ONLY CONNECT
Connect your devices together – and not just those that speak the same language
Will we ever get our devices working together?
Smart home advocates are spoiled for choice, in both a good and a bad way. Good because the market is exploding – more and more products are rolling out with smart support, there’s a long list of kit getting a smart upgrade, and the protocols which drive our kit in the background are only getting smarter. But it’s that latter plural – ‘protocols’ – which continues to be frustrating, and will remain so perhaps forever more: there are multiple platforms, with multiple levels of support. One device may never talk to another, at least without some serious (and potentially flaky) middleware. And there’s even some smart kit that does its own thing entirely, using its own protocols that play with nothing else.
Let’s draw a quick comparison between today’s smart landscape and the computing platforms of the 16-bit era. You couldn’t run Atari ST programs on the Commodore Amiga; you couldn’t play your Archimedes games on the classic Mac – unless, that is, the creators coded specific ports. Today’s smart home equipment is much the same: if it only works with Alexa, then you’re basically out of luck if you want to control it with Siri. You might get some small HomeKit concession, you might not.
There were inelegant solutions in the 16-bit era, though, just as there are today. Spectre cards allowed the Atari ST (which used the same Motorola 68000 processor) to effectively function as a Mac, and similar emulation options were available for the Amiga, as long as you had access to legitimate Mac ROM chips. It’s an awkward comparison, but that in itself is apt: it’s time to do what you can to control everything as one.
Go hard or go home
Why not begin by considering the hardcore option? The Linux-based Home Assistant operating system (otherwise known as hass.io) is, no doubt, a powerful tool. Getting it initially up and running on a Raspberry Pi is fairly simple, and once it’s active it can act as an always-on controller for your smart home devices. You can use it to manage automations and it can offer a front end to all of your devices at once, plus a whole lot more – but it unfortunately follows our common thread in that its compatibility does not extend to every device, and actually configuring it successfully (let alone convincing it to consistently talk to all of your kit) is a very difficult task. Don’t let that stop you trying, though.
For the price of a Raspberry Pi and a whole bundle of time, Home Assistant is a HomeKit-compatible solution that very nearly solves our big problem – indeed, it probably does the best job of tying together multiple platforms that
you’re likely to find. Use its HomeKit Controller integration to seek out HomeKit-compatible devices, and the HomeKit component to pipe the control of any device to Siri or the Home app. Do bear in mind though that you’ll need to reset every one of your devices to make it work, and write a large number of tedious configuration files to get it done – and if Apple or any other company decides to make a tweak to their protocol, you may have to set the whole thing up again.
The comfortable choice
Realistically, and this likely isn’t the news you were expecting, Apple Home (or some variant of it) is probably the best control-everything smart home solution available to you right now. The fact that it spreads between iOS, iPadOS and macOS, with configuration persisting between them, is perfect. Its reach is expanding as new devices add HomeKit support. And if Home Assistant seems like too much, Homebridge (homebridge.io) might be a good alternate answer. It’s a more HomeKit-focused bridging program (hence the name) that turns just about anything into a HomeKit device; it’s compatible with a wide range of usually nonHomeKit devices; and it supports plugins which add additional functionality. More on this in a future issue.
If you don’t want to fully overhaul your network, don’t underestimate the power of your existing hardware. We’ve talked in previous issues about the fact that an iPhone isn’t tied to only Siri – you can run Alexa or Google Assistant in their own apps, and while jumping from app to app doesn’t entirely combine every device, it does at least place one device as the central controller. You can (sort of) do the same thing on your Mac desktop, using Reverb (Free, Mac App Store) to issue Alexa commands, or the slightly clunky MacAssistant (github.com/ vanshg/MacAssistant) for Google Home. If you wanted to make your Mac into your central controller, there’s nothing to stop you downloading Android emulator BlueStacks (Free, bluestacks.com) and installing all of your kit’s individual mobile apps, using them alongside the Home app and Siri integration already present in macOS. Be creative, take a leap or two, and you’ll find what works for you.