Great video… I’m only just starting to appreciate the power of bridging both HomeKit and Home Assistant. I would highly recommend creating multiple Home Assistant Bridges one per room per room… I match an Area in Home Assistant with Rooms in Apple Home. The trick is to add the bridge to Apple Home before you add any entities. When you go back to add the entities you want in HomeKit the Room bridge will automatically add it in the correct room in Apple Home. It also allows you to add more than 100 device as each bridge is counted as a device and not the individual entities. Another benefit is should you have to re-pair a bridge it will put all the entities back into the correct room and not the default room.
Changes for Matter in the past month, or so, in Home Assistant makes it much easier to deal with them. For example, not needing to remove it from HomeKit to see it in Home Assistant.
You need to have home assistant cloud set up to use home assistant devices from anywhere other than your WiFi. If you have that set up, do you have an Apple home hub?
Great video, Delyn. One question I have is if this process can increase the number of scenes we have available. I have maxed out my 100 available in HomeKit, though at least 20 of those can be reclaimed by deleting unused Nanoleaf scenes. Still, knowing if there is a way to increase that silly cap will be helpful. Another question I have is if this can help some of my large scenes execute more reliably. My ready the office scenes touches about 25 devices and I get an error on at least a few devices not updating based on the scene every. single. day!
I don’t think it increases your number of scenes you can have in HomeKit because it essentially brings the scenes over as scenes if that makes senses. I have the same issue with my scenes. I’ve found it usually is matter devices hanging them up (or devices that are offline).
The simple way around this is to create multiple Home Assistant Bridges one per room per room… I match an area in Home Assistant with Rooms in Apple Home. The trick is to add the bridge to Apple Home before you add any entities. Then you go back to add the entities you want. Each Room bridge will automatically add entities in to the correct room in Apple Home.
I see you made the mayor mistake that most do when first configuring the Homekit Bridge: you immediately added the bridge to HK directly by scanning the code in the notification. If you watch the video you will see that the notification disappeared. The problem is that this notification is the only place where the pairing code is displayed. Write that down (i.e. in Home Pass) before pairing the bridge.
This really isn't an issue at all. If the code isn't being displayed in your notification list and you need it again, just return to the HomeKit Bridge Integration page, hit the three dots next to the bridge you need the code for and hit reload. That should place the pairing information back into your notifications list for use.
Devices have to be added first to homekit -> removed from hk -> add to home assistant? Correct? Or can i go straight to home assistant to add these homekit devices?
