After the announcement at WWDC regarding matter and the expansion of HomeKit, it threw a spanner in the works for my planned SMARTHOME build!
I’d been fairly set on HA, Rasp Pi4 and focussing on a Zigbee setup with door and window sensors, smart switches, strip lighting, AC control & cameras (as a starting point).
BUT… now not so sure.
The HA discourse is great, but can be very ‘techy’, and to be honest I couldn’t find the answer i was looking for!
I’m hoping I can get some Apple ‘Biased’ (lol) education / suggestions.
HA has huge scope for what it can do - do you think this the direction HomeKit seems to be going down (post WWDC).
If you were starting from scratch right now, would you still go down the HA path or would you gear it up more towards just HomeKit (matter and thread) and bypass HA.
PS - I already have an Apple TV 4K so this sways me even more towards HomeKit only as I don’t have to fork out for the Rasp Pi.
(I only remember the keynote mentioning that the Home App was redesigned, but there was no HomeKit related session for developers later during the week I think?)
Hey Rob, just the day 1 session. With the introduction of matter and the re-design of the HomeKit app, is this not somewhat mimicking what HA does now (combining multiple smart home devices in a single interface (allowing automation) on your own network)?
Am I missing something between the HomeKit capabilities with matter and HomeAssistant?
From what I can tell, you can do HomeKit and Home Assistant. At least with the devices that support Home Assistant.
I set up my HA install about two months ago and it’s been great as I’ve been able to pull all my smart devices in to a single umbrella app - which I guess HomeKit is supposed to do. I’m happier with Home Assistant than I ever was with HomeKit really.
Home Assistant is more than HomeKit. Here’s a simple example:
When my door is open for 1 minute or longer, turn off the heating in that room.
I can’t do that in HomeKit. I can try, using a combination of HomeBridge and/or Shortcuts, but it’s not nice. In Home Assistant, it’s part of the trigger, so I select “door open” and underneath I can input “1 minute”. Done.
Additionally, there are a lot of Zigbee and Z-Wave devices out there, and I suspect there will be a lot of Matter devices too. Home Assistant can support any/all of them. So all of my Zigbee devices are paired with Home Assistant via Zigbee2MQTT—and then those I want to be able to control with Siri are shared back to HomeKit. I do have devices I don’t share with HK, such as the smart plugs monitoring my washing machine, tumble dryer, and dishwasher (I’d never want those to accidentally turn off mid-cycle because I said “Hey Siri, turn everything off”), but that’s my choice.
Finally, HA offers the ability to combine devices to make smarter devices. I have a “dumb” radiator in my bedroom. It’s on a smart plug. I also have a temperature sensor. I was able to connect the two of those together with a Generic Thermostat integration and voilà, I have a much smarter bedroom heating system.
