Homekit not exactly OOTB. What is it for?

[robmac 173]

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So we have a development platform from apple that will allow us to write apps so we can have 2,000 hue controllers to match the flashlights and the fart apps on the apple-store.

Not sure I am getting the value add for anyone that is not a hard core programmer to make this add value to a particular scenario or home.

It does not add anything to the current crop of controllers that already exist.

If it means that I would have to leave an expensive and power hungry MAC on all day, I am not sure it is a bus I want to catch.

[Dalle1985 16]

I think it is meant to work without a dedicated homekit server - straight from the app. But my biggest gripe with the whole "integrate-the-world-into-your-phone" thing, is that you don't have your phone on you constantly. The idea of home automation is that it should be... Well - automated. It's not home remote control we are playing with. It should require as little interaction as possible. So the whole idea of creating apps that you carry around is a bit stupid if you ask me. Say you want to go to the bathroom at two in the morning and you are using the HK app... Then you would have to find your phone, launch the app, find the right switch and then turn it on to just the right level where you can hit the bowl, but won't wake up the missus. This will probably take 30-45 seconds before you are even ready to set off.

In the mean time however, i will have gotten out of bed, the motion detector in our bathroom will have detected me, turned the light on just right for me, i won't overshoot the bowl because i didn't get the light on right and i will already be on my way back to bed.

What we need is a proper server which incorporates all the right protocols, interacts with the user in a nice, easy manner, and is easy to set up with different modes and profiles without constantly having to mess around with the settings.

Unfortunately, the manufacturers can't agree on one common standard, the adopters can't build one server to rule them all because of prohibitively expensive licensing agreements and the user don't know what to choose because nothing interacts with anything. We need ONE home automation standard for everything (I'm thinking BLE, it might not be the highest bandrate, but most devices today has bluetooth and it can mesh itself if need be) so we can avoid all these proxies going inbetween inducing lag and creating confusion.

BLE would also be perfect for those mobile applications, as the devices would all be able sense the proximity of your phone, or whatever and in thus act as a form of motion sensor.

[robmac 173]

Thanks for pointing that out. I had not realised the idea was that your phone would do it all. A totally pointless exercise. So every time my phone can't get a signal my house is dumb?

As you say little more than an expensive remote control and we sort of have that already for all of the mainstream controllers.

So all we need is to be young again so we don't have to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and the vendors to truly buy into an open standard. hmm neither happening in my lifetime.

I guess the problem is all of the protocols have their strengths and weaknesses. Good range and reliability but high power consumption. etc etc + some have heavy licence costs but I think we concur, Homekit takes us no further forward.

[HansS 3]

I've seen a lot of news articles about Apple having installed Homekit support on AppleTV, with suggestions that it might be to act as a server for home automation. Problem is, no one seems to know what it does exactly, so as far as I have found there's only speculation.

I did find that you can talk to Siri (also without pressing a button, if you have a device configured correctly and connected to power), ask her to turn on your lights, after which she says that she cannot find any Homekit enabled devices. HC2 has such a feature, but I bet Siri is better at it.

[Dalle1985 16]

Thanks for pointing that out. I had not realised the idea was that your phone would do it all. A totally pointless exercise. So every time my phone can't get a signal my house is dumb?

As you say little more than an expensive remote control and we sort of have that already for all of the mainstream controllers.

So all we need is to be young again so we don't have to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and the vendors to truly buy into an open standard. hmm neither happening in my lifetime.

I guess the problem is all of the protocols have their strengths and weaknesses. Good range and reliability but high power consumption. etc etc + some have heavy licence costs but I think we concur, Homekit takes us no further forward.

Well - there is already a solution for one of the two problems you state - it is really the new thing in home automation:

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The other is a bit harder to crack. But what needs to happen is that we need a sort of Apple of the home automation scene to come along. And no, I don't mean like in overly expensive and overly hyped, but in like a company which can change the scene completely and become a market leader that everyone else will have to follow suit on. Monopoly is a bad thing, but a market monopoly can be a good thing to get everyone aligned on the same standard. As I see it, right now, we are in a battle like the HD-DVD (can't even remember the name of it anymore) vs. Blu-ray. It was a fight which brought one common standard along mainly due to one major adopter (Sony with the PS3). Same is the case for Home automation. Many competing standards, but no one clear company to lead the way;

- Apple is trying not to choose sides by creating a standard which everyone can buy into

- Google is also trying to do something by taking over Nest, but WiFi will never be the right way to go for HA - it is way to power hungry

- And then we have the rest of the bunch - small companies who all have great ideas and good concepts, but none of them have the firepower to really shine a light on themselves and show the way! Just look at fibaro - lots of good ideas, but not enough grunt under the bonnet to deliver on all their promises.

[HansS 3]

There seems to be a shortage of information at this time. If you look at the presentation, indeed the home automation is done by iOS, so only your iPhone and iPad and such. I thought that would exclude AppleTV, since the OS for that is not officially called iOS, but it appears to be that or a variant of it.

In the presentation you also see that each iOS device accesses a central database to see what your home automation environment looks like. I believe there is no mention of the location of that database. The slide suggests it is located outside of the iOS device domain.

The automation part, the triggers, run even when an app is in the background, which indeed puts the iOS device as the central part of this home automation setup.

I can hardly imagine however, that Apple hasn't thought of this, and will have put something out there that won't work if your signal dies or your battery is drained.

So I bet there's more going on. Maybe something like the central database residing on your AppleTV, and your AppleTV also handling the automation side. There are a lot of AppleTV's out there already, but this means that if you don't have one, phone problems could indeed be a game breaker for the automation side of things.

Being able to talk to Siri without pressing the home button on a device is also cool. But if you want to be able to do that throughout your entire house, you'd need Siri capable devices connected to power on every floor or in every room. Or carry around your phone all the time, but that means you have to press the button, and I don't always pick up my phone when I'm about the house.

Finally, if there is indeed more to this, I wonder if we will be able to create our own App to support HA devices that are not HomeKit supported by the vendor. It seems to be possible to support custom devices over IP. Looks like it uses tcp/http and json. But the protocol definition is not made public, and it looks like it will be hard to reverse engineer it due to security protocols/encryption. Not that I can write iOS apps (wanted to have a look at the HomeKit stuff, but my Mac cannot run the latest MacOSX

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[robmac 173]

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I want to keep my wife!

[Guest Lode]

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I want to keep my wife!

Lol indeed, i'm not that old