HomePod Mini and HomeKit "Sorry, I did not hear back from your devices."

Configuration
1

Hi all – first post, and excited to join this community. I’ve been working to integrate my Home Assistant universe for control and status in HomeKit for my iOS devices. I’m having mostly success at the moment, but I’m wondering if anyone has insights or suggestions about troubleshooting the following frustrating functionality quirk.

This all WORKS:
From iOS14.2 iPhone or iOS 14.2 iPad:
“Hey Siri, turn on the lights in the Kitchen”
-> instant response (through HASS -> zwave)
“Hey Siri, turn open the shades in the Bedroom”
-> instant response (through HASS -> zwave)
Manually changing the device state in the iOS Home app on either device also functions as expected.

DOESN’T WORK:
If I talk the same commands above to my new HomePod mini, it always responds,
“Sorry, I did not hear back from your devices.”

I have a HomeKit certified LG TV. I can control that TV (eg. power on/off) by voice command to HomePod mini, or in the iOS Home App. This tells me the issue is some interrelation between the HomePod and HASS homekit integration, not simply a problem with the HomeKit Mini.

I did a factory reset of the HomePod mini and after new setup arrived back to the same state - no change in behavior.

All my mobile devices are on the same WiFi router.

I am using the logger integration and DEBUG for HomeKit. I see normal looking communication activity between my iOS devices and the homekit integration in the logs. When issuing a voice command to the HomePod mini, I do not see any homekit integration log activity, but the HomePod of course says, “Sorry, I did not hear back from your devices.”

Can anyone report successful HomePod control to HASS devices via the integration?
How might I troubleshoot this further?

By the way, I set up the HomeKit Integration (by configuration.yaml) following the steps in the documentation.


Configuring a 3 minute start delay automation for the homekit integration was found to be critical to get the integration to start effectively.
2

Unfortunately, the situation deteriorated.

The above status only lasted for about 12 hours total.

Then the iPhone device Home app started showing “No Response” for all components exposed through the HASS home integration.
When opening and attempting to interact with components in the Home app, nothing is logged in the home-assistant.log. (even under DEBUG)

The iPad Home app is still working correctly at the moment with all of the HASS homekit integration exposed components.

I predict this too will fail to the “No Response mode” around the 24-hour point.
This is my second attempt at the homekit integration and this behavior is similar to when I first installed the integration through the GUI. The only difference is that I swapped the iOS device from which I did the initial homekit bridge pairing. The longest functioning device in both cases is the one from which I did the initial pairing.

Everything I’m doing is LAN local. Should I be turning suspicion to the internet or router? Googling around, I keep seeing mention of IGMP. How might that be involved?

Both the working iPad and “no response” iPhone show the same _hap._tcp mDNS entry when looking at the Discovery app.

3

Starting to think about going down the Wireshark road, but I’m not so sure what to look at.
This led me to realize I could install the Home app on my MacBook Pro. I enabled Home through iCloud. The Home app on macOS Catalina shows all of the HASS integration devices and control works right now. (8:20 pm local). I’ll be interested to know how long this lasts.

I my Wireshark recordings, I don’t see any IGMP packets over WiFi. I don’t see any obvious problems in other filters, but I don’t really know what to look for right now.

4

So I was experiencing the same issue. My old set up had just an Apple TV as a hub with Homeassistant running on a vm. Everything seemed to work fine but I only had a few devices. Recently purchased a HomePod mini and that took over as my hub. I’ve also introduced more zwave devices into my network. I initially thought it was the HomePod acting up so I removed it and forced my tv to be hub again but no luck. I stumbled across this thread and began looking at router issues but that didn’t seem to lead anywhere.

Then I found this thread on Reddit. This lead me to looking at my cpu/ram usage on the vm. It was using ~90% RAM as I initially only provisioned 2GB ram so I upped that to 4GB, rebooted everything and it appears that HomePod is now functioning correctly. All my devices show active in the home app and Siri responds to commands.

5

Good info. I think I’m in a different situation. Restarting home assistant does not help, and I’m not looking at some devices not responding sometimes. All of the devices go to the Not responding state at once. I am running latest home assistant as the HASS OS image on a Raspberry Pi 4. (so not in a VM). I checked and my RAM usage is 7.5%

I sorta hope my MacBook Pro “Home” app fails to Not Responding in a day or two because that is a platform I can run Wireshark on and maybe gain more insight into what is happening.

My prediction was wrong re: the iPad. It is still working in the Home app (and voice commands), to all of the home assistant devices now at the ~32 hour point.

6

I believe I’m experiencing the same problem.

When I first set up two new homepod minis, they DID work just fine to voice control my lights via siri, HA, zwave.

After a few days, both quit working with the “I didn’t hear back from your devices” error. But siri on the iphone still works just fine to control the lights.

I’ve tried resetting the homepod minis, removing them and re-adding them to the home in homekit, deleting and re-creating the home, none of which has worked.

I imaged a new SD card and updated it to the latest HA, still using the old zwave integration, same results. I imaged another SD card again with the latest HA, the new zwave beta, and MQTT - and again the same identical results.

One interesting point - siri from the homepod mini can turn on and off my apple TV just fine. So the homepod mini IS able to send out commands.

I think something is going wrong between the homepod mini and the homekit integration in HA, but I am still learning and am unable to post any further diagnostic evidence yet. I wonder if Apple forced out some kind of change to the homepod mini - pure speculation, I have no idea.

7

I suspect this is related.

8

Interestingly enough, I woke up today and now everything is working.

My changes yesterday (I went a little crazy) were:

HA 4.12 to 4.17
pi 3B to 3B+
standard zwave integration over to beta integration with MQTT
i also updated my access point firmware (a ubiquiti AC-Pro) on a lark.

After all of those changes, it still didn’t work for at least 20 minutes after the final change, then I went to bed. This morning when I woke up, it was working.

I checked the homepod’s firmware version number and it’s the same, so apple didn’t update it overnight.

WEIRD.

9

Yay. Things started working from me too. All my i-devices basically simultaneously started working, including the new HomePod mini, which never had worked previously.
AND, I can interact with the HomeKit devices from my phone when not on the home WiFi. This also never worked before.

I changed just two things:

  1. allowed an upgrade from Home Assistant 0.118.0 to 0.118.5
  2. that update triggered a Home Assistant restart

I had done several full restarts previously in troubleshooting, so I assume the real ‘fix’ here relates to the 0.118.5 upgrade. Could it be the ‘Fix homekit bridges when no name was provided’ item mentioned in 0.118.1 release notes? IDK. My configuration.yaml does specify a name property.