Home Automation - Stephen Radford

Controlling Homebridge with Alexa

10 July 2017 by Stephen Radford

I've written a fair few posts about HomeKit and Homebridge but there was one piece of that whole puzzle that I was never really happy with—Siri. While Siri does a job to some extent I think it's hard to say that it does it well. Constantly mishearing or misunderstanding what I'm saying, having to have a phone or iPad nearby to activate, and long waits while it converts speech-to-text were infuriating. My Dad had recently bought into the Alexa eco-system with an Echo Dot and was controlling his Philips Hue setup with ease. He couldn't stop praising the thing—…

HomeKit IR Blaster: Controlling My TV with HomeKit

28 June 2017 by Stephen Radford

If you've read any of my previous posts then you probably already realise I'm on a mission to automate my entire house and control it using Apple's HomeKit protocol. I'm pretty satisfied with the lights in my house now but there's plenty more I would still love to be able to control from my phone. In Search of an IR Blaster Rather than replacing everything in my home it made sense to try and find something to control my existing stuff. The majority of things like my TV, amp, fireplace, and fan are all controlled by IR so I started…

Controlling HomeKit with an Amazon Dash Button

25 November 2016 by Stephen Radford

Since hooking up Homebridge and controlling lights and LED strips in my living room I've been looking for a physical switch to control it. The only HomeKit enabled switch I've found is the Elgato Eve Light Switch which is pretty reasonable at $50 but is only available in the US due to the requirement of a neutral wire — something UK (and most other international) switches do not have/require. I wondered if I could get another Wi-Fi button working with Homebridge but couldn't really find anything. There's the FLIC but that needs Bluetooth so was out of the question unless…

Cheap HomeKit Light Bulbs

03 November 2016 by Stephen Radford

Following on from my previous posts about using HomeKit with LIFX and creating HomeKit LED Strips I wanted to see if I could add some more bulbs into the mix. I wanted RGB bulbs so I could colour match with the LED strip I made so I looked at the LIFX Color 1000. It looks like a fantastic bulb and the only problem I have with it really is the price — at £60 on Amazon. Having built the Homebridge plugin for Magic Home WiFi devices I looked for some other devices running on same protocol. I found a fair few…

Cheap HomeKit LED Strips

23 October 2016 by Stephen Radford

After my success with Homebridge and LIFX I wanted to get some more HomeKit compatible lights for my house. LED strips provide an easy way to hide versatile and flexible lights away and make the perfect mood lighting. Philips Hue already offer LED strips with LIFX's "Z" strip coming in November but there was no way I was gonna drop £70 a few LEDs. Granted that's for a 2m strip but I'd guess most people don't have a 2m surface to tuck one of these behind. In my case I wanted to stick it to the back of…