I love Apple Home. It has its flaws, but— just like Lemmy— I love trying out bleeding-edge tech like Thread, Matter, mesh based routers and sick lighting. I also mess around with Homebridge, and I’ve considered trying Home Assistant. I’ve learned a lot, and I want to collaborate with other home automation enthusiasts. I’m going to try to post more to that community, but I wanted to put this out there if anyone is interested in collaborating with me to build up that community.
I think what you’ll find is HomeKit’s best feature is being a front end for home assistant. Which is where most people end up on their journey.
Yeah, that is what I’ve heard! I’m actually a software developer by day, and I’ve even written a Homebridge plugin for IR control— though I didn’t publish it. Idk, maybe I’m just burnt out coding after my day job, and I’m happy to keep things simple. I also like that my partner can do everything I can without diving into another app.
If I did Home Assistant, I would want direct thread control from both Apple Home and Home Assistant. I want to minimize hops that any request has to take within the network. For example, I’m testing out a Nanoleaf Sense+ switch which has direct control of their lights over Thread without needing to touch a border router.
I also mess around with WLED, which is way more DIY and satisfies the side of me that wants to do more DIY.
It is exactly my case, as HomeKit by itself is way too limited for automations.
All of my HomeKit devices are actually exposed through HomeBridge, so I can still use HomeKit stuff if needed, and devices that do not support HomeKit can still be added to HomeKit.
My current challenge is on the Smart Dashboard side, I don’t really want to buy a Google Pixel Tablet for this, and the Nest Hubs I have don’t really integrate with HomeAssistant except through Google cloud services.
HomeKit dashboard is fine but too basic.
Ok, if you have Home Assistant, what does Homekit do for you? I really don’t know because I don’t own any Apple products, and all of my home automation is either completely home brew, or Home Assistant.
I think a lot of people like that it’s a preinstalled app on their phone. And especially now that they have guest mode. You can impress people that have iPhones and literally know nothing about smart homes by saying “hey check the home app on your phone, I just gave you guest access”.
In practice, I’ve never actually used guest mode, but I think it is a cool selling point.
The wife and family have no idea what’s going on behind the curtain. They open their phone and they see and have access to exactly what I want them to see. They can tell Siri to do things. They don’t have to install some weird app. They aren’t talking to some home brew esp32 that kinda works. It’s built in and just works… if we had android id expose the same stuff to google home.
