Hi everyone. I have been using Home Assistant for the past 8 months. One of the reasons that made me use it was the possibility to have all my IoT devices in a single place, without the need to switch between multiple applications, and consequently, add them to Apple Home App.
I recently bought some new light bulbs and I haven’t found a way to add them into the previously created Home Kit bridge. Is there a way to add new devices into an existing bridge or I have to create a new one every time I buy a new device? Creating a new bridge every time I buy new devices is tedious and makes me lose all the created scenarios on the Apple Home App.
If you have new entities on the HA side, you can definitely add them. How did you set up the bridge? Via the UI or YAML? What does your config look like?
I set up the bridge via the UI, following the prompts on screen.
I read somewhere that if I had configured it via Yaml, adding a new item to the configuration file and restarting HA would automatically add the new device to the bridge.
When trying to add a new device through the UI, it seems that HA tries to create another bridge, instead of adding a new device to the existing one.
This is what I do.
Interesting. I’m away for the weekend, so I cannot check or experiment, but adding another bridge is usually done for certain entities, e.g. it’s best to have a bridge per camera, for some performance reason.
It makes sense that the add entry option would do that. For all integrations, it sets up another instance of the integration. Try clicking the configure option on an existing bridge instead. What do you see?
I figured it out. Clicking on configure, it opens a new menu that was not available for me before, where i can chose inclusion or exlusion mode.
Selecting “exclude” and no device in the next screen makes every device appear on Apple Home App without any added configuration. Then, its just a matter of putting the devices in the right division. Thank you a lot.