HomeKit

Wemo Stage is one of those devices that has a horrible rating if you check Amazon. However, it fills a device category that up until now has essentially had no competition and is honestly not terrible for a first of its kinds device. The category I’m referring to is battery-powered thread light switches. As someone that rents, I can’t install light switches in the wall, so this has saved my smart home by allowing me to install renter-friendly physical controls for Apple Home.

But there are a few differences:

Wemo Stage

• HomeKit over thread
• Mediocre battery life
• Responsiveness is okay most of the time, but it really depends on the stability of Apple Home and can lag
• 3 programmable buttons, each supporting single, double, and triple tap for 9 programmable shortcuts

Nanoleaf Sense+

• Not actually tied to HomeKit in any way
• Uses Lightwave (Nanoleaf proprietary protocol) over thread
• Bypasses Apple Home (thread border router) altogether
• Near instantaneous response time, and doesn’t seem to lag ever
• On, off, and dimming controls. Two extra programmable buttons that will eventually support Matter (coming soon supposedly)
• Includes motion sensor that can control lights via Lightwave protocol

The Sense+ is very new. I’ve only had mine for a few days after pre-ordering the switch. I was really hoping the Sense+ would be better all around, but despite its instantaneous response time, it has a few major drawbacks:

• lack of support for non-Nanoleaf lights
• built-in button programming is very limited; you can’t program a button to set both brightness and hue. Seriously, Nanoleaf?

I wish they could have the switch support direct control of any Nanoleaf light, but fall back to Matter control for anything else. Though I suppose mixing protocols could get messy. But Lightwave is really solid as long as you live within Nanoleaf’s walled garden. But as soon as you throw anything else into the mix, the illusion shatters.

I’m sure the Sense+ will mature with software updates. I’m excited to see how Nanoleaf improves the product!

I may mess around with more wireless Thread switches. ONVIS makes one that is more of a button form factor than a switch. But for now I find myself having to choose between Sense+ which is more responsive, or Wemo Stage which can control more devices.

I’ve been curious about homebridge for quite some time and have been considering picking up a Raspberry Pi to run it. I’m interested to know about others experiences with it, and what sort of difficulties I might expect to troubleshoot in the future.

Is an RPi4 enough? Is an RPi5 overkill?

Hi, I recently made the switch to Lemmy from Reddit. But r/homekit is one of the communities I miss the most.

What can I do to help build this community up? I’m happy to make posts, comment, and upvote. Is trying to poach people from r/homekit a bad idea?

I would love to get to know everyone better. Here’s some info about my smart home.

• I’m using Apple Home, and my primary hub is a 4K Apple TV 4K Ethernet, which I chose for the Thread radio.
• I’m almost exclusively using Thread devices, and most of those are Matter over Thread.
• Most of my lights are Nanoleaf Essentials (Matter over Thread), and despite people hating Nanoleaf, they have been much better lately.
• For more advanced lighting, I’m using WLED, which is a DIY project for controlling addressable light strips.
• My WLED lights are bridged into HomeKit via Homebridge, though I’ve considered switching to Home Assistant.
• I’m using a Deco mesh router with two nodes, and it’s been amazing for the relatively low cost.
• Outside of Apple Home, I use Ring, which I’ve bridged into Apple via Homebridge. I hate the Ring subscription, but their hardware is solid.

Excited to get to know everyone!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21224914

As I don‘t have a water outlet on my balcony I use a water tank and a pump for watering my strawberries. I developed a controller for the pump which runs natively on Apple Homekit but I‘d like to change it to Matter and Threads in the future.

Not sure if this has always been the case, or if I’m only noticing with iOS 18 allowing me to pin a primary hub, but my primary hub constantly falls back to my HomePod mini from Apple TV 4K WiFi.

Whenever this happens, all my lights go unresponsive. Absolutely infuriating.

So I’m sure the issue is WiFi. I have really solid WiFi speed/ping and relatively good range, but I live in a pretty WiFi congested apartment. So my guess is WiFi noise is knocking my primary hub out occasionally. But the odd thing is I never notice my WiFi dropping in other contexts.

But then again, maybe it’s not WiFi, because sometimes pressing a switch seems to trigger the primary hub dropping.

I’m so fed up, decide to buy an Apple TV 4K Ethernet edition to pin as my primary hub. My thought process is WiFi won’t drop, and built in thread radio means it won’t rely on external border routers (HomePod mini).

But I can’t believe the Apple Home experience is this bad. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t this bad pre iOS 18. I’ve never had more home hub failovers.

A user on r/HomeKit has reported a new feature in iOS 18 for Smart Locks. The post shows an auto-lock option that allows to set smart locks to automatically lock after a specified time period, ranging from 30 seconds to 30 minutes.

The feature was works at least with an Aqara Smart Lock U200.

Post: https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeKit/s/8P13RVBs8f

Code references in the first developer beta of tvOS 17.4 to "homeOS" could be an indication that Apple is working on a new operating system aimed for use within a person's home.

If so, how did you connect your Miele account to your developer secret and client ID?

I recently purchased a small studio flat and thought that it is the perfect place to make a smart home since I will only need to control a few things.

I have already ordered my light switches and am still contemplating my blinds.

But my biggest concern is my airconditioning as I stay in the desert and it becomes quite unbearable during summer I normally left the AC on the whole day in my rental apartment.

But since this AC works on electricity only I figured I wanted to make it smart and only want it to cool a 15 minutes before I normally arrive back home.

My thermostat though is a communicating one and so far the only one I am seeing is the Lennox iComfort S30, but I don’t know if it is compatible with what I currently have. The videos I looked at said the companies should be sister companies for compatibility but I couldn’t find out how to check that.

This is my current thermostat

Has anyone else tried to do something similar?

Edit: This is what is on top of the roof of the apartments and each has 1 or more of these

Since upgrading to iOS/tvOS/HomePodOS 17.2, my HomeKit stuff has been SO unstable where every day since 17.2 came out I have been putting out fires and rebooting devices. Even devices that are usually very solid. A couple of times I have even had to do full resets of a device and re-add it to my home when rebooting didn’t work, which is normally a very rare occurrence.

Along with rebooting or power cycling devices, I’ve rebooted and power cycled Apple TVs and HomePods with no luck. Tonight I even rebooted my WiFi hubs (eero Pro 6) and updated the firmware. Jury is still out on results of that.

Anyone else having problems?

Hiya,

I’m wondering if anybody knows of any other brands like Eve that sell local-network-only no-cloud HomeKit products.

To make that word salad a bit clearer, I’m looking for devices that:

• work with HomeKit, either directly or over Thread or Matter.
• don’t have any mandatory cloud services from the vendor.
• don’t have any optional cloud services from the vendor.
• don’t phone home to their vendor.
• is supported as running in a VLAN with no WAN access, or can be trusted in a secure VLAN with WAN access as it won’t abuse that trust.

I’d be very interested to hear your experiences and recommendations around the above. I recognise that some devices can be run in a secured VLAN in a non-vendor recommended manner and am interested to hear about them, but the main focus of this thread is to determine if there are and brands besides Eve that explicitly manufacture “local-only” HomeKit devices.

Hopefully these scenarios are common, and therefore easy to resolve...

I have a photo shelf in my lounge that I was thinking of trying to light up of an evening using some kind of HomeKit-enabled lighting - but not sure what kind of light. Being that it's high up, it'd be better if the lights were battery operated so as not to have a big wire trailing down, but it's not the end of the world if that's not possible, as I'm sure I could hide the wire behind a nearby tall plant.

The shelf I have is a simple one from IKEA (here), and I was thinking of either putting something along the front of the shelf, behind the lip, or in between the 3 photos I have on there.

The other scenario is the aforementioned tall plant. I was also looking for an option of something that can be placed in the plant pot, firing upwards, to light the plant. Wired is less of a problem here, as I have an outlet right next to it.

Again, plant is an artificial IKEA one (here).

Any thoughts/suggestions for what's out there (I'm in the UK)?

Thanks in advance!

Looking for support or purchasing advice with Apple’s Home app, accessories, networking troubles / solutions, anything else HomeKit supports, or which brand or accessory to buy — try asking here.

Try to keep your question as clear and concise as possible because more people will be able to respond.

Here is a list of HomeKit enabled devices on Apple’s website.

If I add an IR device (fan, tv etc) via the G3 hub, does that device bridge over to the home app?

I will highly appreciate any recommendations you might have to spot the occasional hedgehog roaming our small garden.

I got as far that people like generic ip PoE cameras such as from reolink and set them up through syncted. I havent gotten to such a complex configuration, but i have a mac mini m1 with docker at home that i can run as a server if needed.

Are wifi cameras a no go? It would save me to drill through walls.

I recently added a Hue bridge with 2 bulbs that are in lamps. I did set them up in HomeKit to act as 1 accessory. Obviously the lamps need to be "on" in order to work through the Home app/Siri. But I am wondering if there's a way through Automations to turn on both bulbs through a real dumb switch? Obviously one bulb would need power on and just be off in software.

Getting frustrated with Lutron’s documentation and links to non-existing pages. I’be got lots of Caseta stuff in the house already but this new summer just won’t go with the flow. Switch and lights work fine. Wireless signal strong. I’ve even reset the switch. All I get though after the -0-second hold to go through the pairing process, is a slow-blinking top led. None of the support stuff covers this example.

I will say that this is the first switch to get installed on the second floor, and the hub is in the basement. Is it too far away? Is that a thing still (not sure if thread and all that is in play here.)

Thanks for the help.

I was looking to buy some stuff and noticed the “sale” price is the regular historical price. Stay safe

This is what happens when one of my HomePods takes over as the main hub.

New update for the Aqara FP2

1. Optimize sensitivity strategy to solve the problem of creating false targets.
2. Added the function of successfully synchronizing regions through networking to solve the problem of area loss caused by power outages.
3. Newly added area close to far away event reporting switch function.
4. Modify the logic of LAN automation.
5. Optimize regional type functions.
6. Optimize internal target creation conditions under import and export conditions.
7. Optimize background learning.

The most anticipated feature over the original is obviously Matter/Thread support, however, the website boasts some cool new other features such as: a flat magnet option, 5-year battery life, adjustable sensitivity, and tamper alarm.

The Amazon listing is now live but not for sale just yet: https://a.co/d/bfkgsVc

Part of me was truly hoping Apple would step in and offer to host a lemmy instance like lemmy.apple and then we could build Apple specific communities from there. But after the death of Ping... I think Apple and "social" platforms are a thing of the past.

Looking for support or purchasing advice with Apple's Home app, accessories, networking troubles / solutions, anything else HomeKit supports, or which brand or accessory to buy — try asking here.

Try to keep your question as clear and concise as possible because more people will be able to respond.

Here is a list of HomeKit enabled devices on Apple's website.

Getting ready to dip my toe into the world of smart shades. The Lutrons look stylish, and the warranty is attractive, but the Ikea ones are so damn affordable, and I heard they have vastly improved in the past few years.

Can anybody make a recommendation for the Ikea smart shades (in particular, the honeycomb Tredansen)? Or can you justify the price of the Lutron for me somehow?

Our new place is blessed to have numerous, gigantic windows with splendid exposures, but is also cursed to have numerous, gigantic windows with splendid exposures. To outfit just the major windows into bedrooms and into the living room (for projector screen blackout) on the Luton would be like $5K.