Homekit on 2 Hubs Different Home

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1

I want to share my Homekit to a friend for partial access to my HE. But don't want him to have access to everything. I have a spare hub that isn't doing anything. So here is my thought and wonder if it will work.

Set up the spare hub with a few devices linked to my main hub with hubmesh.
Put Homekit app on spare hub.
Create another home in my Apple Home app and link that to the spare hub.
Then share that home with my friend.

Will that work?

2

I wonder if making another instance of the Homekit app on the same hub would work. I do that for MakerAPI where I have multiple instances running on the same hub.

3

I thought I read somewhere that you couldn't have 2 instances of the Homekit app, but don't remember.

EDIT: Just tried, won't work.

4

HomeKit has a limit of 150 devices per instance so you can setup multiple instances of the app and it does work.

5

Just share your home in the HomeKit app, I do this with my daughter. She has two homes in her app.

6

If I try to add a second instance it just takes me to the first one.

7

I don't want to share everything, which would happen if I shared my current home. I just want to share somethings.

8

Hmmm, you are right it does take you back to to the first one. It wasn’t that way when I was first beta testing this so something has changed.

@gopher.ny, how do you add a second instance of the HomeKit app?

9

I created two instances using the homebridge v2 by tonesto7. Setup both in homebridge as child bridges. My circumstances were different though (I wanted to connect it to a separate physical home in HomeKit but didn’t want my HomeKit hubs to interact so it didn’t work for me.

10

Well, thought I would try using the second hub. Ran into a couple problems.

Anything that is Hubmesh on the 2nd hub is not usable in Homekit. That I can get around by using virtual switches and mirroring them to the mesh switches.

Problem 2. It requires a Homekit Hub for remote access. That means I need to re-dedicate one of my Homekit Minis to the 2nd home in Apple Home. Not sure I want to do that.

So back to the drawing board.

11

There can be only one...

Didn't think about this. Current implementation doesn't accommodate it, will see if there's a way to implement it with a reasonable effort.

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12

I'm trying to come up with a reason to share devices in your home with someone else? You could also just create a dashboard with the devices you want to share and give them the non-local link.

13

I currently have a dashboard for them using cloud access. Problem being if internet is down it won’t work. So to accommodate that I have to give them 2 links, which for this person is confusing. The nice thing about the HomeKit is it is automatic switching between local and remote.

14

So we're limited to 150 devices?

15

Just wondered if there was any further thoughts on this or if it might be feasible in the future?

16

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