I’m looking forward to when it supports events. I recently purchased several Ecobee Smart Switch+ devices which have an integrated motion sensor. It is detected by Home Assistant but, like you said, its value is acquired via polling so the ‘time-to-detection’ is usually too long for triggering automations.
The Switch+ also has a light sensor and temperature sensor. All are detected as HomeKit accessories. Whenever support for events is implemented, will light and temperature values also be handled as events or will they continue to be polled? If so, what is the threshold that will be used to report a state-change? For example, will it be 0.5 C for temperature and 1 lux for light intensity?
Or will temperature and light, which aren’t particularly ‘time critical’, continue to be polled every minute?
This thread is about Bluetooth HomeKit devices, and in particular the Elgato Eve ones. AIUI the Ecebobee products are IP based so this is a bit off topic here?
Events are especially important for BLE devices as they are more likely to be battery powered and we don’t want to wake the device up once a minute to poll if we can help it.
I cannot say how particular devices will behave when we have event support in homekit_controller, a lot of it is up to the devices themselves. The current implementation will subscribe to events for any characteristic that it polls if the device supports it. So if your temperature sensor supported events then Home Assistant would be able to make use of them. For the temperature characteristic, this is optional for the accessory manufacturer though.
It’s likely that polling will still be used in addition to events at first. We don’t know how reliable the new event code is, so we’ll keep the existing code in place while we see. Even if we relax this and poll event characteristics less often, we’ll of course still be polling characteristics that don’t support events.
Regarding the resolution of data collected - we support whatever the underlying device supports, and if the device reports a change we report the change to the HA state machine.
Yes, the Ecobee Switch+ is IP based. However, my understanding is that you plan to implement support for events so, unless the goal is to limit that support to Bluetooth devices only, I believe my questions were on-topic.
Thanks for your reply. I look forward to testing the new version whenever it is released.
Cross-posting this from another thread as my Eve Motion, Eve Energy (switch), Eve Smoke and Eve Thermo are now working great with homekit_controller via an Eve Extend:
Just wanted to post an update about Eve Extend. My first Eve Extend had been really patchy with my home WiFi (Unifi). I recently resolved to reset it and try again. Unfortunately the usb socket came off the PCB. Not great.
2nd Eve Extend just arrived. I set it up exactly as before. Used the Eve app on iOS to pair each Eve device i have (the bridge itself + Eve Thermo, Eve Motion, Eve Smoke and Eve Energy) with my phone (not HA). Then used the Eve app to “move” each of those devices to the Extend. (So phone then routes all requests to the devices using the Eve Extend as a bridge). Then i used the Eve app to unpair my phone from the Eve Extend. Made sure to patch all the firmware levels (v 1.1 of Eve Extend claims to improve Wifi connectivity). Finally I paired with HA. It worked first time. Event notifications not only work but the reaction from the Eve Motion are nearly as fast as my Hue motion sensors (normally within a second).
Given my chronic lack of time for HA at the moment this remains your best shot at “good” integration of Eve accessories into HA, but I could do with more field reports from people using this sort of setup.
was just offered an Eve Energy switch, but reading all of the above, I am not sure if this is already supported in HA now? Switching and energy metering.
Could anyone here point me to how to go from here. It is Homekit compatible and operation via Wifi and direct via Bluetooth
thanks for any info you can share. I would start with Homekit controller and then how to proceed? is this mainly the wifi (since BLE is not supported)
As my main experience with smart switches is over Mqtt for the sensors, and api calls in shell_commands for the switching, I hoped this integration creates these sensors and switches automatically? Or does it still require some manual configurations.
I ask without trying first… as in: of course I tried to have a neek peek before this item arrives, but on installing the Homekit controller is starts scanning and doesn’t find any unpaired devices, so wont do anything.
Most Eve products are based on BLE (which is the case of the Eve Energy Switch). Natively there is no solution for Home Assistant, as the Homekit controller is not supporting BLE at the moment.
There are some reports of success when adding a Eve bluethooth extender in the mix. (like the post above from jc2k)
Personally, I have stopped using Eve products for now. Maybe the new era of thread will open up new avenue to integrate with HA. Wait and see.
guess you’re right… found out that the eve switch was installed in a snap, which made me hopeful for its usefulness. would have thought that some central configuration would have taken care of being able to use it in the whole house. But I need to be within 10 meter or so with my mobile device to be able to use it, which makes it perfectly useless of course.
unless I can make a spare Apple TV have something to do again, would that register the eve switch so I can see it everywhere?
HomePod (original and mini) and Apple TV serve as HomeKit extension for BLE devices such as EVE so yes it will help you out. if you have a very recent Eve switch it will be compatible soon with thread protocol (which is akin to zigbee) -> with an HomePod Mini (not the original) you’d probably see a near instant response time (let’s wait for firmware update and review)
yeah, anxiously awaiting the release for the new HomePod Mini here… have a full set of Google home devices, so probably will end up doubling that with the Pods. O dear. Loved the intercom function of those as showed in the recent Apple Event. Have made that myself now in the HA interface of my GH devices, which was quite an effort tbh
Anyways, even thought the Eve energy switch is rather large, there’s a nice discount this weekend, so will probably grab a few extra and maybe even have a look at the Energy strip, which seems about the only strip around with individual smart sockets. Not sure if the energy metering on the strip is individual though.
What little time I have for HA these days is spent on support, code review or fixing bugs. Or very small features. So I haven’t even thought about BLE support in a year, unfortunately.
(It doesn’t help that the Eve Extend has been working so well for me).
Thank you for the quick reply.
In that case i am going to get one of the Eve Extend and try this out. Just wanted to know that, so that I don’t buy this for nothing.
Take care.
Just wanted to let you know the good news and my experience so far with the Eve Extend device.
I can truly understand now that you do not see the need for getting BLE implemented, because its just working great. I have 2x Eve Degree, 1x Eve Energy and 1x Eve Door.
Everything just works out of the box, with the installation description you gave here.
I am even considering buying the Eve Light Switch, since it would fit so well. The only downside are the costs of that thing.
I don’t have either of those devices so it’s hard to speculate.
I believe Air Pressure is not a standard HomeKit value. This means a certain amout of reverse engineering will be needed to extract it. However on the HA side this should map cleanly to an ordinary sensor with a device class of DEVICE_CLASS_PRESSURE.
Flow rate also looks like it might not be a part of the HomeKit standard. It also looks like there isn’t a proper valve type in Home Assistant. Right now valves are modelled as switches, they can be on or off and that’s it. So we have to reverse engineer the custom HomeKit characteristic(s) used for flow rate, then figure out what to map that to on the Home Assistant side. There is a new number integration which would potentially allow us to control the flow rate, but it would be an independent entity to the on/off switch.
I’d need to see the .storage/homekit_controller-entity-map of someone with both of these devices already paired in order to progress further
Thanks so much for all your contributions on this. It really makes a difference.
I know you set up your Eve Extend Directly with HA, what are you doing for firmware updates? Thats my biggest concern with disconnecting the Eve products from IOS is that they wont get updates anymore…
