How to make HomeKit see more of your devices with Home Assistant

I’ve been buying and doing smart home appliances for years. As a result, my home network resembles a kind of UN model of devices, bridges, protocols, assistants, and applications. I try to mediate alliances and resolve conflicts and assure everyone, myself included, that this whole complex matter is still worth it.

It was my salvation home assistanta little servant gives you Local control and a lot of automation power. Every device in my house is connected to the Home Assistant, which works on a small device Raspberry Pi 3B + under my printer. I have a custom control panel with all the switches, sensors, speakers, and lights. I have full control, a custom dashboard, and endless automation.

But sometimes I just want to change the thermostat from the lock screen on my iPhone or tell Siri, on my phone or watch, to turn on the flashlight. Yes, Home Assistant has its own app, as well as a mobile compatible website. But I also want to save my partner from learning how to make a completely different and somewhat grotesque app for accessing lights and switches.

Conveniently, Home Assistant isn’t an all-or-none display. Sure, you can use it to get the big tech companies out of your smart home and design your own dashboard. But you can also use it as a gateway between a variety of tools that are not compatible with HomeKit and the Apple Home system. Or you can switch between both for more control or easier access.

Let’s dive into how Home Assistant can help HomeKit find every device in your home, even the ones it doesn’t officially support, for free. It can also connect Google, Amazon, and assistant apps to rare devices they don’t support, although that costs $5 a month (but also supports Home Assistant development).

Another note before we dig deeper: If you only use Apple hardware to control your smart home devices, you only care about HomeKit compatibility, and you have a spare Raspberry Pi, HomeBridge is another solution. It’s more limited in scope than Home Assistant, but that might be a plus for some people.

arrange your home

First, you will need to get Home Assistant up and running and connect it to your devices. It’s out of our scope here to walk you through the process, but there are several resources you can refer to. never b The official guide to the home assistant To boot the system on a Pi, NUC, NAS, always-on system, Docker container, or in a virtual machine. Essentially, the Home Assistant can live on any small computer that can always be on.

Once Home Assistant is on, add as many devices and services in your home (called Home Assistant ‘integration’) to it as you like from phones or speakers. If you hit a wall, Home Assistant subredditAnd the forumAnd the discord Good places to look for troubleshooting tips. I found some tips about Kirill Biansky’s blogvery.

If you’ve searched Home Assistant and can’t find integration with one of your devices, consider installing Home Helper Community Store (HACS)And the An unofficial compendium maintained by the community for integrations and other add-ons. Look (in the upper-right corner of the HACS page) to see if your device or brand is displayed.

Some HACS integrations may require more work to configure. I had to make a file Mosquitto الرسائل message broker Set up a friend’s home assistant to access their Ring track lights. For some devices (usually cheaper, non-branded type), you can register for an API key in the developer portal of an unknown company. You can decide if the extra steps are worth getting instant access and a swipe on your phone to these tools.

If you already have Home Assistant running and connected to everything and you want to add a HomeKit bridge, you have a special task: GeGet rid of as many old, redundant or unresponsive devices as possible. Head to Settings, Devices and Services, then the Entities tab and sort by status to see what’s no longer connected or responding. When you connect the Home Assistant to HomeKit, Google, or Alexa, the server sends out entire categories of devices, whether they are duplicate or unresponsive. In HomeKit, in particular, it’s annoying to get rid of dead or duplicate entries, and the Home app will notify you to configure devices until you do.