I’m in the process of moving my Insteon devices to Home Assistant. I have over 100 of them in my house, and I’d like to be able to push them to HomeKit. It isn’t clear to me as to whether I can bypass the idiotic HomeKit 100 device per hub limit with multiple instances of HomeKit in Home Assistant. Is it possible, or am I barking up the wrong tree in trying to do this?
Well you can add more devices, though it might not work that great (in my case it would just load half of the entities). Your experience may differ though.
But the other question is, do you really need 100+ devices in Homekit? I mean I have used Homekit for half a year and with so many switches, lights and sensors Homekit really became unusable for me (it would be quicker to just walk to the button then to find that specific switch in the list). If you plan to use Home Assistant anyways, why not try to go HA all the way? You could create a much better version of Homekit haha.
Anyways if you want to use more devices than the 100 limit (which is also true for actual homekit hubs btw) you will probably want to use multiple HA instances to do that.
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Primarily due to the other iOS users in the home. How does the HA iOS App compare? Do I have to have a paid subscription if I use it away from home?
Ah uhm, well if you use the HA app you will have to build it yourself. Or let it auto generate it for you (though that would really clutter your interface).
HA is entirely free, so no subs needed unless you use google home/alexa and want an easy way to pass them through (they can still be put into manually) so basically no sub is required. Though it will require your time (and dedication) to create something nice. Though Home Assistant has a lot of great tools to do that.
As an example what it can do, this is my own HA config:
Edit: yes it will take some time and dedication, but just a note: I am only a bartender. If I am able to create this than anyone could imho (though like I said it requires time and dedication)
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There is also the 3rd party app HassKit you can look into. Its supposed to mimic the homekit interface and has a lot less configuration needed.
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There are actually quite a few great alternatives out there,
- hasskit
- hassapp
And there are a great deal of lovelace cards that mimic this as well like the homekit-panel-card.
Home Assistant really is all about your preference, want to create something yourself? You can, want to use an app from someone else? Well you can.
In any case: Welcome to the wonderful world of Home Assistant!
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@teharris1 I ended up stripping down what I needed in HomeKit considerably. From over 100 imported devices from my Insteon system to around 60. In Insteon there is a lot of redundancy with multiple switches controlling the same light, when it is just better to import just the scene for them all. So in some cases, 4 devices becomes 1. I also didn’t bother importing any sensors, because I can’t control notifications in HomeKit like I can in Home Assistant Companion. Lack of “critical” notifications and being unable to change the notification sound away from TriTone have been the bane of my HomeKit existence until I found Home Assistant.
It’s working great so far, and has room for any potential expansion. Most of the household has Home installed for basic stuff and the adults have both Home and Home Assistant Companion.
Good idea. I see what you mean.