

Oh, and we should also say that there is one company, HOOBS (“homebridge out of the box”) which sells a small computer that comes with homebridge already installed. But you couldn’t use them to bring a HomeKit device, like, say, the Eve smart plug, back into smartthings. You can use them to get your smartthings-connected devices to show up in the Apple home app. Most of these depended on Groovy smartapps which will no longer work, but there is at least one which was created as a cloud to cloud integration and can be used with the new architecture.īut all of these are one-way only. And over the years, there have been a couple of different ones for SmartThings. It does not bring HomeKit devices back into another home automation platform like smartthings.Įach individual “plug-in“ is developed and maintained by individual programmers. HOMEBRIDGE IS STRICTLY A ONE WAY INTEGRATION: it brings non-HomeKit devices into the Apple home app.

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Everything from nest protects to zwave switches connected to smartthings. It’s literally just a bridge between the home automation network that you have and the Apple home app.Īnyway, over the years people have used this method to bring in all kinds of third-party devices into HomeKit.
#IOS SHORTCUTS ALEXA SOFTWARE#
Of course, all software has to run on something, so people typically set up a server device with a raspberry pi, although there are other options as well.Īnd homebridge isn’t a hub in itself: you still have to have a zwave hub and a Zigbee hub and whatever else you’re using. So homebridge is just software which creates virtual proxies that you can see in the Apple home app. It’s not a perfect integration, but it was better than nothing for many people.) (You could even use this method for something like a nest thermostat, which ends up looking like a bunch of different switches in the Apple home app. This was intended to allow Philips hue developers to create apps and integrations for Philips hue devices that they didn’t have yet.īut people pretty quickly figured out that you could use this to fool HomeKit into thinking that non-compatible devices like, say, a ring floodlight, were actually hue bulbs, allowing them to be turned on and off in HomeKit. Homebridge is an independent project created a number of years ago to take advantage of the fact that the Philips Hue API allowed Philips hue developers to create virtual devices that could be connected to HomeKit. HOMEBRIDGE: software that fools HomeKit into thinking other devices are attached to a hue bridge
