My Smart Home Journey From Homebridge to Pure HomeKit
As a nerd I love the conveniences that a smart home provides. A few years ago when I moved into my now-wife’s house, we had a mix of different smart home devices, many of which weren’t HomeKit compatible.
In order to get everything into the Home app, I set up a Raspberry Pi with Homebridge which serves as, well, a bridge between HomeKit and non-compatible devices. For a time this worked well enough with some major downsides which I’ll detail below.
Thermostat
My wife already had a Nest Thermostat when I moved in and this was the most painful device to get Homebridge to interface with. I had to go to the Google Home website, login and then use the browser’s developer tools to copy a token value from a cookie that the plugin could use to connect to Google’s API. This token would expire after 6 months or so, at which time the thermostat integration would simply stop working without warning until I repeated the process.
This was the first device I replaced with a HomeKit-compatible alternative, specifically an Ecobee.
Doorbell
This house didn’t even have a doorbell when I moved in, which was especially annoying if I was in the basement where it can be difficult to hear a knock from upstairs. I installed a Ring and connected it to the Homebridge, which allowed me to see the video from the Home app and made a doorbell chime through the HomePods. Unfortunately the video feed was laggy as was the chime sound.
I replaced this with a Circle View Doorbell, which is much more responsive. I don’t know if the difference is the HomeKit-native interface, or the fact that this one has a dedicated power connection (the Ring used a battery), but it’s a significant improvement.
Garage Door Opener
I bought a myQ on Prime Day a few years ago, and this was the last Homebridge-enabled device that I replaced. It was reliable and responsive so I had no reason to spend money on a new solution… until it abruptly stopped working. Chamberlain, who makes myQ, cut off access to its API that the Homebridge plugin relied upon without warning. A heads-up email would have been trivial to send to users since they have a log of the accounts that were accessing that API, but instead the Homebridge just started getting HTTP connection errors to their service that, after some googling, I came to realize meant that I needed a new garage solution.
I just finished installing a Meross MSG200HK, so my garage doors are back in the Home app.
Goodbye Homebridge
Once these were all replaced, I also unplugged the Homebridge as it no longer serves a purpose. Part of me will miss it because it was my nerdy solution to bringing together a heterogenous collection of smart home devices, but it also introduced what we in software call “a single point of failure” (it occasionally needed to be rebooted) and relied upon integration with 3rd parties via unofficially supported means which may be cut off without notice.
Matter is supposed to serve as the industry standard for connecting a wide-array of devices to all of the smart home platforms, but Matter’s rollout has proven to be slow. In the meantime there are now good HomeKit-compatible options for just about every smart home need I have.
