Home Assistant vs Homebridge?

Configuration
1

Hello,

Apologies for the newbie question, I’ve reviewed the documentation but it wasn’t clear to me what the steps were or if this was supported:

I’m currently using Homebridge to hook up some custom automation (running on Raspberry Pi’s) to Homekit. This includes my back yard pool system (pool lights, pump, heater, cover, valves, etc), yard lights, my aquarium (CO2 system, lights, feeder, etc), and so on. This was working reasonably well until recently but for unknown reasons i’m no longer able to get the iOS Home app to connect to Homebridge (also running on a Pi under Raspbian).

example from my Homebridge config.json -

    "accessory": "Http",
    "name": "Blower",
    "on_url": "http://10.0.1.19/update_blower.php?blower=Blower On",
    "on_body": "",
    "off_url": "http://10.0.1.19/update_blower.php?blower=Blower Off",
    "off_body": "",
    "read_url": "http://10.0.1.19/status.php?function=Blower",
    "brightness_url": "",
    "username": "",
    "password": "",
    "sendimmediately": "",
    "http_method": "GET",
    "http_brightness_method": "GET",       
    "service": "Switch",
    "brightnessHandling": "no"
    },

    {
    "accessory": "Http",
    "name": "Cover",
    "on_url": "http://10.0.1.19/update_cover.php?cover=Cover Close",
    "on_body": "",
    "off_url": "http://10.0.1.19/update_cover.php?cover=Cover Open",
    "off_body": "",
    "read_url": "http://10.0.1.19/status.php?function=Cover",
    "brightness_url": "",
    "username": "",
    "password": "",
    "sendimmediately": "",
    "http_method": "GET",
    "http_brightness_method": "GET",       
    "service": "Switch",
    "brightnessHandling": "no"
    },

    {
        "accessory": "HttpTemperature",
        "name": "Temperature",
        "url": "http://10.0.1.45/last_read.php?option=Temp",
        "http_method": "GET"
    },

I was going to start from scratch and reinstall the latest Raspbian on my Pi and reinstall Homebridge but was pointed at Home Assistant by a colleague at the office.

So my question is whether this is an alternative - can I use HA to integrate my custom automation with HomeKit? I do see that there is a homekit plugin, but it wasn’t clear how to configure my custorm accessories. The documentation for the http module didn’t seem to support what I need to do.

Sorry for the long post but would appreciate if anyone could point me in the right direction.
My fundamental requirement is to be able to control everything with Siri.

thanks

2

I believe the approach you would use with Home Assistant is to model all of your http-controlled devices using the RESTful integration and then expose the resulting entities to Homekit using Home Assistant’s HomeKit integration (not to be confused with the HomeKit Controller integration).

For example, you would use a RESTful Switch to create a switch.blower and a RESTful Sensor to create sensor.temperature. There is no RESTful Cover so your cover will have to be modeled as a RESTful Switch: switch.cover.

Then you would configure the HomeKit integration as per its documentation. In the config file, you would specify the entities you permit to be discovered by HomeKit.

homekit:
  filter:
    include_entities:
      - switch.blower
      - sensor.temperature
      - switch.cover

As a point of reference, almost all of my entities are based on the MQTT integration. I have switches, lights, a lock, cover, sensors, climate, etc and use the HomeKit integration to make them all available in HomeKit.

3

Thanks for your really helpful reply :-).
Sounds pretty straightforward, I’ll take the plunge and try it out.

4

Should you encounter difficulties using the RESTful integration to model your devices, the other option is to use the Command Line integration. One of its advantages is that it has a climate component.

Command line Switch
Command line Sensor
Command line Cover

5

Thanks. A bit off topic, but one concern I have now that I’ve started to review the HA documentation is resource requirements. I was running Homebridge happily on a Pi Zero with 8Gb of flash memory. Seems like this is not adequate for HA?

6

Correct; that’s inadequate for Home Assistant’s needs (might be achievable on a dare but not recommended for daily use). If you’re constrained to using an RPi Zero then you may want to continue using HomeBridge.