A cheap and simple way to measure temperature, and have it displayed in the
Home app, is to connect one wire (1W) DS18B20 (DS)temperature sensors direct to the Raspberry Pi(RPi) and install a
DS plugin. This assumes that You have
Homebridge
up and running on a Raspberry Pi Check this post !!"ANY" temp source can be HomeKit enabled.
In a former post I installed CUPS printer software for a Cannon printer. The scanning functionality is supported by the package SANE. But there is no nice GUI for the scanning function so I made one, with NodeRed(NR), which I really think is "wife" enabled.
Having
Homebridge(HB) up and running it's simple to retrieve and visualize status or measurements from accessories.
For example I'm using the
Aeotec MultiSensor 6,(AM6), via the z-way plugin, where I'm sensing the light level. Since Im living in northern
Europe it's not very accurate to switch the indoor lightning by
sun-rise/set. So instead I'm using the AM6 together with the
EVE app to switch the lightning.
To visualize the measured values over time I'm using
NodeRed(NR) and a HomeBridge plugin
Make Your home automation devices appear in the Apple Home App
Being the Z-Wave controller
HomeKit enable Your Z-Wave devices
HomeKit enable Your devices registered at Telldus Live
HomeKit enable IKEA Trådfri devices
Homekit enable temperature with sensor DS18B20
HomeKit enable Broadband speed
If You have other products there are more than 4200 plugins available A new simple install !! is found here so skip the below info if you aren't interested of the old way!
With HomeKit You can't show Your measured Internet speed in a proper way, X Mbit/s. So why not show it in % ? the measured speed compared to the one You purchased from Your ISP(Internet Service Provider) ? So now You see the point..... Humidity is also in % and can be displayed in the Home app. The only "if" is that the speed is displayed along with a "water drop"..... but maybe You can live with that ?
As long as it's possible to retrieve information, in some way, from a sensor OR a website/webserver, with temperature information, it's possible to show it in HomeKit with HomeBridge(HB). In this post NodeRed(NR) is retrieving the temperature from Your selected source and is also acting as the WEB endpointfor the HB "homebridge-http-temperature" plugin. In my case I wanted an outside temperature so used the measurements from our Davis Weather station and their JSON REST API but it could for example be Your Raspberry CPU temp or showing the speed of Your Internet connection.
! The latest information on Homebridge update is found here !
Start updating the
Homebridge(HB) installation, after You logged on to the RPi, with; sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -y
If You are using
HOOBS
or
Homebridge with UX
their updates can be done via respective GUI interface. HB also have a
function to
update Node.js. In other words, the info below is more like "nice to know".
There have been some questions about how to handle Homebridge, (HB), autostart at power on and restart at failure using Raspberry Pi OS systemd. Please note that, in the later versions, the HB installation handles this !!
I have written a post how to manually set it up but now in this post I will present a script which handles it automagically !! Despite this simple set up I recommend using the app " hb-service", which is installed together with "homebridge-config-ui-x"
With HomeBridge installed on a Raspberry Pi, (RPi), You just install the homebridge-ring plugin and the Ring accessories will appear in Apple HomeKit This post will cover the Ring video doorbell but is a guide for other Ring products. Prerequisites
Updated 2019-05-11 ! My old Mac Book Air, mid 2011, didn't support the latest MacOS, Mojave. So after some checking I found this brilliant fix which did the job. This guy have really done a fantastic job with great instructions and even a Youtube video.
Do You have Telldus devices up and running and want them to be visible and used in Apples Home app ? With some software and a Raspberry Pi(RPi) they will appear in the HomeKit environment.
!! Note !! Before Monterey !! As a part of one of my projects, the ultimate Weather site ?? Weather34(W34), I needed a WEB-host with PHP and started to use a Raspberry Pi. In this post You will get some short install tips on Apache with PHP on a Mac with Mojave, macOS 10.14.x, and at the end of the post the W34 installation is done.
Updated 2019-09-02 ! If you think it's ok that the broadband speed appears as temperature in Home apps this plugin is very nice.
The plugin, used with Homebridge(HB), measures Your broadband speed at chosen intervals. If You use the free app "Eve for Homekit", besides that it shows the last measured broad band speed, it also shows the speed history in a nice graph.
Updated 2019-02-05 ! Using Homebridge for a while, getting nice hardware to emulate Apples HomeKit devices, I finally decided to test IKEA:s Trådfri concept. The actual device that I was interested in is the wireless control outlet. But they have bulbs and other stuff that is really nice priced.
This post will cover an installation of the Trådfri gateway with a HomeKit approach.
We bought a nice LED lamp, Nemo Ellisse Pendant Double, which was said to be dimmable, but when receiving it there was a big IF !!! The lamp was not "standard" dimmable, instead it was dimmable with 1-10 VDC or 100 Kohm potentiometer. The 1-10 VDC control is common in big installations, in public environment, since it can control a lot of lamps with one dimmer. Checking the lamp I found that the AC/DC LED driver was a Mean Well LPF-90Dand in the drivers specification the second IF was found !! The lowest control level didn't switch of the lamp
Updated 2018-02-14 ! This backup method will make a copy/image of the whole card even if there is very little data on it. So if the card is 16Gb, the backup file also will be 16Gb. On the other hand You can ZIP the image file to save space. Another, maybe smarter ?, backup method is described here.