I have about 20 devices in HomeKit that I would really like to control from Home Assistant?
I do not want these devices to connect directly to Home Assistant I need them running independently of Home Assistant - ie they continue to run if Home Assistant is running or not.
But it would be extremely helpful to be able to detect their state or by exception control them.
Is there anyway to get Home Assistant to connect to HomeKit and allow me to see /control them?
I have tried HomeKit Bridge but that just exported everything in Home Assistant to HomeKit I need it going the other way
I am sure it is easy and obvious but any pointers would be helpful.
What you are trying to do is not possible. If you’re running Home Assistant it really should always be running or don’t bother in the first place. Pair your devices to HA and then bridge them back to HK and you get the best of both worlds.
But I need the leak sensors, door and window sensors reliable along with all the window blinds.
But with zigbee2MQTT needing rebuilding every two weeks I need a more reliable way to run them.
I know loads of other people have got the reliable but I have now rebuilt zigbee2MQTT 19 odd times in 2024, each time reducing the load on it, changing the coordinator, multiple sonoffs, and 2 SMLIGHTS over ethernet, on multiple Home Assistant installs and devices. Along with signal separations etc.
I really want to get key elements working. So 99% of the lighting works on Hue and is incredibly stable, I originally had them all non zigbee2MQTT to create a stronger mesh, but it was becoming too onerous to repair all the bulbs every couple of weeks and the Wife happiness factor was plummeting when every room she went into failed to light up automatically - so for the last 9 months been on Hue and she is happy except for the two room that Home Assistant runs, Kitchen and WC, which unfortunately fail depressingly often Even with 50 Router devices and only 9 end devices.
The last instance lasted 3 weeks so I am hopeful.
But as it stood the windows/doors/vibration/leak and blind controllers - all end devices were just too unstable.
They all go through an Aqara hub as of last week and go into HomeKit, but if you can’t access devices in HomeKit from Home Assistant I need to find another way.
I could run up a Hubitat that can talk to HomeKit and relay the HomeKit devices into Home Assistant through MQTT.
If the this version of zigbee2MQTT is stable then I can review it all. Ever hopeful.
Use the Homekit Device Integration to expose HK devices to HA.
Good luck. I was fortunate to get ZHA working well enough with repeaters, so could use HA as the primary control center and feed what was necessary back to Homekit for the family’s convenience. I sympathize with your dilemma while I count my blessings [g].
I can’t help with z2mqtt as I use ZHA but I have never had a single failure outside of a faulty cheap zigbee plug that failed. I have a ton of Hue lights and only used the hub for firmware updates - everything just works. I only had to rebuild once when I added NVME data disk and that was just a simple restore from backup and all set.
Certainly appreciate that - my standalone zigbee2MQTT with an external mqtt and Node red ran for a couple of year - solid with 150 devices.
But since my migration to Home Assistant on different devices including a Home Assistant green zigbee2MQTT has be extremely flakey.
I like Home Assistant - would like to stay but if I have to run zigbee2MQTT mqtt and node red in Docker instances then I am back to managing them there and kinda defeats the goal of simplifying and having it in Home Assistant.
I will keep implementing restore to factory, and re-building zigbee2MQTT again until the Christmas break, by then I have have given an enormous amount of time trying to get it all running.
Home Assistant is doing great with all the other integrations - fantastic in fact.
It is just zigbee stuff that is failing. and I have rather a lot of that.
When zigbee2MQTT fails it kills all the automations I built, all the power/energy management I built and spending so much time getting these working is a really rush but sole destroying watching it all get flushed down the pipe when you have to restore Home Assistant back to factory again.
I have been working on home automation for 30 years since I first started building on X.10 and the level of automation in the house at the moment is the lowest it has been for 20 years just because of all the zigbee devices that require re-pairing every couple of weeks.
I am truly envious of those stable installs and I have been following a lot of people who have had exceptional input, but with little positive outcome to date.
I’ll keep trying with Home Assistant for another month, but by Christmas I will need to focus on a stable platform.
So I’ll give it some thought over the next couple weeks because I want to keep Home Assistant in the mix for all the integrations it brings.
