I have an instance of HomeKit bridge setup and working correctly.
This is in my primary home and it’s also where the device running home assistant lives and I also have an Apple TV 4K acting as the homekit hub.
I want to setup a second home in the Home app and assign a single entity to that “home”. This is because the switch I want to control is physically in the secondary home, but it’s connected to my home assistant in my primary home via mqtt.
If I create a new instance of HomeKit Bridge in Home assistant I’m presented with this
I want only a specific button to be displayed: If I select “buttons” at this stage, it just adds all the buttons (without asking me to include or exclude specific ones), if I DON’T select anything at this stage, it will add all the entities to the new home. I also noticed that whatever the choice, the entities are unaccessible/unresponsive.
I know I can specify which domains and entity to include or exlude after the bridge has been created, but it just doesn’t have an effect.
You get more granular control over the bridges when created in yaml. Add something like this to your configuration.yaml file -
homekit:
- name: 2nd HA Bridge # name it whatever you want
port: 21078 # any random unused port number will do
ip_address: 192.168.1.101 # this should be the IP address of your HA
filter:
include_entities:
- switch.smart_plug_1 # add any of your applicable/compatible entities here
- switch.smart_plug_2
Once added, restart HA. The bridge should appear under the HomeKit Bridge integration page. After that, you can add/remove any entities at your whim to the yaml, but instead of restarting HA entirely, all you’ll need to do is go into Development Tools and reload the HomeKit yaml.
Thanks, I think I figured out how to do it from the UI. I just have to reconfigure the entities once the homkit bridge is created but before scanning the QR code from the iPhone. This way only the 1 entity that I want appears in the home app.
The problem now is that it shows as “No Response”.
I thought this was because this entity was also in my primary homekit bridge, but I have removed it from the primary homekit bridge and restarted home assistant. Still unresponsive.
If the mqtt switch from the 2nd home is working in HA, then you could potentially be running into a quirk of Apple’s proprietary protocol. Are you trying to add the bridge while your at your primary residence? This is where the quirkiness begins. I’ve never attempted what you’re trying to do before. You might need to be on the wifi network that the 2nd home’s hub is on in order to add the bridge. This is pure speculation on my part. But Apple prides HomeKit’s local capability and if I had to guess, you’re hitting a wall because the protocol needs a local connection to be added correctly.
I did try to scan the QR code while I was at my secondary home and it didn’t work.
I had only added an apple tv at that home and set it up as homekit hub.
While at the primary home (where HA lives), I can add the secondary bridge to the secondary (homekit) home, but the secondary home’s homekit hub (the apple tv) is not here, so maybe that’s why the entity is unresponsive.
Thinking about it, maybe both the primary and secondary homekit hubs should be in the primary home? I don’t know if that matters but I just thought that I don’t see any reason for the secondary hub to be at the secondary home. I have another apple TV at my primary home that I could use as hub for my secondary home, but I don’t know how to do that.
