Using HomeBridge on a Raspberry Pi to control devices from HomeKit

If you’ve got a selection of devices that you’d like to control using iOS HomeKit, setting up homebridge might be a good solution. In short, it’s a platform which acts as a “bridge” between your devices and “HomeKit”. There are MANY plugins available for it: https://www.npmjs.com/search?q=homebridge.

Here’s how I use it:

  1. I have a Broadlink RM Mini that controls my AC, TV, Radio and a digital photo frame using homebridge-broadlink-rm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/homebridge-broadlink-rm 
  2. I have it enable/disable an indoor camera using MotionEye using homebridge-script2: https://www.npmjs.com/package/homebridge-script2 

With all those plugins, the options are almost endless if the device is connected to the network. To do this I use a Raspberry Pi 2. To get started, you’ll need to have raspbian installed and running. To do this, there are various guides available, including this official one: https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/raspberry-pi-getting-started.

Now we can install Homebridge. There’s a guide to doing this on a Raspberry Pi available here: https://github.com/nfarina/homebridge/wiki/Running-HomeBridge-on-a-Raspberry-Pi. I found this guide confusing regarding the Node.js installation so I'll try to document the whole process here.
    1. Start with some prep, lets get things up to date:
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get upgrade

     2. Install some prerequisites:
    sudo apt-get install git make
    In most cases this should do nothing, but older version may need these installed.

    3. Check you gcc version is up to scratch:
    g++ -v

     You'll see a whole lot of text but near the bottom there will be a line starting gcc version. In most cases this should be 4.9.2 or later. If it isn't, install the latest version: https://solarianprogrammer.com/2015/01/13/raspberry-pi-raspbian-install-gcc-compile-cpp-14-programs/ and set it as your default compiler:
    sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/gcc gcc /usr/bin/gcc-4.9 60 --slave /usr/bin/g++ g++ /usr/bin/g++-4.9
    sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/gcc gcc /usr/bin/gcc-4.6 40 --slave /usr/bin/g++ g++ /usr/bin/g++-4.7

    4. Now, we need to find out what version of Node we can run. Run this command
    uname -a
     This will give you a line like this:
    Linux raspberrypi 4.4.50-v7+ 970 SMP Mon Feb 20 19:18:29 GMT 2017 armv7l GNU/Linux

     Take note of that part just before GNU/Linux. e.g. armv71, or on my Pi 2 it was armv6l

    5. Go here and get "Copy link address" for the download link related to the ARM version you found above:

    6. Now run these lines, using the link you've just copied for the first line, and the file name for the second:
    wget https://nodejs.org/dist/v6.9.5/node-v6.9.5-linux-armv6l.tar.xz
    tar xJvf node-v6.9.5-linux-armv6l.tar.xz
    sudo mkdir -p /opt/node
    sudo mv node-v6.9.5-linux-armv6l/* /opt/node/
    sudo update-alternatives --install "/usr/bin/node" "node" "/opt/node/bin/node" 1
    sudo update-alternatives --install "/usr/bin/npm" "npm" "/opt/node/bin/npm" 1

    7. Now we can install some last prerequisites:
    sudo apt-get install libavahi-compat-libdnssd-dev

    8. Node makes a mess of the folders so lets clean them up:
    sudo npm config set prefix /usr
   Also it's good to edit /etc/profile and update some env variables by adding to the bottom:
    export NODE_PATH=/usr/lib/node_modules:/opt/node/lib/node_modules
    export PATH="/usr/lib:$PATH"

    9. And then, finally install homebridge:
    sudo npm install -g --unsafe-perm homebridge

    10. Setup up homebridge to run on startup using systemd. First, create a user account to run it
    sudo useradd --system homebridge

     11. Setup a folder for the homebridge config:
    sudo mkdir /var/lib/homebridge
    sudo chown -R homebridge:homebridge /var/lib/homebridge

    12. Setup the systemd files:
    Create the file /etc/default/homebridge:
    sudo vi /etc/default/homebridge
    and add this as the content:
    Create the file /etc/systemd/system/homebridge.service:
    sudo vi /etc/systemd/system/homebridge.service
    and add this as the content:

    13. Then Enable and run the service (first time) with the following commands:
     systemctl daemon-reload
    systemctl enable homebridge
    systemctl start homebridge

     14. You can check the status of the service by calling
    systemctl status homebridge
     or view the logs using
  journalclt -u homebridge -f -a

In another post soon, I'll document my configuration. To get started, you can checkout some information here: https://github.com/nfarina/homebridge

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sync iTunes with MythMusic

This is something I've been playing with for a while using various scripts but I think I'm now getting close to a good solution. It's a three stage process but its better than the 5+ steps I was doing. Here's what I'm doing now: Save the iTunes album art to the file system with iTSfv Copy the library to my MythTV PC with rsync in cygwin Copy my playlists with a nice perl script i found here: http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/365416?page=last iTSfv is a nice tool which interfaces with iTunes and does various things to tidy up your library. One option is to "Export Artwork to Album folder as Folder.jpg". All you have to do is launch iTSfv and check this option, select all the tracks in your iTunes library and click Validate. It'll go through your library and place a nice jpg in the directory for all yout albums, which MythMusic will make use of. Then use rsync to sync the library to the music folder on the Media PC. I'm not goi
Read more

Using Homebridge and Broadlink RM Mini to automate

Image
In this post, I'll be documenting how I configured a Broadlink RM Mini to work with HomeKit using the Homebridge server I built in my last post . The Broadlink RM Mini is a small IR Blaster that sits on the coffee table and sends IR signals when requested. They're cheap, and they work: In hindsight, for a little more you can also get the RM Pro which (I found out later) includes a thermometer. I added a DS18D20 thermometer to my Raspberry Pi to get around this mess up. To start with, you'll need to unpack your RM Mini and get it setup on your network. To do this, you'll need to download their "e-Control" app and follow through the setup. There's a good summary of these steps here: https://spectrum.co.ae/blogs/technology/how-to-configure-broadlink-devices, you can just stop before step 5 if you don't plan to use the e-Control application. Now we need to add homebridge-broadlink-rm to our Raspberry Pi. Connect to the pi console, SSH or local
Read more

LetsEncrypt and AWS ELB Load Balancers

Image
This is something that I've struggled to find good information on. You've setup your IIS Web Servers in AWS, get them working nicely behind an ELB Load Balancer, now you want to apply a free LetsEncrypt SSL Certificate. This guide will take you through that process. Here's he basic run down: Design your Infrastructure to allow for a Central Validation Server Setup and IAM identity with access to manage your certificates Setup an initial certificate Apply the new certificate to a new ELB Re-generate the LetsEncrypt Certificate with a script to automatically update the ELB Certificate Design your Infrastructure to allow for a Central Validation Server One concept discussed in LetsEncrypt's Integration Guide  is a Central Validation Server. To abbreviate this considerably, this is setting up one of the servers to manage the certificates. Fortunately ELB2 presents the certificate to clients and it doesn't matter which certificate is presented by the server.
Read more