Sorry if Iām being dumb. Iāve searched and Iām not able to confirmā¦.
I have a c7 Hubitat, Apple HomePod mini as a Home hub, RaspberryPI running Homebridge.
I have successfully added my 3 Nest Tstats and 7 Nest Protects to Homebridge and Apple Homeā¦
Am I correct in assuming that I now should be able to also add them to Hubitat? I have Homebridge v2 installed and no devices show and Iāve also tried the Homekit Integration (beta) and nothing.
I may be wrong to expect the behavior should go both ways with Homebridge?
Hubitat Hub is being Certified to Apple's HomeKit standard as a Bridge. The name alone should tell you that HomeBridge is also a bridge BUT is and always will be uncertified.
That difference is where you, and many of us, hit a bump in the road. Apple's specifications are explicit about what cannot be bridged: Barrier devices (Locks and Garage Door Openers) and LAN / WiFi. Apple feel those are Apple's alone to manage. Agree or disagree, "them's the rules."
A bridge to Apple is unidirectional. It's used to bring devices INTO Apple, not from Apple. Hubitat and HomeBridge both have this limitation. The work around for ALL of these limits are to add virtual devices in Hubitat and get them into Apple. There, use Apple's Automations to "sync" the virtual switch to the device and vise versa.
Hubitat just added a Virtual Presence with Switch driver and it's the perfect example. The virtual device created on the hub gets added to Apple and shows as both a presence sensor and a switch. Sensors can't be set/reset. Switches can. Apple automations are used to turn the switch component on and off to match Apple's presence and that presents itself on Hubitat as Presence Arrived or Departed.
A better explanation of how Sensors are perceived would be a door contact sensor. You certainly expect that sensor to tell you if a door (or window) is open or closed but what you can't expect is to TELL it to be open or closed. You're not going to move the door via that little contact sensor.
Apple enforces that too, of course. If you create a virtual Presence device on Hubitat, and send it to Apple, it's just a display. You can't change it via Apple Automations. If you're not using Apple's presence feature, you're using a Hubitat derived condition and all you want is that to be displayed in the Home App on your Apple device, then a virtual Presence device is perfect.
There is a way to get Nest tstat into Hubitat with bidirectional communication. Install the community integration via Hubitat Package Manager. IIRC @dkilgore90 is the one who created this, and you should find all you need to know for getting it running on that thread. I have mine added to Homebridge and into HE, but mostly use it in the Home app. The only rule I have in HE, and the main reason I integrated it, is one that shuts down the HVAC if one of the smoke detectors goes off and reatarts it once itās been cleared.
I would recommend ONLY using that within Hubitat. I had it shared out to Homebridge at one point and it was flaky like that if you try to adjust the temp. Sounds like you already have the Homebridge Nest plugin which I also use, and it works great. That is the best way to get it into Homekit.
What I ended up doing was wiping Homebridge from the PI and installing Home Assistant. Went through the SDM API with it and got it working. I'm basically aggregating everything through Sharptools dashboards anyway. Home Assistant has a load more integrations so the combination of Hubitat and Home Assistant has got me covered. At least I don't have to rely on Smartthings anymore!
If you create a virtual Presence device on Hubitat, and send it to Apple, it's just a display. You can't change it via Apple Automations. If you're not using Apple's presence feature, you're using a Hubitat derived condition and all you want is that to be displayed in the Home App on your Apple device, then a virtual Presence device is perfect.
