Pimatic plugin as Apple Homekit bridge

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Hey guys!
First: thanks @michbeck100 for that great plugin! It works very well on my pi!
But I have a question to everyone who’s using the hap plugin. Is there any app that works with IFTTT? I would love to create some recipes with my new HomeKit-Home!

@nco1512 Do you have an example for what to achieve using IFTTT?

Thanks for your awesome work @michbeck100! I just had time to switch from my ugly old version with a second raspberry pi to your new plugin.

Everything works as expected!

I still cant believe I only spent around 100€ (including Raspberry and every light/switch) to get my apartment HomeKit and Siri enabled and i am even doing more than Out-of-the-Box solutions could do.

I am really looking forward for the integrated piamtic-led-light <-> pimatic-hap solution to work with my wifi370 controllers.

@thymian Thanks for the kudos. I will start on the implementation for pimatic-led-light, once i finished my the integration of my hyperion lights. Otherwise i can’t test
EDIT: pull request is available for pimatic-led-light, so now i can start on the integration into pimatic-hap

Hello, is there any possibility that the Raspberry works like a homekit hub.
So that i can control my devices at home, when i’m not at home?
Actually you need a apple tv 3 to get this scenario to work.
Or I’m wrong?

mfg
Chris

@chris Connection through AppleTV/HomeKit was very unstable, so I am using a VPN from my mobile to my FritzBox and then directly Pimatic. Works very reliable from anywhere.

Cheers,
Frank

Yes so I’m already using it.
But one of the Homekit-Apps has a “Mitteilungs-Widget”. So you can access the device very easy and fast.

VPN and then a Homekit-App does not work. Any other idea?

mfg
Chris

@ras37-pi Homekit via VPN does not work, since the Bonjour (aka zeroconf) packages are not able to cross a vp.This is the reason why you need an ATV to control your homekit devices from outside your home.

@chris Maybe you should just use the web app of pimatic when controlling your devices from outside your house. This works fine using a vpn. I think we shouldn’t exaggerate the usage of home kit here.

@michbeck100 Yes, I should have been more precise, I am using VPN with the pimatic web fronted instead of HomeKit through ATV 3. ATV 3 was working fine, before it stopped working. Then suddenly worked again. VPN with pimatic web frontend always works for me. I have an ATV 4 still in a box, I hope HomeKit gets more reliable with this setup.

Cheers,
Frank

Your ATV 3 must not go in Standby.

I think i crushed my hap plugin.
I installed the newest plugin version with the commands of this thread

sudo service pimatic stop
sudo rm -rf pimatic-hap/
git clone https://github.com/michbeck100/pimatic-hap.git
cd pimatic-hap
sudo npm install
sudo service pimatic start

Sadly i forgot to delete all homekit information of my iphone before, so when I logged into eve my three pimatic-led-light devices showed up but nothing else. In the room overview my other devices where still count (approx. 20 total devices) but i could only see the three new led-light devices. Siri did also only work with the new ones.

So i thought a complete reinstall could solve my issue.

• I removed the app Eve
• I deleted my “Home” thought iphone Settings
• I resetted my HomeKit-Configuration via Settings->privacy settings->HomeKit-> reset HomeKit configuration
• I rebooted the iPhone
• edit: searched for persist folders on my pi but there are none!

Furthermore i removed the pimatic-hap/ folder again, started pimatic without the { "plugin": "hap" }, stopped it again, added the plugin in the config and then started pimatic WITHOUT daemon via the HomeKit Debug mode:
sudo DEBUG=HAPServer,EventedHTTPServer,Accessory node node_modules/pimatic/pimatic.js

There were some error messages at start but they are based on pimatic itself and not pimatic-hap i guess:

As you can see in the picture “[pimatic-hap] Starting homekit bridge” pops up, and some lines later there is also
EventedHTTPServer Server listening on port 51826 +0ms

So everything SHOULD be okay. Problem is:

I cant find the Bridge with my HomeKit apps anymore.
Ideas how to fix/ get more debug info?

@thymian Always use the same user for ‘npm install’. Since you’re starting with sudo you should sudo npm install, too.
Apart from this the persist folder was renamed to hap-database.
To completely clear every HomeKit data l you should

• delete hap-database
• reset all HomeKit settings on your iOS device

If this doesn’t help, try to restart your devices and servers.
Usually this is enough.

Thanks for you answer! deleting the folder hap-database worked for me!

by the way: How can i switch colors with siri in german?

@thymian To be honest, I haven’t tried yet. But I found some examples in the www.

Hello,
your plugin want’s that i inform you about the error…

error [pimatic]: A uncaught exception occured: Error: dns service error: unknown
at Advertisement.on_service_registered (/home/pi/pimatic-app/node_modules/pimatic-hap/node_modules/hap-nodejs/node_modules/mdns/lib/advertisement.js:42:24)
at SocketWatcher.MDNSService.self.watcher.callback (/home/pi/pimatic-app/node_modules/pimatic-hap/node_modules/hap-nodejs/node_modules/mdns/lib/mdns_service.js:18:40)
This is most probably a bug in pimatic or in a module, please report it!

And i have the error when i’m configuring the device on the iPhone, then the device is visible on the iPad, but they are not reachable.
When i’m starting on the iPad, it is the other way round.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen
Chris

@chris This error was reported before, just search for “dns service error: unknown”.
I didn’t have this error with my installation.
Currently there’s no solution for this, but it comes from the used library hap-nodejs, not from the piratic-hap plugin itself. Try to restart everything.
Maybe someone else has found a solution?

@michbeck100 Thanks for sharing this great plugin!

Everything works fine for me except that when using the elgato eve app, the pimatic rules seem to be ignored.
I defined a simple rule like “if switch x ist turned on turn on switch y”. If I turn on switch x via the pimatic web frontend everything works fine and the rule is triggered. However, when turning on x via elgato eve the rule is NOT triggered.

Any ideas?

@michbeck100 I’m having the same issues as @l0mp1: rules are being ignored!

@l0mp1 honestly, I didn’t test with rules yet 😳. But I will have a look. Maybe the rules engine is somehow just bound to the gui?