Hi, I recently made the switch to Lemmy from Reddit. But r/homekit is one of the
communities I miss the most. What can I do to help build this community up? I’m
happy to make posts, comment, and upvote. Is trying to poach people from
r/homekit a bad idea? I would love to get to know everyone better. Here’s some
info about my smart home. - I’m using Apple Home, and my primary hub is a 4K
Apple TV 4K Ethernet, which I chose for the Thread radio. - I’m almost
exclusively using Thread devices, and most of those are Matter over Thread. -
Most of my lights are Nanoleaf Essentials (Matter over Thread), and despite
people hating Nanoleaf, they have been much better lately. - For more advanced
lighting, I’m using WLED, which is a DIY project for controlling addressable
light strips. - My WLED lights are bridged into HomeKit via Homebridge, though
I’ve considered switching to Home Assistant. - I’m using a Deco mesh router with
two nodes, and it’s been amazing for the relatively low cost. - Outside of Apple
Home, I use Ring, which I’ve bridged into Apple via Homebridge. I hate the Ring
subscription, but their hardware is solid. Excited to get to know everyone!
I love Apple Home. It has its flaws, but— just like Lemmy— I love trying out bleeding-edge tech like Thread, Matter, mesh based routers and sick lighting. I also mess around with Homebridge, and I’ve considered trying Home Assistant. I’ve learned a lot, and I want to collaborate with other home automation enthusiasts. I’m going to try to post more to that community, but I wanted to put this out there if anyone is interested in collaborating with me to build up that community.
Ok, if you have Home Assistant, what does Homekit do for you? I really don’t know because I don’t own any Apple products, and all of my home automation is either completely home brew, or Home Assistant.
The wife and family have no idea what’s going on behind the curtain. They open their phone and they see and have access to exactly what I want them to see. They can tell Siri to do things. They don’t have to install some weird app. They aren’t talking to some home brew esp32 that kinda works. It’s built in and just works… if we had android id expose the same stuff to google home.
I think a lot of people like that it’s a preinstalled app on their phone. And especially now that they have guest mode. You can impress people that have iPhones and literally know nothing about smart homes by saying “hey check the home app on your phone, I just gave you guest access”.
In practice, I’ve never actually used guest mode, but I think it is a cool selling point.
Ok, if you have Home Assistant, what does Homekit do for you? I really don’t know because I don’t own any Apple products, and all of my home automation is either completely home brew, or Home Assistant.
The wife and family have no idea what’s going on behind the curtain. They open their phone and they see and have access to exactly what I want them to see. They can tell Siri to do things. They don’t have to install some weird app. They aren’t talking to some home brew esp32 that kinda works. It’s built in and just works… if we had android id expose the same stuff to google home.
I think a lot of people like that it’s a preinstalled app on their phone. And especially now that they have guest mode. You can impress people that have iPhones and literally know nothing about smart homes by saying “hey check the home app on your phone, I just gave you guest access”.
In practice, I’ve never actually used guest mode, but I think it is a cool selling point.