New Homebridge Plug-in via MakerAPI

šŸš§ Developers
1130

Hi @dan.t thanks for the plugin. Iā€™ve been using it for a month or two with great success.

I recently added some RGBW lights to my home, previously I had some Dimmable whites in their place.

The behavior in the home app is strange, but I canā€™t tell if itā€™s just a bug in the home app or something thatā€™s out of alignment with the api implementations along the way. When I try to use the color shortcuts... they just glitch. Selecting one, and then trying to select another... the favorite just overwrites the preview color. But the color of the bulb is as correct as the previous favorite was. Hereā€™s a screen recording:

Edit: I am noticing a similar unpredictability with the Home+ app, so Iā€™m leaning toward the problem being in the api usage or timing between phone->ļ£ætv->homebridge->hubitat->Zigbee->Bulbs.

1131

This :point_up_2:t2::100:

If you have that base, you can use HomeKit devices with HE. If youā€™re new to home automation, building up your device list can get quite expensive. But now that the Xiaomi Aqara hub and the latest Xiaomi Mijia Multimode Gateway support HomeKit for many of their excellent, tiny and very well designed devices, you can take advantage of building the low cost and build a very stable smart home setup.

Joining Xiaomi devices directly to HE is a hit and miss scenario and can be very disappointing, but joining them to a Xiaomi gateway and then bridging that through HomeKit is incredibly reliable.

1132

Thank you All,
So, I could understand Homekitbridge Plug-in via MakerAPI make HE as a Homekit accessory and to control whole the system HE+other Apple homekit, I still need an iOS device.

1133

Yes.

You will need:

  • Hubitat Hub running Homekitbridge Plug-in via MakerAPI
  • Homebridge running on an Always-On computer
  • Homekit on an Always-On Apple device.
  • Home app running on iOS device.
1 Like
1134

Might be me but it seems that ā€˜Homeā€™ devices take a long time to load on the ā€˜Homeā€™ app since 2.2.0 (122).

1135

I havenā€™t noticed a difference.

1136

You have no idea how much time I have spend trying to figure out what is causing that..... I am more than confident that the issue is on Apple's end and would try to reboot you Apple hub once.

I went down to tracing the communications between Apple and Homebridge and can assure you that Homebridge (and the plugin) respond very quickly but I still see these delays in the Home app. And then one day, it will be all snappy again and the next it might be slow again.

I highly doubt that the Hubitat release has anything to do with it. The plugin does not query Hubitat when the Home app is opened, the individual states are cached in the plugin.

1 Like
1137

I know it slows down my iPad enough that I have been thinking about getting an Apple TV. Like you, it is not consistently slow for me either. It is usually very speedy.

1138

Does anyone know if the Sage Doorbell Sensor might work as a HomeKit doorbell through Homebridge?

1139

I am running Homekit on a gen 6 iPad and the only time it gets rebooted is when there's an iPadOS update. Not sure if it makes a difference or not, but I am running Homebridge Beta.

1140

I have a sage sensor and just tried adding it to Homebridge and it just shows up as a switch. Seems to work though if you want to use it for homekit automations. It acts like a momentary button, turns on then quickly turns off again. Maybe the plugin needs to add the doorbell capability for it to show up properly as a doorbell???

1141

I experience slow loading sometimes as well. I have noticed that limiting how many ā€œfavoritesā€ I have seems to help a little. I recently rebuilt my raspberry pi using the recent Homebridge Pi image and it seems to have helped too. GitHub - homebridge/homebridge-raspbian-image: Official Homebridge Raspberry Pi Image based on Raspbian Lite.

When I was using HOOBS I noticed more slowdowns.

1142

I don't use HOOBS either, but I am using Homebridge Config UI X along with 7 other plugins. I have 215 devices spread across three instances of homebridge with 18 favorites.

1143

I could probably pair that switch with the doorbell plugin that should work. Thanks for trying it out for me.

1144

Seems more responsive
I installed the beta of Homebridge and am using the Hubitat-HubConnect plugin. I havenā€™t had any issues and it seems to load much faster.

1145

So to exclude a specific device COMPLETE, I use the device ID... and leave the rest blank like this?

"excluded_capabilities": {
"09": [ "" ]

Does that work or do I have to find all the capabilities and exclude them manually?
Also, is the device ID the DNI? I have some which are simple numbers and some are long strings.

I'm going to need to exclude all the Wemo and TONS of Lutron devices (already native to Homekit). Looking for a streamlined way.

1146

The easiest way is to just not expose them in the MakerAPI App on your HE Hub. I have Lutron devices as well, and I didnā€™t want doubles In HomeKit either. So, in MakerAPI, I simply selected just the devices I wanted exposed to HomeKit.

1147

Ahhh, so " Allow Endpoint to Control These Devices"... just don't select the dupes. I don't know how I missed that instruction step. Thanks much @[ogiewon]

1 Like
1148

I added some power meters and those didn't show up in homebridge. I saw that power meter related code was commented out in the code, is there any issue enabling this device type?

1149

Just in case someone wanted something similar I wanted to throw out there that the Sage Zigbee Doorbell Sensor, if programmed as a button, set up with the Homebridge-videodoorbell plugin will act as a HomeKit Doorbell.

Pretty cool.

1 Like