Motorola homesight Wireless Easy Starter Kit review

Clive Webster Read more October 7, 2009

£196

Price when reviewed

Congratulations on your new home. Or, alternatively, on that lovely big pile of presents sitting under the tree. And seeing as the relatives are imminently due, doesn’t the house look nice and inviting? That’s what those desperate burglar types are thinking too. Thankfully, Motorola has something to put your mind at ease this Yuletide with homesight, its new home-monitoring system.

Motorola homesight Wireless Easy Starter Kit review

The system is controlled using the Wireless System Controller from a single PC running the homesight software. This may look like a typical Wi-Fi router, but it connects with your PC over USB and the wireless protocol it uses to link with all the monitoring devices is proprietary. Because of this, there’s no chance of integrating homesight with your existing wireless network, but it does operate using the 2.4GHz radio frequency of 802.11b/g, so interference is a potential problem. homesight asks which channel your wireless network uses (and so which to avoid), but if your router hides this information or channel-hops, it isn’t a particularly helpful question.

In our single-WLAN, three-bed test house, homesight was generally reliable. The Starter Kit comes with a wireless day camera and a door/window sensor; more devices can be added to a total of 12 wireless cameras, three wired cameras and 16 wireless controllers. While that’s more than enough to cover a small business premises, it certainly isn’t comprehensive enough to replace a professional monitoring or alarm service: it doesn’t connect directly with the emergency services, either.

homesight can send email and text notifications, though. Email notifications contain the name you gave to the Event, the device that was activated, and the time it was activated. homesight can even attach the captured picture or video from a camera to enable you to see what’s going on. Text notifications to your mobile phone work using SMS, sending the same information but with no attachment.

And homesight isn’t just for monitoring buildings – add a few accessories and you can automate parts of your home. For example, a motion sensor in the hallway can trigger a Power Controller to automatically turn on a lamp as you enter the front door, and cameras can monitor sleeping babies just as well as nefarious burglars. Or perhaps a day/night camera could keep tabs on the wildlife prowling through your back garden at night. The flexibility of homesight is impressive, with any device able to trigger any other. Motorola has also teamed up with I’m InTouch to give homesight users a discount on its remote-access software, so you can keep an eye on your home from a Pocket PC or Palm OS PDA, or work PC. Visit www.imintouch.net for details.

We have a few gripes with the homesight software though, as it was a trying process to get everything set up as we wanted. We tried to group all the cameras as one, so that whenever the motion sensor in one is triggered it would record 30 seconds of video, and then send us an email notification. Our first problem was in grouping the cameras; we had to start a new device discovery to get an option to group devices. And then homesight treated the group as a single entity, and as it doesn’t let groups initialise an event, it won’t send the email.

Once we became used to the rigidity of homesight, it was easy enough, if a little long-winded, to slog through setting up Event rules. The three stages of setting up the rule (Condition, Action, Notification) are tabbed for simplicity, with the Condition tab holding advanced options such as day- and time-based scheduling. For example, you can tell a camera not to bother doing anything unless it’s between 10am and 6pm on a weekday.
The hardware itself is much more elegant, with sleek white plastic shells throughout the range – tough enough for sheltered outdoor use. Image quality from all three types of camera was good. The day/night camera includes infrared lighting, and we were surprised at how sharp images were in both light and dark conditions. It switches quickly from infrared and back too. The videos are stored as standard AVI files in the data folder of the program’s home directory and are certainly good enough to identify people with – just bear in mind that cameras take a second or so to kick in when placing them. There’s a microphone on all the cameras too, so using a day/night camera as a baby monitor is viable.

It’s worth carrying out the initial connection of your devices next to the System Controller and then placing them. At least you then know that everything works and that homesight knows what it’s looking for. If it can’t pick up a device then you know you have a signal problem and need to get a repeater. We found no need for one in our three-bed test house, though we had to retry the connection setup a few times before complete success.

The range of accessories already available will increase the flexibility of the system tremendously, as any one can interact with just about any other. The temperature sensor could act as a secondary fire alarm or greenhouse monitor; there’s a water sensor that could check for washing machine leaks, flooding or burst pipes; while the three types of camera keep an eye on your presents, the front door, or the night-time visitors to your garden. The keypad kit lets you arm or disarm your homesight system with the touch of a key instead of messing around on the PC every time you enter or leave the house.

homesight focuses on home monitoring rather than the technology Nirvana of a fully networked home, and it does give a certain peace of mind knowing that everything is being monitored at your house or business premises. The interface may be clunky and overly laborious in parts, but at least it’s all integrated and works well once set up. And, although it may be a totally proprietary and closed system, the prices for the accessories are reasonable, and we didn’t see any noticeable interference with our existing wireless network. So, if you want to keep a remote eye on your premises, homesight will do the job well: just note its limitations.