User Adds Car to HomeKit for In-App Controls and Automations, Showing Future Potential

[Siobhan Ellis]

If AirTags are released on April 20 (or later), might it be possible to put an AirTag in your car and have it tie into HomeKit somehow (maybe, via a Shortcut)?
It may not be particularly useful (open your garage door using a geofence?), but I’m just curious.

The Plugin doesn't (yet) know where the car is. The App certainly does, so it must be possible to integrate that in with HK. Although I'm not entirely sure what use that would be. What would be nice is if Jaguar integrated the App capability to find the car in with Apple's "Find My..."

As already pointed out, you can already open a Garage Door with CarPlay.

 

[Kabeyun]

Of course you could - they didn't do anything other than install a plugin that someone else wrote.

The plugin apparently required "a fair amount" of manual configuration and presented a few warnings

I’ll pass, thanks. Don’t need it that badly even if I had a supported vehicle. I just like to see people pushing the boundaries of existing technology.

 

[CostaMoses]

Well i've done....the same 'cool' project? They've installed something someone else has written - why has the article written like this blogger is the first person to ever do this?!

That is wonderful. Did you ever write about it online and have it shared with others? I had no idea this was possible until I saw this MR article. Had Siobhan not written about this, I wouldn't have known.

I'm a dynamic electricity tariff that changes every 30 minutes - I wrote a script that checks the current electricity price against the cars state of charge, if the car is below X charge and the electricity is also cheaper than X then it starts charging, otherwise it stops it - it basically means I only need to pay for more expensive electricity to charge the car when I really need it (eg on less than 20% charge) but if i'm over 50% i'll only put some charge in if the electricity is cheap - if it drops to minus pricing then I stick it on max charge. Pretty sure no one else has actually ever done that - so where's my article?

This sounds awesome! Is it documented somewhere I can read about it? I know you sarcastically ask about where your article is, but I bed someone like MR or even Inside EVs would write about it if you had a blog accessible. I'd certainly read it.

I have a PHEV (2021 Pacifica Hybrid) and would love to try it out. Are you able to explain how I would implement this, or point me in the right direction? I'm a simple front end developer, so, not too knowledgeable about programming, etc.

 

[Shirasaki]

HomeKit can not be hacked. It is more secure than any home app there is. And most security systems are safe. No one can hack into your HomeKit and start messing around with stuff.

Just the mindset of “HomeKit can’t be hacked” is wrong no matter what. It’s just so happen that HomeKit is not a prime target for many hackers as of yet.

 

[noel18]

I love Homebridge. I’ve written plug-ins for all kinds of things. Wrote a custom sprinkler controller with HomeKit integration. Added HomeKit support to my non-smart garage door. Wrote a plug-in to turn on off my son’s computer because he leaves games running all day long heating up the house. Wrote one to run an outdoor shower I rigged up with a Raspberry Pi and some sprinkler solenoids. Wrote one to power cycle all of my WiFi APs using a Zigbee switch. Got some really cheap ($4) Zigbee thermometers for all the rooms and used Homebridge-mqttthing to integrate them. Wrote a plug-in to start/stop any systemd service on a Linux server. I’m sure I’m forgetting a handful of others. Seems most Apple users have no clue what Homebridge is much less HomeKit.

 

[_Spinn_]

I love Homebridge. I’ve written plug-ins for all kinds of things. Wrote a custom sprinkler controller with HomeKit integration. Added HomeKit support to my non-smart garage door. Wrote a plug-in to turn on off my son’s computer because he leaves games running all day long heating up the house. Wrote one to run an outdoor shower I rigged up with a Raspberry Pi and some sprinkler solenoids. Wrote one to power cycle all of my WiFi APs using a Zigbee switch. Got some really cheap ($4) Zigbee thermometers for all the rooms and used Homebridge-mqttthing to integrate them. Wrote a plug-in to start/stop any systemd service on a Linux server. I’m sure I’m forgetting a handful of others. Seems most Apple users have no clue what Homebridge is much less HomeKit.

That all sounds really interesting. Got any pointers? I have 2 “dumb” garage door openers that I’d love to hook up to HomeKit.

 

[noel18]

That all sounds really interesting. Got any pointers? I have 2 “dumb” garage door openers that I’d love to hook up to HomeKit.

I used a Raspberry Pi, an 8 channel relay card (because I used the same rig to run my sprinklers) and two magnetic window sensors to detect when the door is fully closed or fully open. I wrote an API in Nodejs to handle the door and then wrote a homebridge plugin to call my API so I could integrate it into HomeKit.

SainSmart 8-Channel Relay Module

This is a 5V 8-Channel Relay interface board Be able to control various appliances and other equipments with large current It can be controlled directly by Microcontroller(Arduino 8051 AVR PIC DSP ARM ARM MSP430 TTL logic)

www.amazon.com

Magnetic Switch, Standard Packaging,Black

Help deter theft with this magnetic switch that is compatible with most vehicles with a sliding window. This switch contains normally closed and normally open contacts for customized use.

www.amazon.com

You have to find a good place to mount the switches so the software knows when the door is fully open or fully closed. You also have to run some wire from the opener to the Raspberry Pi so it can do the button press to toggle the door motion. I've not released any of this software publicly. It's actually my sprinkler controller and garage door controller in one. I guess I could split the garage door out into it's own project, take some pictures of how I mounted the sensors and then release it on GitHub.

 

[stevet]

pretty sweet ... that is the future. Does one need this? No. Do I want this? YES.

Should try to do the same thing for my Tesla - shouldn't be too hard since Tesla has 3rd party API. Homebridge is awesome to bring unsupported devices to HomeKit (the Ring integration e.g. is even better than what Ring integrates into Alexa which is surprising since both are owned by Amazon).

EDIT: just looked on homebridge ... Tesla integration for Apple HomeKit does already exist: https://www.npmjs.com/package/homebridge-tesla

Since Tesla required two factor authentication I don't believe this will work anymore. I use Home Assistant and the integration is broken because of that so I suspect home bridges would be too..

 

[noel18]

Since Tesla required two factor authentication I don't believe this will work anymore. I use Home Assistant and the integration is broken because of that so I suspect home bridges would be too..

Looks like the plugin will accept a user/password or an authToken. I suspect if you go the OAuth2 route you can get around the 2FA stuff.

 

[Bazooka-joe]

one small complaint with mbux is that the nav data is so bad when it comes to road closures where i live, that its basically useless.

Works fine for me but I found that CarPlay with Apple maps was inaccurate by about a mile

 

[Arsenikdote]

all my lights in my home are smart lights. but i got sick of needing to summon siri to turn on the lights so i bought these smart light switches that i stick on top of the old analogue switches. so now when i need to turn on/off the light, i press the smart wifi connected light switches to send a signal to my wifi connected smart lights to turn off. so convenient.

what a world we live in.

LOL, so you wanted "smart" "dumb" lights! sounds like a lot of money was spent without knowing why!

 

[_Spinn_]

I used a Raspberry Pi, an 8 channel relay card (because I used the same rig to run my sprinklers) and two magnetic window sensors to detect when the door is fully closed or fully open. I wrote an API in Nodejs to handle the door and then wrote a homebridge plugin to call my API so I could integrate it into HomeKit.

SainSmart 8-Channel Relay Module

This is a 5V 8-Channel Relay interface board Be able to control various appliances and other equipments with large current It can be controlled directly by Microcontroller(Arduino 8051 AVR PIC DSP ARM ARM MSP430 TTL logic)

www.amazon.com

Magnetic Switch, Standard Packaging,Black

Help deter theft with this magnetic switch that is compatible with most vehicles with a sliding window. This switch contains normally closed and normally open contacts for customized use.

www.amazon.com

You have to find a good place to mount the switches so the software knows when the door is fully open or fully closed. You also have to run some wire from the opener to the Raspberry Pi so it can do the button press to toggle the door motion. I've not released any of this software publicly. It's actually my sprinkler controller and garage door controller in one. I guess I could split the garage door out into it's own project, take some pictures of how I mounted the sensors and then release it on GitHub.

Thanks for the info. I have a few Raspberry Pis sitting around doing nothing so I'm definitely trying this out.

 

[Karlg101]

So, uh, I did this with the Viper (smartstart) after market module 3 years ago. Use it just about every time I use my vehicle to remote start, lock and unlock it. Guess I should have blogged about it.

GitHub - karlg100/homebridge-smartstart: Viper/Directed Remote SmartStart Integration for Homebridge, HomeKit and Siri

Viper/Directed Remote SmartStart Integration for Homebridge, HomeKit and Siri - karlg100/homebridge-smartstart

github.com