So if I run homebridge for presence detection will it notify HE? Or is it more a one way street. Control he with HomeKit but not HomeKit with he? I’m looking at having HomeKit do presence detection and changing a thermostat. Will that work? I have already thought about getting a couple of minis even without factoring in home automation stuff.
If this is true then Apple really knows how to setup cloud services compared to Amazon, Siri is consistently very quick compared to others, like instant for me.
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I agree that it is much faster than Alexa
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It's a one way street as far as I can tell. I started using just homekit/iphones for some presence automations and it seems to be really accurate and fast so far.
Maybe wait for a homekit thermostat with Thread protocol? or is there a good thermostat for homekit already?
The advantage Apple has is their SoC's in the HomePod Mini is dramatically more powerful than anything Amazon or Google have in their "Smart Assistants". As a result, they do a lot more local processing - they do still need the cloud, but not quite as much.
I looked up the specs of the Apple S5, it's a 64-bit dual-core processor with a GPU, 32 GB flash memory, Bluetooth 5.0, 1 GB RAM, 802.11 b/g/n 2.4 GHz WiFi and satellite positioning (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, QZSS).
It's what Apple use in the Series 6 Watch - for this application it's a beast!
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The way I run it, I have a Virtual Presence Device in HE for each family member (eg djos - icloud) and this is exposed to HomeKit as a switch. Then in HomeKit I have 2 automations for each family member:
1/ "when Person-X arrives home", turn on Person-X switch
2/ "when Person-X leaves home", turn off Person-X switch
I also Have "iPhone WiFi Presence Sensor" setup for each of us to speed up "arriving" detection. TBH this is really unneed as HK presence detection is insanely fast (it know we are home before we even open the garage door). I mainly did it for redundancy.
I then have the "Combined Presence" app rolling up these 2 "sensors" into a single Virtual presence sensor for each family member (eg djos)
HE Mode manager then watches those combined Virtual Presence devices to set the House to Home/Away. HSM then uses those states to Arm/Disarm our Security sensors.
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HomeKit-native devices are a one-way street, but you can get two-way communication with Homebridge devices. I’ve been using node-red-contrib-homebridge-automation to pass events to Node-RED and then back to Hubitat. It’s not elegant, but it works. If you’ve already got a computer set up to run Homebridge, you can install Node-RED on the same system and keep everything local.
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Man that just sounds like a big pita. I’ve been thinking ecobee on HomeKit and using presence there. Then either selling the Schlage connect and get the sense to use with HomeKit. Might be the easiest for presence. I had SmartThings and it was solid on the presence but they retired my hub and after the app migration nothing seemed to work worth a crap. If I can’t honestly do stuff in HE without rebuying everything or finding a “work around”I’m not for sure what good it is. Presence is kinda everything for automations. I mean no offense just not that awfully impressed. I would like to say it will keep evolving and getting better but name one hub that’s started and is still going?
Curious, why are you looking for two-way presence communication anyway? Are you planning on using HK along with HE for automations?
I think most people use HE as the heart of their automations and HK as the front-end. IMO, the HE dashboards are as good if not better than HK, but require a decent amount of work to even get to the out of box experience from HK, which obviously is a major downside for the majority of people.
If you are trying to control HK only devices you can also do all of the logic inside HE with a virtual switch in place of the actual device that you expose to HK and then have a super simple HK automation to actually control the device.
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As I mentioned earlier I am using Homebridge and NR to pull in Ring events and trigger devices in HE.
There other good reasons to incorporate Node-RED into your setup if you are so inclined - check out the node-red forums for more info. If you have the technical experience to install Homebridge you can install Node-RED. It's really not that much of a PITA and you will end up with a very flexible and powerful platform. For my use-case HE+NR+HB rocks! 
Of course the disclaimer is it's not for everybody but there are a fair number of people here that use it...
I am. I have a thermostat and locks, that I can only link to HE but it will rely on great presence. I don’t want life360. HK offers that but if HE can’t read that presence then it’s kinda pointless. I’ll admit that I’m not 100% sure what I can and can’t have in either system. And I’m sure HE will become easier with more integration if the company stays independent. It’s like SmartThings was before Samsung. But as I get older I get tired of using a bunch of work arounds. Maybe I’m being unfair. But at 300 dollar locks and 150-300 dollar thermostats I don’t feel like adding them to an upgrade cycle. When Samsung retired my box I honestly thought about all the competition that was in the space when I started. Now none of them are valid. They all collapsed. I figured as the years have passed we should be at a golden age of zigbee and zwave devices. Just frustrated.
Ecobee thermostats support HomeKit natively, and they can be integrated Hubitat as well if desired.
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I do not see why you say HE can't read that presence, no clue if you can do it officially, but you very likely can do it similar to how I use Alexa for presence. Create virtual switches (virtual presence with a switch if you want it cleaner) in HE for any and all people with HK presence that you can expose to homebridge and by extension HK. Then in HK make simple automations to turn those switches on/off according to presence.
Exact same process that I do for Alexa except that HE has native Alexa integration that replaces the homebridge obviously. Not an iPhone user so never explored HK/Homebridge, but iirc I think I saw a way to host homebridge on your HE but I could be wrong.
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That’s actually pretty brilliant. Set up HE presence switches and wire the automations to those switches. Then just have HK flick the switches. No need for more programs just simple elegant work around. Thank you. Man I never saw that side. I can still set up time based rules and have them flick the switches also. And since it’s in HE and not HomeKit I can really drill down granularly. I’m actually pretty excited again. This train of thought will really help complex processes become less of a chore. I can’t stress enough how this alternate thinking expands what can be done between the two. I could never get two phones working as presence on SmartThings. Now I can have everything run in the background with HE and the wife can use HomeKit upping the WAF by 1000%. Way to go!!!!
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Seriously if we were in the same room I would fricking kiss you. I have a bunch of stuff that needs automated for the back porch lighting but I know I won’t be able to do it unless it’s easy and the app is beautiful for the wife. If She runs everything through HK it will get approved. I can’t wait to program stuff based on those switches as a parameter. Like the fire feature can only run if her and my switch are present. The doors auto lock if the kids switches are there but not when our switches are there. Just opening up what happens for individual people based on presence is going to be amazing.
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Glad to be of help
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I ran did quite a bit of testing yesterday and now this thread is making me feel really stupid. I have not received my homepod mini yet but I was shocked by how fast my iPads, macOS, apple watch and iPhone reacted to my siri commands compared to Alexa. I had them available all along and home voice control was the primary function for the echos in every room. The "hey siri" is local processing first and relies on the cloud only if the local processing fails or cloud data is required. The amazon devices on the other hand seem to be cloud first. Out of all my tests, only my apple watch3 seem to be as slow as the fastest echo show 10 gen2. All the echos by the way behave about the same. The bottleneck is the cloud processing of the voice. Given the redundancy, I have decided to take down almost all of my echo devices replacing 12 various echos with only 4 homepod minis.
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It’s quite a stark difference, I was stunned too.
So I will say that I am not entirely sure how to intercept Siri commands like I can with Alexa and use them to control HE devices. I use Node-RED to capture and parse certain Alexa commands and which Echo device they come from in order to do stuff in the area around that specific Echo device that received the command.
A slow and messy way to do it would be using virtual switches that you expose to HK and then turn on with HK automations. The issue is this does not scale well and makes managing or changing anything kind of a nightmare.
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