homebridge

Getting started with Home Assistant

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A screenshot of Home Assistant

A recent project of mine has been to set up Home Assistant, as a way of controlling the various smart devices in our home.

From bridge to assistant

You may remember, back in February, that I had dabbled with Homebridge, a more basic tool which was designed to bridge devices into Apple’s HomeKit universe which aren’t otherwise supported.

I’ve ditched Homebridge, as it didn’t really do what I wanted it to do. If you want to primarily use Apple’s Home ecosystem, but have a few devices which don’t support it, then it’s great. But that doesn’t really apply to our home – although I’m an iPhone and iPad user, I no longer have a working Mac and so I use a Windows desktop, and my wife uses Android devices. Consequently, the only device that we own which natively supports HomeKit is our LG smart TV.

Home Assistant is essentially a replacement for Apple Home, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings and whatever Amazon’s Alexa provides. That means that it provides its own dashboard, and lots of possibilities for automations. But instead of your dashboard being hosted on a cloud server somewhere, it’s on a device in your own home.

Setting it up

Like with Homebridge and HOOBS, you can buy a Home Assistant hub with the software pre-installed. If you already have a device, such as a spare Raspberry Pi, then you can either install HAOS (a complete operating system based around Home Assistant) or just install Home Assistant on an existing system. I chose the latter, and now I have Home Assistant sat on the same device as my Plex Server, using Ubuntu Core and the relevant Snap package.

Once set up, Home Assistant will auto-discover some devices; it immediately found both my ADSL router and my Google Wifi hub using UPnP. You can then add devices yourself. Home Assistant supports way, way more devices than its competitors, due to its hobbyist nature. For example, there’s an IPP integration which means that you can view your printer’s status, including how much ink is left. Despite it being a ‘smart device’ of sorts, Google Home won’t show this in its app. You can also bring in web services like Google Calendar and last.fm.

Some integrations are easier to set up than others though. In most cases, one of the first instructions for setting up an integration is ‘sign up for a developer account with your device manufacturer’. Whilst the instructions are usually quite clear, you’ll find yourself spending lots of time copying and pasting OAuth keys and client secrets to be able to connect your devices. In the case of my Nest Thermostat, this included paying a non-refundable $5 USD charge to access the relevant APIs.

It should also be noted that, whilst Home Assistant does offer integration with Apple HomeKit, I’ve yet to get this to work. Which is ironic as this was the reason why I previously used HomeBridge.

Remote access

Another thing which took some trial and error to get right was enabling remote access. If you want to be able to view and control your devices when you’re out of the home, then there’s a few additional steps you’ll need to complete. These include:

  • Configuring port forwarding on your router
  • Setting up a DNS server

Home Assistant recommends DuckDNS, which is pretty simple and seems to work okay, but again it’s something that requires some technical know-how.

One limitation of using Home Assistant as a Snap on Ubuntu Core is that you can’t use addons, so setting up DuckDNS meant manually editing Home Assistant’s configuration.yaml file. Indeed, some integrations require this, and so it’s worth backing up this file regularly. You can, however, install a separate snap which enables the Home Assistant Community Store (HACS), and this allows you to install additional (but less-well tested) integrations. I initially couldn’t get this to work, but managed to install it literally whilst writing this paragraph.

If you’re willing to pay, then for £6.50 per month, you can get Home Assistant Cloud. As well as providing an income for Home Assistant’s developers, it offers an easier and secure remote access solution, and integrates Google Assistant and Alexa.

Privacy matters

It should also be noted that Home Assistant has a greater focus on privacy. By hosting an IoT hub yourself, you can limit how much data your devices send to cloud servers, which may be in places like China with markedly different attitudes to privacy. Indeed, the integration with my Solax inverter (for our solar panels) connects directly to the inverter, rather than the Solax Cloud service. It’s therefore not surprising that many of the Home Assistant developer team are based in Europe.

Looking to the future, I’m hoping more of my devices will support Matter – indeed, this week, Matter 1.2 was released, adding support for devices like dishwashers. Theoretically, our existing Google Home devices can all be Matter hubs, but none of my other devices yet support it, and may never will. Home Assistant can work with Matter devices, if you buy their SkyConnect dongle, and again, it will mean that more of your device communications can be done within in your home and not using the cloud. That should be faster, and better for privacy.

Overall, I’m quite happy Home Assistant, even though it’s taken a long time to get every device added and some trial and error. I appreciate being able to see (almost) all of my devices on one dashboard, and it feels like I have more oversight and control over the smart devices in our home. I hope that, with greater Matter support, it’ll become easier for less-experienced users to use in future.

Adventures in setting up Homebridge for HomeKit

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A screenshot of the Homebridge dashboard

A recent project of mine has been to get Homebridge up and running. It’s a server-based program that acts as a bridge between smart devices in the home, and Apple’s Home app on iOS.

One thing, I don’t know why

HomeKit, the technology underpinning Home, is famously limited; whilst most smart devices support Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant, very few support HomeKit. Indeed, out of the various smart speakers, plug sockets, dishwasher, thermostat, smoke alarm and TV that we have in our house, it’s only the TV that natively supports HomeKit.

Whilst just about everything else (except the smoke alarm) supports Google Assistant, and the Google Home app, it would be helpful to be able to use these devices with Siri. For example, when I’m driving, I want to be able to use the Hey Siri command to turn the heating on, so that we don’t come home to a cold house.

I tried so hard, and got so far

There’s a few ways to run Homebridge. If you have money to spare, then by far the easiest way is to buy a HOOBS box. HOOBS stands for ‘Homebridge Out of Box System‘, and you’ll get a plug-in device with a customised version of Homebridge that is simple to set up. You can also buy HOOBS on an SD card, that can be slotted into your own Raspberry Pi. Or, you can just download the HOOBS SD card image for a donation of £10.

I have two Raspberry Pis – a RPi 400 which is our seven-year-old’s computer, and a RPi 4 which is my Plex server. The latter runs Plex under Ubuntu Core, a minimal version of Ubuntu Linux which doesn’t include a graphical user interface, or even the Aptitude package manager. Instead, apps can be installed using Snap packages, which enforces greater sandboxing and security. There is a Snap package for Homebridge, but I couldn’t actually get it to work; once installed, I couldn’t open the browser page as instructed.

So, I’ve installed it using Apt on our child’s Raspberry Pi 400, and followed the proper instructions.

There’s only one thing you should know

When you first start Homebridge, it won’t do much initially. To get it talking to your devices, you’ll need to install the appropriate plugins, which you can do through the web UI. I suggest going with the plugins that have been ‘verified’ first, as you’ll probably find that there’s more than one plugin for some of the more popular services like Nest. Whilst installing plugins is relatively easy, configuring them can be difficult:

  • The Nest plugin, for example, has you logging into your Google Nest account in Chrome’s Incognito mode, whilst having Developer Tools open. You then have to copy and paste various data from the HTTP headers.
  • I have a series of smart plug sockets which use the Tuya Smart Life platform, but I had them registered under a different app which Homebridge can’t connect to. I had to de-register them and then set them up again on the official Tuya app.
  • Despite following the instructions, I couldn’t get my Bosch smart dishwasher to connect

Setting up Homebridge is therefore something best reserved for people who are comfortable using the Linux command line and with at least an intermediate understanding of how devices work. However, it does mean that I now have these devices in HomeKit as planned.

Homebridge even supports my Solar Inverter, although in a rather odd way. It appears as 12(!) separate accessories in the Home app, seeing as HomeKit doesn’t ‘know’ what a solar panel is. You can also make the Google Home app talk to Homebridge – again, this is the only way that I can make my Solax system work with Google.

But in the end, it doesn’t even Matter

Those of you who follow news in the smart devices/Internet of Things space will be aware of Matter, a new unified smart device standard with the support of Amazon, Apple, Google and Samsung. Matter will hopefully do away with the separate ecosystems that each company offers, and any Matter approved device should work with any other. However, the final Matter specification was only agreed last year, and I’m not expecting many of my existing devices to be updated to support it. At best, my Google Nest Mini devices will be updated soon, and my thermostat may be updated. For others, I would probably have to replace them with Matter-enabled devices in due course. Therefore, Homebridge offers me the flexibility that Matter will hopefully bring as an interim solution.

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