Precise range control and Coming Home Button: how we improved auto-unlock.
Unlocking the door with an app, smartwatch, or keypad is great – no more keys! But returning home to a door that unlocks by itself, as soon as it detects you’re up to 3m away, is even more amazing.
However, this is a tricky solution that uses multiple technologies. It doesn’t work in 100% of situations, and all smart lock brands struggle with that. In our latest firmware updates, we have introduced at least two new methods to make it more efficient.
Now you can make auto-unlock activate even if you don’t go that far from home. You can also let your lock know when you’re heading back – so the lock is ready to unlock.
As a short introduction, to give you context of what we have improved, please take a look at what it takes to unlock tedee automatically as you get back home.
Automatic unlocking settings include two zones – GPS-defined areas around your home.
IN and OUT areas are defined around your place.
For the automatic unlocking procedure to start, you need to:
- Leave the OUT zone – walk out of the perimeter set around your home. This makes sure automatic unlocking does not start when you are at home.
- Then you need to come back into the IN zone. This means you’re getting back home, and your smartphone may start detecting the smart lock via Bluetooth.
You can control the IN and OUT ranges in your smart lock settings. You can adapt it to your lifestyle, depending on how far you distance from your home before returning. It does not matter that much if you commute to work or drive a car for larger distances away.
But if you live in a city and often walk errands in the neighbourhood, you may not leave the OUT zone every time, so the auto-unlock feature has no chance to launch.
In one of our latest firmware updates – that is always free, available to existing locks, and automatic if you use a tedee smart bridge – we have introduced numerous solutions that may improve the efficiency of auto-unlock in such cases.
More precise IN and OUT ranges
Based on usage statistics, we simplified zone ranges for your convenience, so you can set IN and OUT ranges closer to home.
Now you will be able to select IN zone in the range 100-500 m and the OUT zone in the range 150-600 m. Default zones were also updated to 200 and 300 m. Your current settings will not be affected by this change.
Lower values of IN and OUT zones available give you better control of the areas where you use your lock. If you often leave your flat but stay near, this will make the detection of your getting back home more efficient.
What if you don’t leave even the lowest, 150m OUT range? When you leave your place to walk the dog across the street or go to a convenience store downstairs to grab some milk?
Coming Home Button: updated mobile widget
Mobile widgets, available for iOS and Android devices, give you precise control of your tedee even without unlocking your smartphone or launching the app.
Apart from the usual lock and unlock buttons, we have added a new blue button that lets you manually launch the auto-unlock detection.
Newly added blue Coming Home Button.
We call it a Coming Home Button because it means just that. Previously, to make your phone start detecting the smart lock to unlock it automatically, you had to leave the OUT and enter the IN zones. Coming Home Button has the same effect, even if you’re closer than the minimal range of 100m away from home.
How to use it?
Tap the Coming Home Button when returning home from a dog walk or paying with your smartphone for groceries.
Your phone will start detecting your lock via Bluetooth – as if you left the OUT area and got back to IN zone.
When your smartphone and tedee smart lock connect via Bluetooth, your lock will unlock automatically a couple of meters away. With your phone in your pocket or hands full of groceries.
Auto-unlock detection starts as soon as you tap the Coming Home widget.
More advanced updates
There are more improvements introduced with consequent updates. We have decreased default ranges of IN and OUT zones, optimized battery consumption, improved Wi-Fi detection, etc.
You may not notice some of these consciously, but feel confident that your regularly updated device gets even better month by month. For free, and automatically if you use a smart bridge.
You can learn all the latest improvements in our tedee release notes.
A full overview of the automatic unlocking feature is available in our Knowledge Base.