Recently, we introduced a number of new updates for our Wi-Fi and smart home hub platform. These updates: simplify setting up parental controls for the multiple device home, increase your ability to manage your Wi-Fi users and also enable you to better remotely control your smart home.
Through the Almond app you are now able to see all the people using your Wi-Fi network. You can: see when they join the network, the type of device, their IP address and type of connection. You can even block them, schedule them and set to receive a message when they join the network.
These features – blocking, scheduling, and notifications – can monitor any device on your network, and are also a particularly effective form of parental controls. They enable parents to now more easily centrally manage many aspects of their children’s surfing now that the older methods no longer work. Before children accessed the Internet from the family PC meaning you only had to install parental controls in the browser. Now the modern home has multiple devices – tablets, smartphones, and notebooks – all connected to the net and kids bury them deep in their pockets and backpacks, fiercely protecting them with passwords and a sense of privacy and independence. This new setup makes it more difficult to keep track of your children’s surfing habits.
Almond’s parental control features are situated on the router and managed through the app. This enables you to take back control without needing to get your hands on your child’s device. For example:
1) Stop them from getting online when it is time to read or do their homework.
2) Block them from gaming into the early hours.
3) Learn about their overall surfing habits and amount of time they spend online.
Almond integrates with a who’s who of key smart devices like Nest and Phillips. Its Rules Engine enables you to create sophisticated automation between those smart devices. Almond stores your rules directly on Almond and in the cloud.
Previously, you could only create those rules by connecting directly with the Almond through our smartphone apps over Almond’s local network (your home network). Now you can create and modify all of your rules through the cloud from anywhere. All your rules will be synced between the device and the cloud connection delivering the best of offline and online: storage on your device means your automation will still work even if the Internet is down, and cloud control is for remote convenience.
Almond now has a dashboard so you can quickly see:
See how many network and smart devices are online.
Toggle between your different Almond accounts
Tap to get notifications
Now it is possible to use the weather as an ‘IF’ condition on which to automate your home. For example, you can set that if the weather outside is 70 degrees then turn the thermostat to a certain temperature.
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