#homekit

[mj-loves-rejjxxxx]

Jacky Boy ❤️

[wrinklybabies2005]

dont forget your daily clicks !

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"Thank you for bringing me to ThunderClan. Tell Bluestar I have always been grateful for the home she gave me. This is a good place to die. I only regret that I will miss watching you become what StarClan has destined you to be."

[mariosegno]

All right, I have to say it I’m a @orbitkey lover. I like how the products fits the aesthetics of my #setup and my #EDC. Tell me, what products/ brand are you a fan? . . . . . . . #orbitkey #edc #everydaycarry #desksetup #setup #iphone #iphone13promax #iphone13 #iphone14 #homekit #magsafe #airpods #airpodspro #airpodspro2 #keyorganizer #alfaromeo #cars #giulietta https://www.instagram.com/p/CnEYZKDNFZO/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[katharineberry]

Adventures in automating unchangeable apartment lights

For the last year or so, all of my lamps have used Hue bulbs, which means I can use my phone (via HomeKit) or Alexa to turn them on or off, change their brightness, and so forth. However, my apartment has some overhead lights in the kitchen area that are not easily replaceable with anything standard. Though I did try:

Living in an apartment, I also can’t replace my light switches with any of those fancy electronic IoT-ish switches, so I just let the problem be.

I finally tired of having three lights that didn’t respond, so I set out to solve the problem My requirements were the ability to control my lights via both Alexa and HomeKit, like the rest of my lights.

As far as I can tell, there is exactly one product on the market that is compatible with the my lights: Switchmate. It completely avoids the problem of replacing lights, switches, or indeed anything at all by just physically actuating the existing light switch. It is, by far, the easiest thing to install:

Unfortunately, beyond being compatible with my lights, it solves none of my problems. It isn’t compatible with Alexa, and it isn’t compatible with HomeKit. It promises voice control, but what that really means is that you can tap a microphone button in the app and then speak to your phone. This isn’t really very useful. In fact, as advertised, this product is pretty useless — though it’d be pretty neat if it was the only approximation home automation I had. What it does offer by virtue of having a mobile app, though, was opportunity. They communicate with their mobile apps via Bluetooth LE, and we can emulate that and thereby control them. Conveniently, people have already done this.

So I ordered the parts I would need and set out to make it work:

Three Switchmate BLE switches (two of them the slim/”bright” versions, because the older ones won’t fit side by side on two-gang switches)

One Raspberry Pi 3 model B+ — though I’m pretty sure the Pi Zero W would’ve worked as well, it didn’t have same-day shipping, and I am impatient.

A micro-SD card to put in the Pi

And… that was it. Total cost around $140, but it could’ve been closer to $100 if I were more patient.

Once I received them, I upgraded their firmware to the latest version using the mobile app, snapped them over the relevant switches, and got to making the promised integration happen.

On the software side, I installed the latest Raspbian on the Raspberry Pi, then grabbed a handy Python switchmate tool someone had written (which as far as I can tell is the only up-to-date implementation) to see if it would talk to my switches — and it did! I could experience the joy of turning my kitchen lights on and off from the command line.

Excellent! So now I’m exactly where I was with the phone app, except everything is slightly more inconvenient. But I have my proof of concept, and I can get to work on integration.

For this, I turned to a wonderful project called Homebridge, which lets you add arbitrary devices to Apple’s HomeKit and basically do whatever you like in response to whatever devices you choose to present. There are actually multiple homebridge-switchmate type plugins… but they’re all outdated and won’t necessarily do anything on recent hardware. I instead used homebridge-cmdswitch2 to expose command invocations as HomeKit switches. I simply had it invoke the previous python switchmate tool with the appropriate arguments whenever I needed to throw the switch. This was fine, except that I it needed root permissions. Being lazy, and in flagrant violation of anything ever resembling good practice, I just ran homebridge as root, and everything was good.

This worked! Sometimes. Except when it didn’t. And then it would just stop working entirely no matter how much you tried. In the end, I ended up writing a (terrible, terrible) script that retried several times, and reset the bluetooth stack before each attempt. Apparently the Pi’s integrated BLE does not play nice. For those interested, the script I wrote is over here.

With these retries, the HomeKit integration became reliable, and so I could proceed to the final task: Alexa integration. Conveniently, this has also already been solved by a plugin called homebridge-alexa, which publishes your Homebridge devices for Alexa’s consumption. After setting that up, it worked!

The initial fade-in is the Hue lamps turning up, followed by the three binary switches being thrown. It’s certainly slower, but it beats them being uncontrollable. And you get very satisfying whirring and clicking noises!

[eldergodchucky]

HomeKit Weekly: SwitchBot launches a battery-powered standing fan with Apple Home integration

The latest Apple story matters less as spectacle than as a clue to where the company’s hardware, software and services may be pulling users next. Apple stories matter because one product decision can ripple through hardware, services, developers, accessories and the wider market that reacts around the company. Continue reading HomeKit Weekly: SwitchBot launches a battery-powered standing fan with…

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[factorial-one]

Setting up Homebridge on Raspberry Pi

Hardware Required Raspberry Pi MicroSD SD Card Reader Another computer/ Screen+Keyboard Software Required Etcher (Download) Raspbian Lite (Download) Process Download latest version of Raspbian and write the image on the SD card using Etcher Once SD card is ready, install it in the Raspberry Pi and boot the Raspberry Pi ​ The default username for Raspbian is pi and the password is…

[ouggi]

Chelsea's home kit for the 2026/27 season.

[iphoneislam]

5 Crucial Things Apple Must Fix Before Launching the HomePod 3

It seems that Apple’s upcoming HomePod is currently living in a gray area, and the reason? The delay in upgrading the personal assistant Siri with artificial intelligence. Honestly? This delay might be the best thing that has happened to the anticipated HomePod 3. Before Apple unveils the new generation, there are real gaps that make this smart device seem much less intelligent compared to its…

5 Crucial Things Apple Must Fix Before Launching the HomePod 3