Homekit_connector ecobee, myq, etc. local vs cloud

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I’ve always glanced over any homekit related news, posts, and bugs but I just recently read about the homekit_connector in another read about ecobee. I added my ecobee using it to play around. This ended up being rather fortuitous because the upgrade to 102.3 broke the ecobee cloud component.
And now I’ve noticed a few things…

  1. The state changes and state information appears immediate instead of the 5min poll of the cloud component. (although I still wish we could have realtime motion info from the sensors)
  2. The card for the homekit_connector doesn’t have exactly the same controls. Is this an HA side thing that just needs updated or a difference in available ecobee apis between homekit and cloud?
  3. I’m going to dig into point 2 a bit but I have yet to find per-homekit accessory info like we have for the direct-to-components like myq or ecobee.

The first point seems huge to me. It offers local/direct access to things instead of relying on the Internet which is a core benefit of home assistant. It also seems like a sustainable compromise between us wanting local api access to devices and vendor’s tendencies to avoid that and instead offer a ‘service’. If this is as good as it seems, I may consider picking up a homekit enabled myq bridge to avoid the Internet for garage door control too.

What has been other’s experience when moving to the homekit integration of components that would otherwise be cloud/internet-based?

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Did you make any progress on this? I’m currently running the cloud api and I don’t want to lose any functionality, but wouldn’t mind gaining some response speed.

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I have three Ecobee thermostats and I was finding that my Ecobee integrations were often breaking. Every few weeks, or after a HASS update, I’d have to remove and re-add the integration to get them working again.

So, when I realized that there it was possible to take advantage of the Homekit feature to get local control (even though I don’t have Apple devices in my household), I tried that. As you’ve pointed out, the Homekit integration doesn’t appear to expose the same features. I don’t appear to have access to the Home, Away, Sleep mode settings. Instead, I can only change between Heat/Cool and Off.

It’s not ideal, but I think I’d rather have local control, so I’ll keep using the Homekit integration.

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Thanks for chiming in guys. I’ve found a few discussions on discord, here, and github about the native ecobee vs homekit and what I understand is that the homekit climate support does not expose all features.

See:

Regarding my 3rd point, i found what I was looking for in the homekit_controller code. There is a file for each integration type. ie climate

Depending on what you need, using both may be the best answer.

I wonder if the open sourcing of some of the homekit stuff will improve stuff like this.

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@hasshoolio Some time has passed since your last comment. I am in a very similar situation - I have both ecobee and myq. How have the homekit_controller integrations been working for you? Particularly with ecobee, have you had any issues or has it been pretty solid? I am considering adding my ecobees to homekit_controller. I am also considering keeping both the HA ecobee integration and the homekit_controller integration, thinking/hoping that will give the best of both worlds.

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Ecobee via homekit controller has been reliable. I don’t use it a ton but compared to the internet integration it’s rock solid. I would definitely add it and see.

I’m more strongly considering a myq homekit bridge since the myq api keeps breaking. I want to confirm it has full feature parity first.

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@hasshoolio If you go the MyQ homekit_controller route, please let me know how it goes.

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I’m so curious about how well this will work. Please let us all know if you do it!

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@hasshoolio @jjross After the MyQ integration broke AGAIN this morning, I dumped it and switched to homekit_controller. So far, everything seems to be working!

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@_Mike

Awesome to hear.

Any differences in behavior/response time?

Do yo use see the transitional states of closing/opening?

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@hasshoolio MyQ is through homekit_controller is working very well. And yes, it does pass through the transitional states.

The only issue I have - which I think also was an issue when it was connected directly to HomeKit - is this: If you trip the safety laser sensor and don’t give it enough time to clear before closing the garage, it will sometimes get stuck in a closing/unresponsive state. Other than that, it is perfect.

The only caveat to using homekit_controller is that you need to have the version of MyQ that is HomeKit compatible. Not all of them are.

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@_Mike

That’s good to hear, thanks for sharing. I have the wifi bridge and have been keeping an eye on hk enabled bridges on ebay. What i have now is ok but if the right deal comes along I’ll go for it.

Do you have the 819lmb or the myq-g0303-sp? Trying to find the difference.

For my ecobee HK integration I’ve noticed an odd behavior. If i turn the system off (via the ecobee app on my phone) I see sudden dips and spikes in temp measurements of 2-5 degrees (main unit and remote sensors). I don’t know if the cloud integration would see it because of the 5min polling, so I’m not sure if its an HK issue or system-off-sensor-reading issue. I need to troubleshoot more.

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@hasshoolio I have the MYQ-G0303-SP. I THINK at the time I purchased it, that was the only way to connected to HomeKit. I’m not sure what the difference is, but I’m very curious to know if you find out!

Very strange about the ecobee. Maybe a bug?

Also FYI. Since the MyQ gets wonky when you trip the sensor and then try to close the garage too soon, I wrote this automation as a backup. I actually have the HA integration AND the homekit_controller integration for the garage, but homekit_controller is the primary one. When the below gets triggered (when you close the garage using homekit_controller) it will then wait 6 seconds and then also execute the HA integration. Works pretty well. It took me a while to figure out because the event platform was new to me, so I figured I’d share.

  trigger:
    - platform: event
      event_type: homekit_state_change
      event_data:
        entity_id: "cover.garage_door"
        service: "close_cover"