Newbie question

Devices
1

I’m pretty new to the whole home automation world, if you ignore the time I’ve spent using HomeKit. I have set up Home Assistant on my Synology just to try things out but have to say that I don’t think I want to spend any more time in that part of town, but the thing has at least taught me how things work in the Homey/HomeyKit neighborhood in that you can control HomeKit devices using HomeyKit as a controller and if you do that, you control them exclusively.

But that also means that I lose some functionality if I decide to go down the Homey path, like adaptive lighting, so I started wondering whether I could bridge the gap, so to speak, by creating a virtual HomeKit device and setting a variable in that device to “off” (or whatever) and make the HomeKit hub use that as a condition to control the devices that I have already bought.

I’ve tried Googling this a bit and it seems to be possible to do this the other way around (taking actions in Homey based on external values) but I haven’t found anything that shows a way to tell HomeKit to turn a device on or off based on external triggers…other than moving everything to HomeyKit, where I would be missing some features.

So I guess my question is: is there a way to use the data from apps and sensors controlled by Homey to send signals to the HomeKit ecosystem, without requring repairing and moving all the HomeKit devices to Homey?

2

That’s not correct: Homeykit isn’t a controller, it’s a bridge. That means that Homeykit will expose Homey devices to Homekit (i.e. you can control Homey devices from iOS).

There is no Homekit controller for Homey, which is something to consider if you have a lot of Homekit-devices for which no Homey app/implementation exists.

3

Thanks for the clarification.

Does that mean my original train of thought was right, that I can create a virtual device, use HomeyKit to expose it to HomeKit and then use the variables in the virtual device as criteria?

4

I think it should be possible, yes. I don’t have a lot of experience with Homekit automations, but I assume that you can trigger on “a device has changed” (which would be the virtual device) and then perform an action?