Tong Family

Well, I bit the bullet today and upgraded our Apple Home to use the new protocols. The main issue is that it keeps complaining that one of my Macbook Pros, the 2017 model, has not been updated to the latest firmware. Also, my oldest Apple TV is not compatible, this is another case, where the hard is so unreliable that 7 years (?!!!) feels like a young device. That’s not that big a problem as I hope the 2017 resolves itself.

Apple Home User not found

Perhaps the most annoying bug right now is that one of our users saw the initial alert to join the home but this is now completely borked. I can keep adding, but we never get a notification. Ugh. No real read on message boards about this (and I refuse to use Twitter or Reddit to debug 🙂 The solution is to uninstall and reinstall Apple Home.

Roborock via Xiaomi MiHome via Homebridge

The other annoyance is the Roborock doesn’t support Apple Hom yet and the new Roborock application does not work at all because you can’t find the private token that you send the Roborocks to control them. So here is the process:

1. Unpair your Roborock from the Roborock application
2. Install the MiHome application and add the Roborock from there
3. Then you need to use a Python utility that knows how to query the MiHome cloud and get the secret token (guard this one carefully)
4. Start the Homebridge UI and Then load the Xiaomi Roborock plugin carefully fill in the IP address and give it the secret token
5. Reboot the Homebridge and check the logs, you should the Xiaomi Roborock appear!

One minor annoyance is that you can’t seem to change the default room where the Xiaomi lives, in my case the Homebridge is located in the “Utility Room” and you can’t move the Roborock to a different “room”. It seems like a bug since the other plugins I use like the Tesla one work.

Also, don’t make the name of the vacuum too long, you will get a basically unreadable string under three identical switches, Since there is no Vacuum type, it pretends to be a fan which is pretty confusing 🙂 But if you add things like Pause and Find Me, it’s not clear which switch to hit unless you memorize them.

But if you just have a single, then it treats the thing like a fan, so you can set it for 0-100% and I presume this means how much vacuum power to use?

Alarm.com, Tesla, and UniFi Protect Homebridge Plugin Review Update

Well, we’ve had this running for a month and it is actually pretty good. I’ve not tried to arm it from Apple Home, but there is now a tab on the left that says Security, and I can see that I can arm it as Home, Away, and Night and Off which is pretty nice.

Note that the Tesla plug-in is pretty broken, I have no less than four icons that say locked but I don’t know what that means.

The UniFi Protect works pretty well, but I don’t get video from it, the help says that you need to have more than a Raspberry Pi running this, so I might repurpose a MacBook Pro 2010 I have downstairs to run this.