoint, this kind of thing is going to prove invaluable in helping people with certain conditions, lead a normal life.
Even those with age-related disabilities like arthritis. The FP2 is something that can be set up by a family member and then just run constantly in the background, doing things that involve a certain amount of dexterity like operating switches or even remotes. And actually, the FP2 does have another secret feature that could benefit in this scenario, and that’s fall detection, which could prove invaluable. So why would you choose the car FP2 over other sensors? Well, for starters, it’s a hell of a lot more useful than nearly every other sensor that I’ve tried. And this also has a built-in light sensor. Now, in theory, the functions could be replicated with a camera, setting up things like activity zones and using AI for potentially even more of an accurate reading. But that involves having the camera in every single room. The FP2 puts privacy at its front line because it’s unable to tell if you’re wondering how it’s bollock-naked. And if anyone was to have access to the sensor through unscrupulous means, the only thing they’d be able to see is a dot on a map which, for me, makes this a much more comfortable device to have in every single room rather than having a camera. And it also means that I don’t have to worry that someone’s gonna leak my nudes to the Daily Mail. Again, now, despite that I think this is the best thing to happen to smart home technology in a long while, I do have a couple of small comments to temper some expectations. The first is the setup process. With its more complex nature, it means a more complex setup. And even for someone like myself who tinkers around with smart home kit nearly every single day of the week, I found it a little bit convoluted and at times confusing. It took a good 30 to 40 minutes of staring at the screen to get a base understanding of how to make it work properly.
Fortunately, once it’s set up, you do become a little bit more familiar with it and it becomes quite simple from that point to operate. Now, the second comment I’ve got to make is about the range. Now, as a disclaimer, I have quite a unique room layout. In the gallery, it’s a total of 10 meters long and around two meters wide. The total range of this sensor is around six to eight meters. This is more than enough for most houses, but in this case, I lose tracking the moment I step past around the seven meter mark. Now, a solution to this will be to add a secondary sensor at the other end of the gallery. But at the time of this review, it would mean having a separate sensor and a separate map with separate zones. They unfortunately wouldn’t talk to each other. Now, I got straight onto a carer when I found out that you couldn’t just pair two sensors together to make one continual map. Good news is, they got straight back to me saying that this feature is currently in development, which is amazing stuff. So soon, I’ll be able to make a whole room map or a whole house map with multiple sensors that all talk together and work in unison. So big round of applause here for a carer. I cannot wait until that feature comes to be. But there’s no news, unfortunately, at the moment when this will come. Just sit tight. Now, the last reservation about the FB2 is the initial cost. Currently, it’s 82 pounds on Amazon. So not a cheap sensor by any stretch. But as I said, the potential savings could absolutely be incredible. And I think it’s got a very unique position to actually save you the most amount of money out of any sensor that I’ve ever tried. Genuinely, I think with this, you’re potentially going to get the biggest savings you possibly could, comparative to any other smart home sensor. And that’s why I love it. Yes, it’s a bigger outlay, but it does so much more and it will save you so much more money. And at the end of the day, this is still relatively new technology.
So naturally, the price is going to be higher than other stuff that’s been out for years and years. Will we ever see a price drop over time? Maybe? Possibly? Who knows? But there’s one thing I will say about the value right now. And that’s that, although it is a bit expensive, I think this is worth every single penny. And the moment it becomes in stock again, I’ll be buying one for every single room in the house. And this kind of proves its popularity. It’s been out only for, well, less than a month. And it’s been pretty much constantly sold out since then, with over 1800 reviews on Amazon as well, sitting at currently 4.4 out of five stars. This thing is not a device to sleep on, especially if you have a smart home. Listen, guys, I’ll drop a link below so you can check it out for yourselves. And if you’re thinking about getting one, I’d certainly buy it sooner rather than later because I wouldn’t be surprised if this thing remains constrained the foreseeable future.
Last edited:
