Homekit Binding

Hi all,

I’ve been digging into the HomeKit adapter code and have learned quite a bit about how it works lately. Please forgive the “everything but the kitchen sink” nature of this post!

Hopefully I can provide some feedback based on what I’ve learned:

The HomeKit adapter associates items by their name, so if you rename your items after they’ve been discovered by the HomeKit adapter, you can get strange behavior, like things disappearing and reappearing in the default room, or doubles (though this seems to be more related to PaperUI managed items being duplicated).

Your best bet when getting started is to get one item working well with the adapter before tagging all of your items. That way, if (when?) things go wrong, you’ve got less mess to clean up.

I have a bunch of duplicate subscription messages, and I think they’re mostly harmless. I haven’t had a change to track down the source, but I think it’s probably caused by a failure of accessories to unsubscribe from the “bus” when reloading the home kit bundle.

If anyone happens to read this and is interested, I have added a new “fan” accessory type. This is useful for (obviously) fans, but is also currently the best way to model various audio devices that have on/off, mute and volume controls. HomeKit has a speaker accessory type but the Home app currently doesn’t support it, so this at least allows you to control power and volume via Siri [1]. Drop me a note and I can send you an updated homekit bundle to test out.

I’m also looking at a problem with setting thermostat mode: changes from the thermostat or OpenHAB show up in Home, but attempts to change the mode from Home result in “No response”. I think this is a problem in the HAP protocol library used by the HomeKit add-on, but haven’t gotten time to debug the situation further.

Best,

Bill

[1] https://github.com/nfarina/homebridge/issues/1326

Dear all,
could you give me a hint for using thermostates with Google Assistant/Alexa using the Homekit Item rules?
I created a thread here:

I also posted this link in the Google Assistant and Echo binding discussions,but maybe this is specific to Homekit?
Thanks!

Hi There,

I have also the same issues with duplicate subscriptions and also think it somehow is an issue with the jsondb and the items file. I got it running for some days but after a restart none of the homekit devices worked anymore.

Just to be sure: If i discover some devices using paperui, it is the correct approach to enhance this items with Tags (like for homekit) in an additional items file. This is a correct approach?

Everyone still having problems with duplicate subcriptions, please do what the README suggests:

openhab> log:set TRACE com.beowulfe.hap

Then recapture a log and attach it here.