Joshua Pressnell

No! Absolutely not! You must not say wonderful things about my work!! *glib smile* Don't worry... it'll happen. I spent a good portion of my spare time today working on the web-based appliance code. It's my personal opinion that the drop-in appliance is critical to the commercial success of the driver. Too many users and too many dealers won't understand the concept of homebridge and running their own mini-servers. The overall package *has* to be as completely seamless as possible in order to get widespread adoption. Sadly, that means idiot-proofing the setup and *tons* of documentation, which all takes time.

I haven't heard from too many people who are trying this out yet, but the homebridge-control4 plugin has been installed nearly 200 times. I have been in touch with one person who is successfully using this driver in his project... so far so good. I have a pre-configured homebridge appliance nearly ready to go on sale. This will be a drop-in network appliance that comes pre-configured with everything needed to get the Homebridge driver running with HomeKit, and which supports a super-easy web-based configuration. Plug it in, enter a few settings, and everything should "just work." It will even auto-import the device configuration from your Control4 system. Here's a little sneak-peek. MSRP for the hardware box will be about $225.

One further note. Siri gets a little picky in terms of naming and how you define things. If you can either say a command to turn on an exact item, or command to turn on all lights in a given room. "Hey Siri, turn on the basement lights" will turn on all lights. But if you say a command like "Hey Siri, turn on the basement hall light" and there isn't an item *named* "Basement Hall Light", then it will turn on all the lights in the basement. So you really want to have an item named "Basement Hall Light" that's also located in the Basement room to make it play nice. It takes a little tweaking to get used to, but once you understand how HomeKit works and get it all setup, it's pretty smooth. And I really like setting the theater dimmer settings based using the Apple TV in my theater with the voice remote. That's just fun.

Okay. The driver's looking solid so far. I'm going to go ahead and post it here and hopefully get feedback from you folks. You can download it here -> https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13324724/homebridge.c4z As a reminder, this driver will only be functional until Dec 15 OR until I release a new updated version of the beta. A new release will deactivate old beta versions. Since there's no programming involved, it's not a problem. Just upgrade the driver to the new version (or delete it and re-add the new version) and everything will pick up from where you left off. The documentation outlines what you need to do to get it running. If you're familiar at all with homebridge, it should be a piece of cake. I don't want to post more than that here, because I really want feedback on the documentation as well as the driver operation. If something doesn't make sense, I'd like to know about it. Please let me know when you folks have installed the driver and gotten the plugin working. I'm interested in success stories as well as trouble reports, as I want to verify that everything is solid, not just find errors. A note on doors that's not in the documentation yet. By default, all window and door "contact sensors" in the project will get output using a generic "Contact" device type in the homebridge plugin. Due to how HomeKit works, you can display contact sensors, but it doesn't let you get notifications when open/close events happen. If you want a door with a notification (I like to have my front door do this so I can see when my kids get home), then you'll need to change the configuration a little bit. Just change the "Service" value in the config.json to be "Door" instead of "Contact". The downside here is that HomeKit thinks doors should be something you can *control* so HomeKit will give you the option to open/close the door. My plugin ignores those commands, so if you tap on the "Door" in HomeKit, it'll show as "Opening" with a transition status until you tap on it again to get rid of the "Opening" state. There's not much I can do about that... and it's only a display issue. But that way you can get notifications when a door opens and closes if you want.

Ok folks... I have the homebridge plugin pretty well prepared and published in npm. You can find it here -> https://www.npmjs.com/package/homebridge-control4 For those of you with homebridge setups already (or at least a machine that's always running that you don't mind installing homebridge on), you can go ahead and install my plugin via npm to get your setup prepared for the driver. I've got the driver setup for beta test and I'm just doing final testing on it now to make sure it's stable. I'll post a link to the beta driver here as well as soon as I'm sure it's solid and good to go. The beta will work until Dec 15, at which point the driver will no longer operate.

The driver I'm currently working on wouldn't do this so well. My initial goal was to do a direct link between C4 hardware and HomeKit hardware concepts. HomeKit doesn't have any "AV profiles" yet, so "Hey Siri, Watch AppleTV in my bedroom" won't link easily to starting an AV source in a room. It's easy enough to get that kind of thing done, but in HomeKit, it would have to look like a series of switches. Then you'd tie the "switch state" to active scenes (Watching Apple TV, Watching News, etc) and turning one on would turn the others off and have the desired effect you wanted. I might be convinced to make a separate driver/plugin that does that, but it goes beyond the intent of my C4/HomeKit bridge enough that I wouldn't want to muddy the waters with it in this product.

Thought I'd show you guys a little of what I've been working with. So far, it's been very snappy and stable.

How much further would you like? As of tonight, I have lights, dimmers, fans (via switch), fan speed controllers, doors, windows and blinds (via contact sensor), garage doors (via the contact/relay combo driver C4 ships with), and my security system (via security partition proxy). I've got three Nest thermostats hooked up via the Nest C4 driver, but homebridge also has a Nest plugin, so no real need to connect that through C4. You can just use the Nest plugin directly. HomeKit doesn't support AV systems yet, so there's not much I can do for home theater control. I don't have any C4 locks or video monitoring sources or doorbells to play with so I can't adequately test interfaces with them, although I'd like to at some point. The only thing left on my near term plate is the motion sensor (via contact sensor driver). I looked at the HomeKit relay setup and there's some stuff in there that I can't understand the meaning of as required data values and since HomeKit is MFI, there's not a lot of documentation to work from. I'm certainly happy to discuss feature requests, though. The way setup works is you install my driver. Then you enable logging and use the built-in action to print out the homebridge config file setup. Cut and paste that into your homebridge config.json file and restart. That's it. No programming in Composer required. My driver and the homebridge plugin handle all the details. Ive got about 95% of this all working. I need to clean up the config file generator and document the heck out of the setup process. I may also eventually put together a pre-packaged homebridge box that comes with everything needed and an embedded web server to configure it easily, but that'll depend on whether folks really have a demand for all this. So far, I've been tinkering with what I need for my own setup, so any ideas are always welcome!

Got the fan speed controller and fans connected to switches working yesterday. Still have motion detectors, generic relays, and the security system to do, but that shouldn't take that long. Hopefully will have something out to play with soon.

Cool. When I'm ready for a beta test and have a licensing scheme worked out, I'll post here. I originally played with homebridge and the basic HTTP driver and was very discouraged with the amount of programming required to get everything working, and even then I just got basic lights and switches. The existing plugins for homebridge aren't quite what is needed for a good interface to control 4 and relying on the event model and programming in C4 had just a bit of a delay. So far, my experiences with the native direct driver I'm writing have been very snappy, I presume because I don't have to rely on dynamic programming and event models. You only have to install a single copy of my driver. Then you setup homebridge and install my plugin. This lets you setup as many lights, dimmers, contact switches, etc, as you like, with bidirectional data flow.

As the original poster of the thread... everyone take a deep breath. I don't mind Cy at all, and I generally appreciate his blunt approach. Maybe it's an engineering thing. That said, his comment was generally relevant to a "perceived market". Either way, I'm making the driver. I have lights, dimmers, and doors working already.

Yeah, I sorta get that. I'm an Apple developer and my entire immediate and extended family are entirely in the Apple ecosystem. I didn't want to buy a whole bunch of Echo components when my family carries perfectly functional voice recognition devices (iPhone and Apple Watches) around the home already. There's also the fact that the current Apple solution is widely available in other countries/languages already, where-as Amazon is lacking in that area. What I'm working on will work without additional hardware in the mix (with the exception of needing a computer system (Mac, linux, Raspberry Pi, etc) to run homebridge on. I'm developing this for myself... so it's going to get done whether or not there's a market for it externally. But if folks are interested, I'll be more careful to think about "production level code" while I'm working on this.

I've been working on developing a homebridge plugin to fully enable HomeKit control/reporting of various Control4 devices. Initially I'm supporting lights, dimmers, door contact sensors, window contact sensors, generic contact sensors, motion sensors and security systems (because that's what I have in my home). I'm also working on a Control4 driver that will communicate with the homebridge plugin for all system devices without additional programming needed. This will give the benefit of: * Direct control of Control4 systems via HomeKit w/ Siri voice control * Remote access (if you have home hubs such as Apple TV 4 or iPad) without 4Sight needed * Direct integration of "favorite" devices into the iOS control center views * Control of all Control4 devices via Apple Watch SO....a few questions: 1) Does anybody out there have interest in such a thing? 2) Are there folks out there that might want to beta test?

Right... but assuming I get someone to install the drivers. What does a single license of the driver cost? The shop where the driver is posted says I have to contact a dealer for pricing. :/

I'm not a dealer. If I wanted to have a copy of this driver installed and activate it, what would it cost me? The local dealers around me mostly closed up shop.