Homebridge Plugins: Tesla, Harmony, and Unifi Protect

Ok, I’ve been using this Homebridge extensions for a while and they have been actually pretty useful, there are whole variety of these and it confusing what is good or not, but here are the three that I use with some tips and tricks:

  1. It is confusing, but your homebridge goes into a location which you set at the beginning, but when you add plugins for various things, you have to move them elsewhere, otherwise the default is in the room where the homebridge is, so after each addition of plugins, you have to move each accessory.
  2. Tesla Homebridge. Ok, this finally let’s you say things to Siri like “Turn on the Tesla”. It adds a bunch of buttons like Start and Charge and so forth. You do have to move this thing to your Garage or a new room for it make sense. One tricky thing is that you need an authentication token (you don’t want to put your Tesla password in clear text into this application). You can get this with a third party application that runs on your phone. But now things like “Hey Siri, Unlock the Model 3 doors” should now work where the Model 3 is the name of the accessory
  3. Homebridge Harmony. If you have some Logitech Harmony Remotes (I know these are being discontinued) and you want to say things like “Hey Siri turn on the TV”, then you can load this up. This let’s you run harmony commands directly from the Home application. Yes, you can use the Logitech mobile application, but this puts it all into one place.
  4. Homebridge Unifi Protect. This adds the Unifi Protect camera feeds to your Home. It only surfaces motion events though, but it is nice to see all the cameras from native Homekit to Unifi in one place. It also suppors their doorbell, so you can listen for these. There is advanced mode with Homekit where you can create a security system in it where the states are Home, Away etc. To use this, you go to the url of your https://controller/protect/liveview and then you have by default a view that includes all your cameras in an array

I’m Rich & Co.

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