Category: Smart Home

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my latest attempt to add my older garage door opener to HomeKit.

That project has been a huge hit with everyone in my household, so emboldened, I recently took on an additional HomeKit project: adding our driveway gate to the network.

When I first had the idea, I assumed that I would need to piece something together on my own, but then I came across a product called the ismartgate. After poking around the website for a few minutes, I came across this really great configuration page. After checking a few boxes, the website told me that the ismartgate LITE would work for my needs. $130 and a few days later, I was ready to go.

Compared to installing the Meross, this was shockingly straightforward. The main unit plugged into a spare power outlet located inside of my gate’s control box, and I had to run a total of just two wires to the control board:

With the brains of the ismartgate squared away, I now had to set up the magnetic sensor so it would know if the gate was opened or closed. After some tinkering, I ended up mounting them on the hinged portion of the gate:

When the gate is closed, the surface with the magnet rotates, coming near the sensor, which is battery powered. I was able to mount it using some strong double-sided foam tape and one of the two screws used to hold the laser emitter in place.¹

Getting the ismartgate LITE added to HomeKit was very simple, but it serves as a reminder that Apple doesn’t ship near enough icons to choose from in the Home app. Visually, it and my garage door look the same, which is a bit annoying.

Also annoying is how Siri treats the names of rooms and accessories. I put the “Garage Door” in a room called “Garage” in HomeKit. That worked really well until I added the “Gate” to the same room. Then, Siri wanted me to clarify what I meant when I said “Open the garage door.” Until I can dive into that further, I’ve moved the gate into its own room.

That hiccup aside, I’ve been really happy with my two recent HomeKit additions. In both cases, a relatively cheap accessory — that can be easily uninstalled — has made life just a little bit nicer here at the Hackett house.

Three years ago, I installed the Insignia Wi-Fi Garage Door Controller, which allowed me to check the status of my garage door — and control it — via HomeKit.

After that blog post was published, I heard from several people saying that they had done the same thing, just to be disappointed when the Insignia hardware failed on them within the first year or two of use.

I’m sad to say that the same thing happened to me, so for the last year or so, I’ve been opening my garage door with its old-school remote like an animal.

This issue was so widespread that Insignia has discontinued the product.

Recently, some folks in the Relay FM Member Discord were discussing a HomeKit garage door kit made by Meross. The company makes a wide-range of HomeKit-enabled gear, all of which seems to be well-liked so I spent the $50 for the kit.

Installation was pretty straight-forward. Unlike the Insignia, which had a module that attached to the garage door to work out its orientation, the Meross uses a set of small magnetic sensors to know when the door is closed. As the door opens and moves up the track, the sensors lose contact with each other, and the system knows that the door is open.

The stationary side of the sensor pair is hard-wired to the base unit, and doesn’t require separate power or batteries. I like the simplicity of that, even if it meant needing to run wire from the sensor back to the small base unit, which I mounted to the top of the garage door opener. My garage is unfinished, so it wasn’t a big deal with to run the wire, especially with Myke Hurley making sure my ladder didn’t move out from under me.

The other wiring required was to two terminals on the garage door opener itself. These terminals are also used for the wired button in the garage, so this was just a matter of backing the screw out on each terminal, then slipping the new wires into place. My opener is from the 90s, but didn’t give me any trouble during the installation.

The base unit plugs into power via USB-A and a small power brick. No batteries needed.

The opener requires the Meross app for set up and firmware updates, which isn’t a dealbreaker for me. It’s been shuttled off into the App Library forever, but now my garage door shows up in the Home app, right next to a bunch of other stuff around the house:

Ben Lovejoy has the details, but this is about the worst thing that could happen when it comes to having cameras in or around your home. Thankfully, if you have these and have switched them over to using Apple’s HomeKit Secure Video platform, you should be good.

Update: Eufy has commented that this was due to a software bug on their servers.

Last week, a beta version of firmware for the Logitech Circle 2 cameras enabled use with HomeKit Secure video. As the user of a couple of Nest cameras, I’ve been keeping an eye on this, as storing footage in my iCloud account is quite appealing. I bought a Circle 2 camera on Amazon and set it up over the weekend.

I didn’t get very far before bugging Zac Hall at 9to5 Mac, as he writes:

HomeKit Secure Video cameras can be set to record clips and stream video, only stream, or turned off individually, and each mode can be assigned to when people are home or away.

But something Stephen Hackett asked me over the weekend is if it’s possible to turn cameras on and off without location. In his case, he would like to use HomeKit Secure Video in his detached home office when he’s not inside, but geofencing control isn’t an option since the house and office are too close.

You can manually turn a camera on and off by digging through the camera’s settings in the Home app, but that’s just not smart home automation. My suggestion was connecting the HomeKit Secure Video camera to a HomeKit smart plug as a workaround. It’s not as elegant as it should be, but it’s a solution for now.

Hall goes on to write about some of the other frustrating issues with HomeKit Secure Video, and on Connected this week, we spoke about it at length, starting at 1:06:53.

In short, this product doesn’t feel ready. Notifications are buggy, the motion sensitivity on the camera is way too high and it lacks many features found with competing products.

I also worry about HomeKit Secure Video being one feature of one app Apple ships. For companies like Nest and Ring, it’s the feature of the app they ship.¹ I don’t want to have to wait until iOS 14 for Apple to fix what’s broken in HomeKit Secure Video, and honestly, I shouldn’t have to. If Apple wants to compete with these products, it should.

In a recent stay with John Voorhees, I noticed him asking Siri to open his garage door. He told me he was using the Insignia Wi-Fi Garage Door Controller, which he reviewed for MacStories earlier this year.

As someone who frequently worries about having left the garage door up after leaving, I knew this was a device I needed to check out, so I ordered one on the spot.

The controller is actually two separate components. The first plugs into power and runs small wires into the garage door opener itself:

The other part is a wireless transmitter that attaches to the garage door to tell HomeKit if the door is open or closed:

Setup was pretty straight forward. I had to take the panel off my door opener — after unplugging it, of course — and back out two screws to slip a new pair of wires onto the contacts. This method will vary opener to opener, but was easy enough on mine.

The beauty of this approach is that all other methods of opening and closing the door continue to work. In my garage’s case, that’s a pair of old-school wireless remotes and a doorbell-like button in the garage itself.

Those small wires join and plug into the main unit, which has a HomeKit barcode on the side to join it to the wireless network. I have pretty good coverage in my garage, but even so, the opener can be slow at times to report its status back to HomeKit, but more on that later.

Unlike many HomeKit devices, the Insignia doesn’t require its own iOS app to function; it talks directly to HomeKit and shows up in the Home app and is accessible via Siri. All of this just works without any configuration past adding the HomeKit device to the Home app.

In addition to the HomeKit and Siri control, the opener will send a push notification when the status of the door changes. These can be adjusted to be sent only during certain times of day or if certain people are or are not home.

My only complaint is that the device can be a little slow to respond to commands, and the UI in Home takes a moment to update after the door has changed status. The speed is by no means a deal breaker to have access to your garage door anywhere in the world, but it is a little annoying.

At the end of the day, the Insigina Garage Door Controller does what it advertises: puts your garage door on HomeKit with minimal fuss or disruption. HomeKit continues its slow march toward being a powerful, trustworthy system, and this is just another example of the ecosystem continuing to become more useful.

Included is a connected radiator valve, door lock, window guard and more.

Tim Hardwick at MacRumors is reporting that IKEA's Trådfri smart lighting system now support Apple's HomeKit.

The lights require a Ethernet-based gateway, not unlike the Philips Hue bridge, although Hardwick also reports that the Trådfri bulbs can work with a Hue bridge.

The bulbs run anywhere from $12 to $18 a pop, which is roughly what Philip's dimmable LED bulbs cost.

Update: Turns out, MacRumors was incorrect. IKEA says support is coming this fall.

Sigh.