Homebridge

For those of you who have smart device in your home, such as Nest Thermostat or Ring security cameras/alarm, may have noticed that these devices don’t “play well” with Apple’s HomeKit.

This is not just an Apple thing, as they don’t tend to work well with each other, but when you are an IT geek and you have spent time and money in one manufacturer’s platform (Apple) you start to wonder why the industry is so blinkered and why the different companies won’t work together.

My understanding is that this may be resolved later this year (2022) with the integration of Matter into many smart devices (although probably not the older models), more of that in another post.

My issue is that we have had a Ring floodlight camera for many years (which I have been mostly happy with). The iOS app is good (sometimes a bit slow, not quite what you see on the TV adverts) but I had bought an Apple TV and had seen that security cameras could appear on the screen.

After waiting a while for these companies to sort themselves out (see matter and this post on Smarter Home Guide), I decided to do some research.

I came across some interesting Youtube videos that mentioned the free “HomeBridge” software.

HomeBridge is a “bridge” between multiple vendors interfaces and Apple’s HomeKit.

Various people have created “Plugin”s for HomeBridge ( including for Ring and Nest), to allow you to add your smart devices into Apple’s HomeKit, so that you can automate stuff via Shortcuts or change settings via Siri.

After a short while I was able to add in the Ring and Nest plugins and shortly after that I started to see the devices, that I was previously unable to use on my Apple systems, appear in HomeKit. This was a massive leap forward.

My first test of this was to create a virtual unix machine using VirtualBox on my existing MacBook. I used a spare USB pen drive, created some space, installed one of the default Linux images and then followed the instructions on the HomeBridge site.

After feeling happy with the setup and as I didn’t want to leave my Mac on 24/7 I took the next step and I purchased an SD card and a Raspberry Pi Zero W. The Raspberry Pi Zero is a full computer on a circuit board, not much bigger than a USB pen drive. After a bit of research, I was able to write the Raspberry Pi image for HomeBridge to the SD Card.

Booting the Pi zero and making some changes to the security (more on this in another post) I was able to back up and restore the HomeBridge configuration from my Virtual Unix system to the Raspberry Pi Zero and it came to life as if nothing had changed.

Over the next year or so, I have been using the Raspberry Pi Zero as a Homebridge. The only issue being that the device struggled with streaming from the Ring camera(s) (“live”), due to the limited memory and processing power. Updates to the HomeBridge software were also slow and maxed out the processor.

The solution to this issue happened in the last few weeks, when I found that there was an update to the Raspberry Pi Zero, The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W.

The Zero 2 is the same size, but has a better RP3A0 chip, which is 5 times faster and can manage streaming images. So it took me no time to order the new model.

Rather than just removing the SD card from the original Pi Zero and inserting it into the Pi Zero 2, I performed a backup, copied the config and then installed the latest Pi HomeBridge image, inserted the card into the Pi Zero 2 and performed the basic security changes, before restoring the configuration.

The new system is soo much quicker, with “live” images appearing straight away and the processor usage (which used to max out at 100%, for a few seconds) running at an average of 3% and the HomeBridge and plug-in updates were a lot faster.

If you aren’t as technical, there is also a solution called HOOBS (which stands or HomeBridge Out Of the Box ) which makes the process more user friendly and less technical, whilst still keeping the same features as HomeBridge (with some tweaks).

So to summarise, until Matter is available (original estimates were late 2021 or early 2022) on all smart devices, I would recommend spending a little money ( under £25, for an SD card and a Raspberry Pi ) and set up HomeBridge as it makes Apple Home a lot easier to use with these troublesome devices.