HomeKit and how entities are are represented in Home app

So recently added homekit to home assistant, and added the bridge to my Apple Home app on the iPhone.

Works great for thermostats and lights, but some odd behaviour with regards to Met office entities.

I have defined Met Office for weather forecasts and Apple Home picks up a number of these as sensors, including Temperature, Humidity and Chance of Precipitation. All great but for some reason when importing the devices \ entities to Apple Home Kit, while the Home app picks up correctly that ‘sensor.met_office_feels_like_temperature’ is Temperature, and that ‘sensor.met_office_humidity’ is a measure of humidity, for some reason it picks up ‘sensor.met_office_probability_of_precipitation’ is a measure of humidity.

When importing the entities there is no way to change this, though I can specify the name of it 'i.e. ‘Chance of Rain’. I would assume that this is a limitation of the Apple Home app, but is there anything I can do to present the entity differently to HomeKit so that it is represented correctly? See below screenshot.

Thanks

Also, the reason why this matters, is because this attribute is represented incorrectly in the Home App summary, as per the below screenshot.

Not sure if i’m posting silly questions or whether this forum isn’t particularly active. Is there a better place to post for answers? It tends to be very lonely here recently.

Any pointers welcome.

Thx

At the moment every Sensor that has % as it’s unit is added as a Humidity Sensor. That might not have been the smartest decision as you noticed. However there is no way to add custom sensor entities to HomeKit that don’t show up as unsupported.

I will probably change that in the near future to only include sensors that have the device_class: humidity or something comparable.

1 Like

The PR: https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/14277

Thank you so much for the answer. It helps a great deal.

So in the near future, just to clarify, the fix will be to exclude any sensor types that are not of the device_class: humidity, which means that the ‘probability of rain’ sensor wouldn’t be imported into HomeKit at all.
Reading between the lines, is that because of an Apple support limitation that means no sensors other than humidity sensors are supported in HomeKit?

Thanks for the answers.

At the moment HomeKit doesn’t support any other sensor types then the already added temperature, humidity and light sensors.

Although the protocol itself would allow it, they get displayed as unsupported in the Home app since custom sensors doesn’t comply with the official specifications.

The only other option is the current state which can be achieved even after the PR is merged by adding device_class: 'humidity' to the customize section for the sensor entity.

1 Like