Apple HomeKit Integration

[Aaron]

Just noticed this and thought worth sharing:

https://www.loxone.com/enen/blog/apple-homekit/

[Duncan]

its quite buggy at the moment and limited in what it can do:

-must have a v2 minserver somewhere in your install

-only v2 of the lighting controller seems to work (scenes only)

-blinds seem to be ok

-some virtual inputs and switches

-IRR seem to need V2 as well

it requires the miniserver plugin 1.0.4 (not 1.0.0) and it crashes the minserver quite a bit whilst setting up

[L P]

I’m using Homebridge on a Raspberrypi for voice control. It isn’t perfect, and setting it up is much more work than most people will want to invest, but it works much better than I expected.

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[Jonathan Dixon]

>it requires the miniserver plugin 1.0.4 (not 1.0.0) and it crashes the minserver quite a bit whilst setting up

This is really concerning from a system  point of view, and something I've feared since they started with (NEF) Home Connect in building cloud integrations directly into the miniserver.

Architecturally it means that random external internet servers out of their control are being integrated more closely into the core of a house building control system, and the opportunities for those servers to have random updates that subtly change some behaviour and cause a Loxone crash taking the entire house offline. It's sad if your light switches and fire alarm no longer work just because the washing machine cloud service has pushed an update.

 Add to that, as the number of integrations goes up  the number of potential interactions between them grows exponentially, and the frequency of Loxone firmware updates will have to accelerate to keep up with random service updates being pushed on a timeline out of their control, which is itself a vector for new bugs getting into the system. So I expect this is only going to get worse over time, and expect some zero-day exploits to pop up too.

I much prefer the v1 architecture of a "local connection only" miniserer and using some separate, more powerful (and non-mission critical) gateway to bridge to cloud services, e.g. Loxberry, iobroker, home assistant, 1home, or whatever. The main drawback I see is Loxone themselves don't have a strong support or recommendation for this architecture, and never will now they're trying to build everything into miniserver v2

[AaronP]

Hi All - out of interest what do we mean by Miniserver crashing? Literally the whole thing rebooting? I've had Homebridge running on an RPi for years now and agree with L P around it being more difficult to setup (Config Ui X reduced the level of complexity when this come along a couple of years ago though, still more  onerous than 1Home or native integration though, granted) but I'm intrigued to find out more around peoples experiences of Loxone crashing and the whole house going offline when there are third party services that have changed their API etc and Loxone haven't aligned updates in time to ensure seamless operation. 

I would fully expect a device to be unavailable for operation through Loxone, say a washing machine, if the Home Connect service had made a change affecting communication etc into Loxone but not the entire Loxone system go offline. Similar to that of Home Kit and any other third party service. 

(I'm genuinely intrigued in the detail here btw and want to share experiences - not saying that this isn't happening, just I haven't experienced it and I've also just connected three Miniserver Gen 2's into HomeKit natively without an issue)

Cheers,

Aaron

[Duncan]

Joth

the  plugin only uses the internet for connection/setup. once its up and running then local commands use your network only. If you set up a device as a homekit bridge eg apple tv or ipad, external commands are routed via your apple ID to the bridge then use your local network

AaronP

yes, crashes and reboots the miniserver - it only appears to be a setup issue. i got it working once before i had set up the correct devices and it worked fine, but now crashes every time i try to set it up

[Jonathan Dixon]

On Tue, 12 Apr 2022 at 19:44, Duncan <joanne...@gmail.com> wrote:

Joth

the  plugin only uses the internet for connection/setup. once its up and running then local commands use your network only. If you set up a device as a homekit bridge eg apple tv or ipad, external commands are routed via your apple ID to the bridge then use your local network

Good to know. (Not that I have a miniserver v2 or an Apple Homekit so no direct impact to me either way!)

Pretty sure other integrations like Home Connect / Miele@home are direct from miniserver to cloud. Would love to be wrong on that though. The appliance is there on the local network, after all.

 

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[Rob_in]

Nothing new here. You can easily voice control your Loxone system via ioBroker (runs perfectly on a Raspberry Pi) which integrates with Alexa, HomeKit or Google Home (I ever created a local Google Home fulfilment server that requires no cloud).

Wish Loxone would just fix bugs and sort out consistency of the features they do have first!

Robin