The Best Smart Home Setup for 2024: HomeKit & Home Assistant

if you're starting your smart home in 2024 or you already have one you should be using homekit and home assistant these are two amazing platforms and using them together provides the Best of Both Worlds High spouse whe approval factor and super powerful automations starting fresh with your smart home setup can be a bit daunting if you haven't used home assistant before it can take some time to get familiar with it but the good news is there are tons of great resources on how to get started with a brand new instance but once you have home assistant up and running what next let's talk about how to play to the strengths of both home assistant and homekit and a quick side note for Android users I have an iPhone but for the purposes of this video when I talk about homekit it also applies to Google home because the strengths of Google home are quite similar to homekit first let's talk about the strengths of homekit number one is native smartphone app support it's already on your phone or your significant others phone which which means you don't have to install anything else number two it's easy to share access because the home app is pre-installed on most iPhones it's actually really easy to share access to your smart home with your friends and family that also have an iPhone this is great if people are visiting and you want them to be able to control your home without setting up a new home assistant username and password number three the UI is very familiar for platform users you may have seen videos of really cool home assistant dashboards but those have a learning curve and it's a completely new app that you have to teach someone to use with homekit it's pretty intuitive and matches the design patterns on the rest of the platform which just makes it feel familiar finally number four Voice Assistant you get voice assistant control out of the box and you won't have to roll your own I have a LoveHate relationship with Siri as I'm sure many of you do but it does work most of the time then we have home assistant let's talk about some of the strengths that home assistant brings to the table number one you can integrate everything it's rare that I come across a a smart device that I can't find a way to integrate into home assistant now these Integrations do rely on the community to maintain but home assistant is one of the top open- Source projects in the world number two automations on home assistant are crazy powerful you can do pretty much anything with anything and although there is a learning curve you can learn as you go and over time your automations are going to get smarter and more sophisticated number three it's great for tinkering I'm kind of a smart home nerd maybe you can tell so home assistant is a great place for me to Tinker with automations create new dashboards change things up and my wife is never bothered by any of it if I was changing dashboards and hom kit that would be a completely different story lastly local control by integrating with home assistant a lot of devices that would normally require Cloud control or proprietary app to be able to be controlled that doesn't have to happen with home assistant this means when the internet is out if your home network is still up and the power is on your devices will still work now as you can see both of these platforms have some really great strengths the best part is you can use both of them at the same time through the homekit bridge integration and home assistant I've been doing this for years and it is very reliable so let me show you in home assistant how you can set up a homekit bridge for all of your devices so here we are in home assistant this is a brand new home assistant instance that I use for testing nothing has been configured other than putting in my name and a little bit of information some of the devices that you see here have been automatic Al added because they're on my network so what you want to do when you're first setting up home assistant and you want to bring in homekit or you want to allow homekit to be used with home assistant is you want to set up a homekit bridge the way that you do that you go to settings and then you look at the devices and services tabs you might see a lot of devices here with some homekit icons hold on that for a second what you want to do is you want to add an integration you can search Apple and you will see homekit bridge this is the one you want the first thing you're going to be prompted with is what's honestly kind of a little bit of a confusing screen it asks you which domains you want to be included for now you don't have to worry about this too much cuz you're not going to have any devices or if you do have a lot of devices you can think about this a little bit essentially what this means is which devices do you want home assistant to send to homekit so in this case the camera if if I had a camera that's going to be sent over or if I had a cover like a garage drawer that's going to be sent over but buttons aren't and you may want buttons to show up in home ass or to show up in homekit it's up to you and you can kind of choose and pick and choose as you want but this is a generally good list to start with the defaults are fine uh you will notice here that scenes are not uh sent over to homekit but they could be so for now we'll just hit submit these are the domains that homekit is going to see once you have your homekit Bridge set up you're going to see in the notifications in home assistant that there is a homekit pairing code this is what you're going to need to connect your phone and homekit to home assistant so now let's switch over to homekit on my phone you'll see that there's no devices there's nothing from my network that's showing up right now what I need to do is I need to connect home assistant to homekit and the way that I do that is I hit add accessory so I hit that add accessory button button now I scan there's my code I hit add to home you will see this pop up that it says it's an uncertified accessory don't worry because you know what you're doing hit add anyway and now you can select where the Bridge location is usually I put this in the basement and you could name it if you wanted to but we'll just hit continue so what's really cool is that all of those devices are now being fed into homekit now I could go through and identify which lights these are which rooms they're in and that's something that you're going to want to do but for the purposes of this I'm just going to exit the setup right now and you'll see that the default room is pulling in all the devices that I already have in home assistant that have been automatically configured which is really amazing so as you add new devices to home assistant that going to show up in homekit and you can put them in different rooms in homekit so at this point you're going to want to move devices to different rooms you can set up wallpapers you can get it the way that your significant other wants to use homekit or the way that you want to use homekit and there you have it moving back to home assistant the way to think about how to add devices is actually to always add them to home assistant first now on this dashboard you see some devices have automatically been discovered and some of them are actually homekit devices you can see this bridge up here another smart Bridge which is our Lutron lights and then lastly here is a Rio smart watering uh system so those are actually going to be automatically picked up by home assistant which is great because they broadcast over the homekit protocols which is just over Wi-Fi so anytime you have a homekit device you want to pair it through home assistant and then again once you pair it in home assistant you can then decide to send it over to homebridge through the home Bridge uh to homekit and there's even additional things you can do here where you can specifically include or exclude certain devices so you'll see here that you can select specific entities to either be included or excluded and honestly this just takes a little bit of trial error to turn things on see if they show up and make sure you get it set up the way you want anytime you do make a change just hit reload and you'll automatically see it start to show show up in your iPhone which is very easy to test very rapidly and that is it in a nutshell The Best of Both Worlds you've got homekit connected to home assistant you get to configure things the way that you want in your phone and you get to use all of the amazing automations from home assistant it's always fun to start fresh in a new year and I'm excited to keep building my home assistant and homekit Smart Homes my solution works for me and my wife but I'm curious what's working best for you let me know in the comments and please consider subscribing my New Year's resolution is to post content more frequently on this channel so I'd love your support have a great day and I'll see you in the [Music] future

Channel: Future Smart Home

Views: 16,509

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Id: EYbXotmxnMU

Length: 8min 53sec (533 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 11 2024