Guys, you made my day. Finaly Im able to use Homekit devices in HE. Tomorrow I will try to pair Aqara Hub to HA over the Homekit controller and will see how it works. But anyhow, I was able to add Mi Desklamps and fully controll them form HE. Good job!
4 Likes
Illuminance is working for me as well, but only when directly joining an Aqara motion sensor to HA. I hadn't noticed until now because I don't use illuminance with most of my sensors, but the Aqara hub and the Mijia Multimode gateway do not pass illuminance to HomeKit.
If you're determined to use Xiaomi motion sensors for illuminance, a Conbee 2 might be a better choice for getting Aqara devices into HE via HA, rather than a Xiaomi hub. The Conbee 2 also supports those cheap IKEA buttons so many want to use. The Nortek appears to be a very bad choice for an Aqara motion on HA. It was very difficult to join and although illuminance works, motion was stuck on detected.
1 Like
Curious how your testing is going. I’m working cautiously. Aqara/Mijia devices are a big part of my automation, and very stable with HomeKit automations syncing to HE virtual switches.
Last night I moved one production motion sensor over to this so it could participate in an actual automation. It’s actually also shared via Hub Mesh too, and so far it’s working great. Very fast, despite all the hops.
1 Like
I was able to add hub, but all of my Aqara devices are connected directly to HE and they work without problem (dont touch something that works 
). Today I added my 2 Xiaomi desk lamps with Homekit functionality thanx to this integration. I have some spare devices, so I will try later with Aqara HUB. And thanx to HA running I was able to add Xiaomi Vacuum to HE finaly as well. This way Im controlling my +- 100 household deivices fully over the HE.
1 Like
Took a chance this evening and messed with binding my Aqara hub to HA. Some disappointments, but it's not all bad.
I totally forgot that HA doesn't create entities from stateless devices like button controllers. Since this driver needs an HA entity to create a Generic Component device in HE, buttons will not work. For most, this probably isn't a big deal, and for me it's not huge since most of my buttons are Lutron Picos. But it presented a problem for my 6 button Opple which is a favorite of mine. Sure, I've heard others have had good success with joining it directly, but where does that leave the Mijia button in my son's room? That thing drops pretty quickly when joined directly to HE, but never drops when joined via the Aqara hub. He likes it and I have a few more of those unused at the moment, so the Aqara hub needs to stay. Besides, that serves as my doorbell too!
On the plus side, if you do bind an Aqara Gateway to HomeKit Controller in HA, you still get control over the alarm and the light, including color control. RGB color control from HE of a device joined to HA might be too much to tackle though, since HA use CIE-XY color mapping. However, the color controls are still there in HA, so you can at least pass it forward to HomeKit for control from the Apple Home app.
Personally I'm now thinking I need to keep both my Aqara Hub and Mijia Mulitmode Gateway active. The Mijia Gateway will serve to bring Aqara and Mijia contact, motion and temp/humidity/pressure sensors into HE, and the Aqara Hub will stay bound to Apple HomeKit via my Apple TV 4. The Aqara hub exposes the Opple button controller to HomeKit, but for some reason, the Mijia Gateway doesn't, so the Aqara is best suited for buttons in the official HomeKit.
In the end, I've actually increased the number of active gateways in my house by one 
. The Mijia Multimode Gateway has been sitting plugged in, but not doing anything for a year anyway, so at least it's finally useful. But overall I realized as I was rebuilding my required HomeKit automations, what a nuisance it is to have to configure them, and what an annoyance it is that, as soon as a device disappears from HomeKit, so too do the HomeKit automations. 
I'm therefore very much looking forward to this change. 
1 Like
Well, you can't see buttons joined in HA on HE, but you can create simple automations in HA with buttons. That gave me an idea, and while it's not perfect, it does work! As button controllers, Lutron Connected Bulb Remotes don't hold a candle to Picos, but at least they can be used as button controllers. I haven't been able to use these with anything other than my Hue bridge since my Wink days.
Using @jason0x43 's HE > HA integration, I shared four HE virtual switches, each set to turn off in 500ms and then created four HA automations and set each button press to turn on a virtual switch. For whatever reason they'll be consistently responding each time you press, but suddenly the same button won't respond. Then after a few presses where there's no response, the same button will start responding again. 
So they seem about as reliable as they were when configured as button controllers on Wink. However, unlike the Wink integration which was always very slow, this is actually very fast to respond (when it does respond 
).
[Edit] Still not 100% consistent, but it seems if you wait at least 3 seconds before pushing the same button again, it's significantly more consistent.
LCBRs are never going to replace the reliability and features of a Pico, but it's very nice to learn I can once again use them for something other than Touchlink.
1 Like
Ha - I'm in good company then!
Just a week or two ago, I added my sole LCBR to zigbee2mqtt and am now using it with node-red to control the two bulbs in my nightstand that are paired to Hubitat.
The actions I have are:
Button-1: on-100%
Button-2: raise by 5% ever 500ms
Button-3: decrease by 5% every 500 ms
Button-4: off
Felt good to get it being useful again!
1 Like
How's it working for you? Responding each time, or do you get inconsistent results when you press a button?
1 Like
All,
I just pushed a new version 0.1.14 of the Parent device driver to GitHub. This new version supports Fan Controllers. I have tested it with a Lutron Fan Controller only.
Enjoy!
4 Likes
Responding every time.
1 Like
Going to have to experiment with a different Zigbee gateway.
1 Like
What are you connecting the LCBR to...a nortek stick in HA?
Yes. Does a Conbee 2 work better?
Can you detail how you did that? I cannot figure out how to configure even the simplest "native" automations on Home Assistant (and I say that having used it before I used Hubitat after I decided to move away from SmartThings; I had all my custom automations in Python with AppDaemon instead of, at the time, YAML). Now I know how people feel when they come here for help with Rule Machine on Hubitat... 
Anyway, it still seems like going in the "other" direction, HASS to HE, should be possible with a driver on Hubitat that is configured properly (an app would probably make this easier) to interpret the button events, assuming they come through the websocket; I understand they don't make entities on the Home Assistant side that make it quite as easy as other devices, but I haven't explored this part of the API yet. And first I need to find a button device I an pair that works well enough that I'm OK with stealing from Hubitat for a bit. 
1 Like
I'm sure it could be done, but the driver that's been created here (doesn't have a name yet 
) needs entities.
Anyway, I'm not at all versed in Yaml. Just using the UI.
Name it
Specify the trigger
No need for a condition in this case, so just specify the action
1 Like
It might. The nortek stick has some apparent limitations. I had difficulty getting getting the button events on my Lutron Aurora dimmers to register consistently and worked with one of the HA devs for the ZHA component for half a day. We updated the the zigbee portion of the stick and I provided a bunch of bellows logs and he determined that the Nortek simply ignored certain types of reports. The Conbee2 just worked. Since I was already moving to all zigbee anyway, I just migrated my devices to Conbee2 (using zha...not deconz). Very happy with it so far. Your issue sounds similar so who knows.
2 Likes
Any reading I should do for this, or is it just plug-in and load like the Nortek? Think I'll order one to try.
Pretty easy install for the stick but you can't have 2 zha integrations at the same time. You would need to completely remove your existing integration and all devices.
I have my HA instance setup in a proxmox vm so I simply spun up another instance for testing first. Once I was comfortable with how it was working, I removed my devices from the Nortek stick, deleted the zha integration, attached the Conbee2 to my production instance and paired my devices. I copied all my old entity names to an excel file so I could name them the same (and not have to redo any automations). It was not a trivial task for my 80 devices (over 200 entities) but it was worth it for me.
Oh..and, I would recommend you update to the latest firmware and set an appropriate zigbee channel before attaching to HA. You can install the deconz software in windows pretty easily to do this. Just PM me if you get stuck.
3 Likes
Does the zha component support the zigbee 3.0 coordinator firmware available for the Conbee2?
I should note that I have a DeCONZ/Phoscon integration I've worked on but never published. This works directly with the websocket API of the Conbee/Raspbee software (Phoscon, I think? Never been clear on which part that belongs to, but everyone always says "DeCONZ"...). I believe there's another one floating around the community, too. This works without Home Assistant at all, as again it just goes directly to the DeCONZ/Phoscon API, though you can run it inside Home Assistant as an add-on if you want (and optionally also integrate it with Home Assistant--this being via the DeCONZ integration, not ZHA, and not to be confused with the add-on that is a way to just run the software that way if you want...I think I've learned enough about Home Assistant for this to be correct ).
Anyway, I did get button devices working that way. Pretty easy; they send events over the websocket like other devices, and the bulk of my integration came from my Hue Bridge integration that I reworked to use this instead of HTTP. They are remarkably similar except the websocket allows instant status (yay! ...and button devices are usable for that reason).
1 Like
