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.
I have tried to find some basics how a standard underfloor control system is regulating the heating, but haven't, so started with checking up our own temperature control system from LK(TCS). I used Node-Red, with Raspberry Pi(RPi), sensing when the TCS applied voltage to the actuator. Since the actuator is running on 24 VAC and the input on a GPIO PIN is maximum 3,3 VDC I used a optocoupler to level shift. Schematics below
There are many displays for Raspberry Pi and following some of the manufacturers instructions isn't always so easy.
But there are scripts available which will make it very simple. As an example, in this post, I will install the LCD touch display from Joy-IT RB-TFT3.2-V2. The size is 3,2" with a resolution of 320 x 240, has a touch display and comes with 3 buttons.
! 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".
At higher outputs, current, from the batteries I had detected an increasing voltage drop. So I decided to change and update the supply cables from the batteries, see picture, to a more correct solution. The solution was
Cable lugs on all cables
The lug is crimped and soldered to the cable
Heat shrink tubes, with glue, to cover the transition between the lug and cable
The easiest way to test Your OpenPlotter, OpenCPN or SignalK(SK) applications is to use the supplied sample files in SK. Another way is to capture Your own data from a sailing trip, which is described here. Then You can use them instead of the supplied sample files.
A fantastic way to distribute data between devices is using MQTT. In this post I will do a quick and simple setup with Node-Red(NR) and the Mosquitto(MQ) broker on a Raspberry Pi. Very short, the Broker, installed on a server, handles incoming Publishing and Subscriptions from clients. Every published Message is "linked" to a Topic. All Subscribers use a Topic to "link" to the right Message. How to install Node-Red(NR) is found here and the MQ manual here.
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
This Blogpost was initially made before the IKEA outlets was enabled in the Apple Home app. They could then just be reached via a Tradfri Homebridge plugin. Since a while blinds are supported by this plugin but not by the IKEA Gateway and app so maybe its time again to install it ? Another post covers the installation of the Trådfri gateway with a HomeKit approach. (Without Homebridge)
Updated 2019-08-10 ! New to Node-Red(NR) and maybe start with a simple application You can benefit
direct from ? This application is measuring Your Internet connection at chosen intervals
using Speedtest.net and showing
the result in a graph. If the speed is under a set value it will send You
an email.
My thoughts, about NMEA WiFi have finalized ? since my first post in the subject and the Yacht Devices YDWG-02N is now installed in my NMEA2000/ST/NMEA0183 network and works just fine. I'm already using Raymarine ST => ST NG converter but otherwise I had bought the YDNR-02 instead which should have done the same job. Please find some thoughts from the installation below.
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.
Running Weather 34, W34, using my setup, the program "cumulusdata.php" is fetching data from Davis Weatherlink(WL), and are writing the data to a file, type Cumulus. The old way was to fetch the data via a scheduled cronjob. Doing a small change to "windspeeddirection.php", "updater.php" , and using the latest version of "cumulusdata.php", will do the update with the built in W34 refresh routine instead of cron job. Thanks to Ken who gave me the hint.
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.
I bought the Gledopto RGB+CCT LED controller(GO), so I could use RGB LED strips, not just the IKEA ones. There were some IF:s, which will be scrutinized below, but it worked.
!! 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.
