Yesterday was a wonderful day: Apple pushed out an update to audioOS that finally activated the temperature and humidity sensor that’s laid dormant in HomePod mini since launch. This sensor will also be in the full-sized HomePod (2nd Generation) the releases on February 3rd.
I’ve been really excited about this software update, as I have HomePod mini’s throughout the house, so I’m excited to see the temperature variance between rooms. I’m most excited for this because of my own bedroom, though. Because of how small my bedroom is relative to the rest of the house, it gets hotter faster than the other rooms. Because of this sensor being activated, I can theoretically set up automations that, when the temperature hits certain levels, can give me a notification to open a door to ventilate, or a window (depending on the season).
Naturally, I immediately started digging into Shortcuts and almost instantly found workable action for the Home app. Using the Get Accessory State action, I’m able to quickly grab the readings from this sensor and present them in a notification. Thanks to this, a reading on the temperature in my bedroom is never more than a tap or shortcut run away.
I did run into one issue while building this Shortcut though. I’m not sure if this is a feature or a bug, but the Get Accessory State action returns the temperature in Celsius, despite the fact that it shows in the home app in Fahrenheit. This was easy enough to work around, though. Using a few calculate actions, I’m able have the shortcut hand the conversion math and give me the information in a nice easy to read notification. If this is a bug that gets addressed in later software updates, I’ll release a simplified version of this action.
Setup of the shortcut is very straight forward. Once you download the shortcut (from the link below), just select the temperature sensor you want and the humidity sensor you want. I suggest choosing from the same room, though if you wanted two different readings from two different rooms, you could modify the text block that contains the notification text to address that.
One thing of note: while you can run this shortcut from your Apple Watch in theory, it seems that temperature and humidity data is not passed to the watch, so you will wind up with a notification that has all the text, but none of the information that matters. I know the use case for a shortcut like this is probably very narrow, but I figured that since I had use for it, maybe someone else would too.
What shortcuts and automations are you building around the newly unlocked temperature and humidity sensors? Let me know in the comments below! I’d love to hear about them.
Dan Stransky 
One thought on “Quickly Get a Room’s Temperature and Humidity Using HomePod and Shortcuts”