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Control4 HomeKit Driver - Updated Release


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Varietas Software is pleased to announce version 1.5 of our Homebridge driver, now available for download/update from HouseLogix.  

This new version coincides with the newly released version 1.0.21 of our homebridge-control4 plugin and version 1.0.4 of the appliance firmware.  These updates are dependent on each other, and all 3 must be installed for proper operation.

This is a major release, with some extremely important updates:

* The driver and plugin are now fully event driven.  I have eliminated the need for polling entirely.  This means that the "refresh interval" has been hidden in the appliance configuration portal.  For those configuring your own homebridge servers, you should leave the refresh_interval in the device configuration, but you should set its value to 900000.  This causes homebridge to manually check on system state every 15 minutes, just to check-in.  The C4 driver and the plugin will communicate with each other in real-time as changes happen in the system.  This also significantly reduces the network load and the processor load on the director.  

* The Homebridge appliance now supports more than 100 devices.  The system automatically detects when the device limit is exceeded and starts up a second homebridge server instance under-the-hood.  The process is almost entirely hidden from the user.  The device list stays the same.  There's just a few places where the user sees status for multiple services instead of just the one, and you need to add multiple bridge devices into HomeKit to have them all available in Home instead of just the one.

* I've also fixed several bugs, and have added the ability to view and copy/paste the homebridge system logs from the configuration portal, which will help us support users better.  

* I also added support for "doorbells".  In Control4, doorbells are just tied to a contact sensor, so anybody using a simple relay to detect doorbell presses can use this to get HomeKit notifications when someone's at the door.  It's fast and responsive.  If you want to know more about this, contact me.

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Varietas Software is pleased to announce version 1.5 of our Homebridge driver, now available for download/update from HouseLogix.  

This new version coincides with the newly released version 1.0.21 of our homebridge-control4 plugin and version 1.0.4 of the appliance firmware.  These updates are dependent on each other, and all 3 must be installed for proper operation.

This is a major release, with some extremely important updates:

* The driver and plugin are now fully event driven.  I have eliminated the need for polling entirely.  This means that the "refresh interval" has been hidden in the appliance configuration portal.  For those configuring your own homebridge servers, you should leave the refresh_interval in the device configuration, but you should set its value to 900000.  This causes homebridge to manually check on system state every 15 minutes, just to check-in.  The C4 driver and the plugin will communicate with each other in real-time as changes happen in the system.  This also significantly reduces the network load and the processor load on the director.  

* The Homebridge appliance now supports more than 100 devices.  The system automatically detects when the device limit is exceeded and starts up a second homebridge server instance under-the-hood.  The process is almost entirely hidden from the user.  The device list stays the same.  There's just a few places where the user sees status for multiple services instead of just the one, and you need to add multiple bridge devices into HomeKit to have them all available in Home instead of just the one.

* I've also fixed several bugs, and have added the ability to view and copy/paste the homebridge system logs from the configuration portal, which will help us support users better.  

* I also added support for "doorbells".  In Control4, doorbells are just tied to a contact sensor, so anybody using a simple relay to detect doorbell presses can use this to get HomeKit notifications when someone's at the door.  It's fast and responsive.  If you want to know more about this, contact me.

 

Awesome to witness the development of this amazing "bridge".

 

Really hoping Thermostat control is coming soon. Can't wait to geek out

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37 minutes ago, dew1551 said:

Looks like I still need a driver update in my project. 

Yes. You'll need the driver updated. But if your dealer installed the free HouseLogix auto update driver, then that will happen automatically. If not, then you'll need them to install the updated driver. While you're at it, ask them to install the auto-update driver too ;)

Once the driver update has been done, reboot the appliance (power it off and on again) and you should be all set. 

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1 hour ago, andre.baracat said:

 

Awesome to witness the development of this amazing "bridge".

 

Really hoping Thermostat control is coming soon. Can't wait to geek out

It's coming. I did doorbell support because I wanted it, and it intrigued me. Making that work was more complicated than it should have been.  And I needed something "fun" to do in the midst of all the painful updates. 

Thermostats are next up on my list... followed by a docker image. 

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For those of you waiting on dealers to update you to the latest C4 driver, you may want to hold off, or make sure they also install the auto-update driver.  I'm working on Thermostat support right now, and once that's done and tested, I'll be releasing version 1.6.  If you have the auto-update driver installed, it'll get picked up automatically.  Otherwise, if you hold off a couple of days, then I should have the version out with Thermostats supported.

After that, my update cycle should cool off for a while. ;)

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Hey Josh. The new version seems to have trouble communicating with my alarm again. It seemed to create a feedback loop of some kind, where I tried to arm my alarm, and then it kept repeatedly trying to arm it again and again. I couldn't even disarm the alarm manually, because it would just rearm itself instantly. It only stopped when I took Homebridge offline and then removed the alarm from my configuration. Any idea why that might happen? I did have HomeKit trigger on the arm/disarm event, but nothing that ever tells C4 to arm/disarm from HomeKit, so I'm not sure where the loop came from.

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You'll have to remind me. You have one of the old alarms that's not updated with the new proxy, right? I haven't gone through a lot of testing with that yet, and don't officially support it. 

I'll get around to working with you on that soon, but I have a few other updates that need fixing first. 

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10 hours ago, dew1551 said:

Since updating I get a notice in ho edit app that says " kitchen not responding". All of the lights however are controllable. But I cannot find any way to get rid of the message? Any thoughts 

That's telling you that the "hub device" in the kitchen isn't working. That's an iPad or an Apple TV that behaves as a hub/repeater. HomeKit is saying it's not there, which means it can't be used to control things if you're outside the home. I've seen this once before, and toggling the HomeKit options on the Apple TV corrected it. 

That particular issue has nothing to do with the appliance or the devices in it, which is why you can still control things. 

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Thanks for the tip. Power cycled the appletv used as a hub. Message disappeared. I now have my 2 doorbell relays showing up as camera not working, my doorbell relays are used for announcements and do not have cameras so that seems ok? Nothing to control in HomeKit I guess. But I do have control4 cameras can these be controlled in HomeKit? How?

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On 4/23/2017 at 10:59 AM, dew1551 said:

Thanks for the tip. Power cycled the appletv used as a hub. Message disappeared. I now have my 2 doorbell relays showing up as camera not working, my doorbell relays are used for announcements and do not have cameras so that seems ok? Nothing to control in HomeKit I guess. But I do have control4 cameras can these be controlled in HomeKit? How?

Right... so in the current version of HomeKit, Apple doesn't support stand-alone doorbells.  The doorbells only function IF AND ONLY IF there is a HomeKit compatible video camera associated with the same room.  Then HomeKit auto-links those capabilities, and doorbell works, and associates doorbell events with the camera video.  So for now, I associate an invalid camera stream with the doorbell in the appliance, which essentially does nothing, but allows the doorbell to work properly.  The rumor mill indicates that HomeKit should support stand-alone doorbells in the next release of iOS (sometime this fall), at which point I'll add an option to the homebridge configuration to disable the camera portion of it.

I don't support cameras yet... They're very complicated, from a device perspective.  I might, at some point.  For now, if your cameras support RTSP, you can use a separate homebridge plugin to pull those into HomeKit directly.  If you verify your cameras support RTSP, and you want to try that, PM me.

 

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Ok.  I'm near finished with the 1.6 update (reference above).  I've got thermostat support mostly working, but I've also added one niggling thing that's been bugging me for a while; *security*.  Hopefully this is a bit of a "bonus present" to those waiting patiently for the update.

All of the original homebridge interfaces basically let anybody who was on your network and who knew the homebridge existed and the protocols (which aren't too hard to sniff for if you know what you're doing) could basically command your system to do whatever could be done by HomeKit.  I've added an encrypted unique security token to each request.  Without a valid token, which changes for every request, the Control4 driver refuses to respond at all to any web requests.

Due to limits with security and encryption methods, the security features will only be available to customers with my appliance or who have licensed by appliance Raspberry Pi images.  There's just not a good way to make this kind of security really "secure" if I put the token creation algorithms in an open source javascript project.  As such, the token generation code is limited to an encrypted native function that comes with my appliance firmware.

This will add one small step to the configuration of your installation.  By default, both the driver and the appliance use a default shared secret.  Your dealer should change that secret and let you know what it is.  You'll configure the same shared secret in the appliance.

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