Funny story, a few weeks ago I locked myself out because technology. I left the house via the garage to see some neighborhood commotion and realized when I came back that I had been hoodwinked by my own code.
You see, I typically let myself in via a custom developer-signed app that travels out over the internet, back in to the house via a reverse proxy and then triggers an Arduino+relay connected to the door opener. It’s got… a few single points of failure. But it has been quite reliable until that week when I left the house without checking the app first. Developer certificates for apps only last until your current membership expires (at most a year if you installed an app on the day you renewed your membership) and mine had renewed since the last time I used the app - one of the secret perils of extended work-from-home I guess.
But everything worked out and I was able to get back in relatively quickly (quoth @bradfitz: “luckily you have a friend with backdoor access to your home network”) but it prompted me to tackle a project I had been putting off for a while; migrating from a custom app to a custom homebridge plugin.
HomeKit is by far more optimal for this use case: I can ask Siri to trigger it without writing my own Siri intents (which I did for the original app - except HomeKit has a monopoly on asking Siri to open the garage so I had to configure it for “hey Siri open the thing”), the user interface is built-in to the HomeKit app and won’t expire periodically, and I can rely on HomeKit Apple TV home hub rather than a reverse proxy. Less stuff I have to maintain or debug, and the only way I can be truly locked out is if the power is shut off.
getting started
As is customary, the actual code to wire all this stuff up is trivial but understanding the concepts behind the homebridge API is not.
I already had homebridge set up and configured for another project so I focused on how I could create a custom plugin for homebridge and connect it to my existing installation. I started by forking this example plugin project for homebridge: https://github.com/homebridge/homebridge-plugin-template
The installation instructions were great and I had the plugin showing up in homebridge-ui immediately.
Here’s where things start to get tricky: HomeKit garage door support is built with the idea that there’s a sensor that can detect if the garage door is open or closed. This isn’t typically something a non-smart garage door can tell. It’s got a toggle that opens, closes or stops movement from the garage door and your eyes and brain are the indicator that the door has completed opening or closing.
If you look at the Homebridge Garage Door service API docs, you’ll note that it handles a few different states. There is no “toggle garage door” command, but there are triggers for setting the CurrentDoorState and TargetDoorState. In an ideal world we’d trigger the garage door toggle, set TargetDoorState to open, wait for the garage to open and then set CurrentDoorState to open.
Next time:
How to structure your homebridge plugin, and trying things the hard way…