N. Lee 
Your robot vacuum cleans your floors, but by default it also reports home — to servers you don’t control, in a jurisdiction you may not be comfortable with. Xiaomi and Roborock vacuums running stock firmware maintain persistent cloud connections. Map data, room layouts, cleaning schedules, usage telemetry, and even audio commands pass through cloud infrastructure … Read more
The Aqara P1 (RTCGQ14LM) looks identical to older Aqara motion sensors, but under the hood it’s a different beast. Its predecessor, the RTCGQ11LM, hardcodes a 60-second re-trigger lockout — move in front of it at second 61 and your lights work fine; sit still at second 58 and they cut out. The P1 ships with … Read more
Aqara’s March 2026 privacy policy update explicitly addresses local mode data collection. Here’s what it says, what it doesn’t cover, and how to verify it.
The M3 is Aqara’s first hub with a real local automation engine. The M2 came before it and still gets sold beside it, often at half the price. If you’re weighing the Aqara M2 vs M3 for a privacy-focused setup, the spec sheet comparison misses the point. The question is: what actually breaks when the … Read more
The Aqara E1 hub costs less than a nice dinner and gets every Aqara Zigbee device you own into Home Assistant with full local control. No cloud polling. No subscription. The catch: the setup path is counterintuitive enough that most guides either skip over the hard parts or get them wrong. This guide documents the … Read more
Xiaomi and Aqara make some of the cheapest, most reliable Zigbee sensors on the market. Motion sensors under $10. Door contacts smaller than a matchbox. Temperature sensors with year-long battery life. There is one catch: out of the box, these devices are designed to phone home. Setup requires the Mi Home or Aqara app, and … Read more
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. If you buy through them, we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. The Aqara Presence Sensor FP2 is one of the more impressive mmWave devices to land in the consumer smart home market in the last few years. Multi-zone tracking, sub-second response times, illuminance sensing … Read more
