Apple homekit integration!

intergrate with hue

Daryl,
I ordered a Hue Hub V2 and LED Strip last week to integrate with my C-Bus Homebridge and play with. The strip will either be for kitchen under bench or rear of TV mood lights.
I will get some Hue globes for bedsides and a reading light that would have had to be wireless C-Bus otherwise. I will see what I can do as far as integrating with the Home App.

 

So to link it to CBus relies on Homebridge running reliably.
I think that is possible.
To add a few Hue products to a home should be quite good.

 

Hi Twistz
Hundreds of accessories.
That would be excruciating if you had to delete the home on the phone and recreate it.
Maybe you should check out the new Wiser Automation controllers.
https://smartvoice.com.au/ is working on Siri voice integration.

 

I've started a new thread for Hue lamps with Homebridge and CBus.
Many thanks to Anthony for Homebridge CBus which can hopefully make it worthwhile to give it a go.
http://www.cbusforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=16568

 

re ios upgrade fail

My Home accessories no longer found after IOS upgrades. Have putty'd into my PI running homebridge and went to the persist directory. It contains AccessoryInfo.CC223DE3CE30.json and IdentifierCache.CC223DE3CE30.json and when I rm these files it says they are write-protected. Permission denied. Do you delete both these two files? and if so how?

 

Did you do sudo rm?
Remove Home on phone (edit Home, scroll down to bottom, remove Home)
Stop Homebridge sudo systemctl stop homebridge
Delete those files in the persist folder.
Reboot pi and wait 5-10 min.
Add Home on phone.

 

Hi All, I have successfully installed homebridge and the cbus plugin on my mac and I have C-Gate running on a windows pc on the same network which is where my bus install is programmed from. I have also modified the json file to suit and added the remote ip address to the config.txt file.

When I run homebridge on my mac, it runs and gets as far as saying loading 0 accessories and goes no further.

Could anyone provide some assistance?

 

Did you allow access on the Windows machine CGate access.txt?

 

Hi - I have added the ip address of my macbook to the access.txt file...

 

If CGate is running on the Windows PC you could check that.
Open a telnet connection from the Mac to CGate ip address port 20023
enter "project list"
should show your project loaded
enter "net list"
should show the cbus network and state.
note address eg 254

If all that is OK it may be somethinging in your config.jon

If you like attach it as a text file, post here and I will have a quick look.

 

I'm guessing it's necessary to have a bus ethernet CNI device on the network or can this work using a Pascal Automation Controller or the PC Interface device?

 

Two instances homebridge

Found this link and followed now have two bridges running on my RPI to get around 100 accessory limit on home kit https://www.reddit.com/r/homebridge/comments/759ip9/multiple_instances_of_homebridge_on_rpi/

regards
Twistz

 

Hi Twistz
I know some people have tried over 100 accessories per bridge.
I don't know if it works or not.
Thanks for the link.
Multiple instances of Homebridge looks an interesting solution even if just for testing.

 

ghiaED
Homebridge talks to CBus via CGate.
You can use whatever CBus interface the PC already uses to connect to the CBus network.

Last year I had Homebridge running on a raspberry pi and CGate running on a Windows desktop PC.
It works but I would consider it only good for testing because you need both devices running all the time.
That might be good however if there was a PC on site running Homegate/Schedule Plus and an instance of CGate running at all times.

Raspberry pi is a good low powered device for this job and you can run both Homebridge and CGate on it.
Then you still need a CBus interface.
CNI is easiest.
RS232 PCI works well with a serial device server, basically funtioning as a CNI.
Any other device which can function as CBus interface should work if you can find instructions how to set it up.

Just remember Homebridge CBus is not a robust interface solution like something you might buy from a manufacturer.
It is however a cheap way to get some voice control going.
Recent iOS updates have caused users a bit of grief.
I have found the setup quite reliable but you never know when an update will break something or if Apple may block software bridges in the future.

Apple has a long way to go with their Home app.
If you go handing off all the scenes and schedules to the app it is highly likely you will be recreating them from scratch more often than you would like.
I'd just recommend Homebridge to do any tasks you cannot find on a CBus device eg Siri voice control.

I would not recommend it for anything critical like access control or any system where malfunction could be a safety issue.
It has happened to me where a wrong voice command can turn off everything so I would not recommend it for a customer or commercial use at all.

One other thing which needs to be mentioned.
When you use a remote CGate on the raspberry pi you want to have your head well around where your up to date project xml is located and how to back it up.
If you start making changes to CBus unit programming it would be easy to end up with two different versions.

 

Wiser as a CNI

Hi all, this is a great bit of software, I have it working on a Raspberry Pi talking to a CNI and it works great, however I noticed once the Raspbery Pi is up and running talking to the CNI nothing else can connect to it, probably a good thing as it makes you think about how you manage it with the toolkit file.

However I was just wondering if I could use a Wiser 2 as the CNI without affecting the functionality of the Wiser 2 in the process.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that the Wiser 2 could support multiple connections but dont have one handy to try this out.

 

A CNI can only support a single connection, but the Wiser 2 contains 2 CNI's, so yes, you can use a Wiser 2 as a CNI without stopping it's normal operation.

 

Hi wilma288
What other thing are you wanting to connect to the CBus network?
Just Toolkit?
You can use Toolkit with a remote CGate on the pi.
I have briefly tested Clipsal Homegate software with remote CGate on the pi too.

Either way you do it if you make some programming changes it needs to be updated on both PC, pi and a backup.

I installed samba on the pi and shared /usr/local/bin/cgate for easy access to logs and tag folder.
For me CGate hasn't given any trouble on the raspberry pi so I'm happy to use it with Toolkit.

 

Thanks Guys that makes sense

The samba on the Raspberry PI would simplify things, I like to keep all the projects on my laptop but that would be easy enough to do by just backing up any way

For the Wiser2 I assume that if you used 1 for the Raspberry Pi then that leaves only one connection spare for users to connect to it which could result at times with someone not being able to connect to the wiser.

Sort of like below
Raspberry PI - connected to Wiser CNI1
Local User 1 - Connected to Wiser CNI2
Remote User 2 - not connected as both Wiser CNI in use

Also just thinking with the new Automation controller does anyone know how many CNI there are on that and if that could be used for this.

Thanks for the feedback

 

Not quite. Users connect via the network, not the CNI. The wiser passes all user traffic though a single CNI. So one CNI is dedicated to the Wiser and the second for either CGate or a single direct connection.

Note also that CGate maintains the tag file, not Toolkit. So the tag file will be updated on the Cgate machine, not the Toolkit machine. Since you only ever need a single copy of Cgate running, its tag file is the only one you need to worry about. But certainly back it up to a PC (or whatever) regularly.

The new Automation controller has a single CNI. I haven't tried running Toolkit on it yet and seeing if the controller is still active. I'll give it a go when I have a spare moment.

 

hi there,
I am trying to find a way to get a voice control thru google home to my cbus home. I have read several post and i understand that with pi is possible but what i would like to ask, do i need a CNI hardware or i can do it with the 5500PC (RS232 interface)?