Trying to unlock door when garage door opens - but ONLY when done via homekit

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1

I’d like to have a way to open my garage door AND unlock my door from my car’s CarPlay setup. HOWEVER, I don’t want the door to unlock whenever someone opens the garage because I consider that a security concern. I can open the garage door via my iphone and the homekit integration which appears in carplay.

Is there a way to unlock my door ONLY when the garage door is opened via homekit? Is there another way to achieve something similar?

2

I know there’s a context on triggers that can be accessed in automations (I do this). If you act on something from the HA UI there will be a user context. I don’t know what will be the case for actions from HomeKit (assuming you use the HomeKit controller integration), but this might give you something to look into.

3

I have a HomeKit-only front door lock. With three different home automation ecosystems now, I have used HomeKit’s automations and arrival/departure presence detection to automate unlocking the front door and turning the alarm system on/off.

Unless something has changed recently, the big gotcha is that Apple’s automations cowardly refuse to unlock doors based on arrival. I have to use a virtual/dummy switch (input_boolean helper in HA) on all of my back-end HA platforms to control the lock, with four different HomeKit automation routines to keep the lock and virtual switch in sync based on whether the lock was opened/closed via the virtual switch or at the physical lock.

Anyway, I assume that you can set something similar up from the HomeKit automation side…

4

Do you have any good examples? I get the general concept, but I’m having trouble determining the event type and how to use use the context to filter for only HomeKit events.

5

Can you share your method or link to something similar? Obviously from a programmatic standpoint its simple but I’m new to working with these kind of entities. I haven’t yet learned homw to explore and experiment with them.

6

I should add that I can see the logbook Garage Door is opening by HomeKit so the info is definitely there, its just getting to it.

7

I don’t specifically do what you need, so I don’t have a good example of exactly that, but this is an example of how I determine which user triggered a script. This just shows how to access the context.

    - service: persistent_notification.create
      data:
        title: System
        message: >-
          {% set user_id = states.script.shutdown_remote_host.context.user_id %}
          {% set triggered_by = (states.person | selectattr('attributes.user_id','==', user_id)) | list | first or "system" %}
          {% set first_name = "System" if triggered_by == "system" else state_attr(triggered_by.entity_id, "friendly_name").split()[0] %}
          {{ first_name }} shut down {{ name }}.

Under the developer tools, try to listen to events to see the full JSON of what’s received. I didn’t know myself what to listen for when doing a quick test, so just my main gate via HomeKit while listening for all events (* – this results in a lot of data very quickly in my case).

I got this:

{
    "event_type": "homekit_state_change",
    "data": {
        "entity_id": "cover.main_gate",
        "display_name": "Main Gate",
        "service": "open_cover",
        "value": null
    },
    "origin": "LOCAL",
    "time_fired": "2022-01-14T06:37:39.947632+00:00",
    "context": {
        "id": "6710e34dac1eaa23d1127b04e1c688d8",
        "parent_id": null,
        "user_id": null
    }
}

So it actually seems a lot easier since there is a specific event. I thought there might’ve been a special context on a state_changed event.

Knowing this, you can now write an automation using this (untested):

  trigger:
    - platform: event
      event_type: homekit_state_change
      event_data:
        entity_id: cover.some_cover
        service: open_cover

Should probably submit an update to the docs about this…
HomeKit - Home Assistant (home-assistant.io)
Document that the integration emits an event by parautenbach · Pull Request #21189 · home-assistant/home-assistant.io (github.com)

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8

It took me quite a while to get back to this but its working! Really not bad to set up, I think I got sidetracked by more complex problems.

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