Salutations, readers! Have you ever wanted to feel like that dude from that sci-fi movie? That one guy who can control everything in his house from his phone? Well, you’ve been able to do that for a while with smart home accessories. However, each company has their own way in which they have implemented this. Luckily for us, Apple and Google have made their own software frameworks to more easily connect these smart home devices to your smartphone. The problem? Quite a few devices still don’t natively support Apple’s HomeKit or Google Home, leading to a mess of different applications to control various different things
Enter, Homebridge
Homebridge is a piece of software that turns this into a non-issue, as it allows users to install plug-ins which add these unsupported devices into HomeKit.
Like Pi-Hole, I decided to run Homebridge on my Raspberry Pi. The installation was extremely simple, just flashing the software image onto the SD card which the Pi boots from.
However, Homebridge can also run on any desktop-class operating system. I chose the Pi as it is always plugged in and online, but you can choose to run it on Windows, macOS, any Linux distribution which supports Node.js, or deploy it in a Docker container
From there, simply dump the Pi somewhere it has an internet connection, be it wireless or wired (I am using Gigabit Ethernet), and take note of its IP address, as it is required to view the web interface where the plug-ins are managed.
As you can see, the program itself is not very resource-intensive seeing as it is sharing 1GB of RAM with the Pi-Hole and a full-on Plex server.
Once installed, just head over to the plugins menu and search for the device that you require on HomeKit! I wanted to add my Yamaha RX-A4A A/V Receiver, as the app was a bit clunky to use and the shortcuts built in to iOS made switching inputs and volume much easier. There were at least 5-7 for me to choose from, and the developers had included a readme file that laid out the setup process extremely well
Also, there is near zero delay, even though instructions are sent through a middle-man, so there really is no downside to something like this.
See y’all later 🙂