Today I want to talk to you about some interesting news from the new version of Controller for HomeKit. We always complain that this app is pretty expensive… but the fucking ones are doing it a lot and it starts not to look like a high price to me for what it offers.
It’s not the first time we’ve talked about Controller for HomeKit, in fact is my favorite app to manage my home devices, create automations and so on. As you know, tI do all duplicate in HomeKit, that is, in the Apple House app or in Controller and on the other hand I have the same automations in Home Assistant. I do so because historically HomeKit has given point failures, I remember a time after the update of Apple’s operating systems where automations stopped working but did not give any error, they simply did not run. Also
It happened to me with the automations that include Apple Music music, during a time the automation was running but the music did not sound. In addition, it was not even a user or automation error, in fact these failures were automatically fixed by implying that the problem was on Apple’s servers and not on our devices.
So, during those periods of time, just I was deactivating the chorrosotohundred conditioned automations I have in HomeKit and enabling them in Home Assistant.. I have exactly the same with the exception of the automations that have to do with music, as Home Assistant is perfectly integrated with the Songs speakers and these take the music from Apple Music but the HomePod have not managed to integrate them to that level, you can send them a song but you have to have it downloaded on MP3. Come on, don’t fuck with me, who’s got the songs downloaded in mp3 today? This process should fucking be faster. In my case, every Sunday on
He’s giving one of my kids the song that’s gonna wake him up during that week. When my eldest son who is now 17 years old chooses it, it is a kind of smoky rap that is absolutely understood, some insult from time to time and little more. If my little daughter who has nine now chooses her, as it is often commercial regularity of that perreo, whenever it sounds I wonder where she hears those shit if at home she has all the restricted content. If my favorite son who is Miguel chooses her… now, don’t worry, they all know that my favorite is Miguel. Sometimes I tell them ‘if we were in a situation of danger and I could only save one and let the others die, it would be Me
Guel ‘and start’ Jo papa! ‘But deep down they know my favorite is Miguel. Well, when Michael chooses it, it usually sounds like a Dragon Ball song… you understand why it’s my favorite, right? He gets it by the pulse. And when my son Paul is now 12 years old, it’s usually a romantic song of those’ For the love of that woman we are two men with the same destiny ‘. Total, they’re always more or less current songs… how am I gonna have that on MP3? So that’s the only automation I have to have yes or yes in HomeKit or throw it from Home Assistant to the Sonos but not the HomePod.
For a time I was so angry with HomeKit that I thought I’d change all the speakers in the house., sell the HomePods and put in Sonos. The truth is that the Sonos are phenomenal integrated with Home Assistant and HomeKit and they also sound wonderful, you can send them songs by AirPlay… but you don’t have Siri, so if you’re on the other end of the house and you have to ask Siri something, it’s your turn to get your mobile out of your pocket or use the smartwatch (you’re thinking ‘Hey smart, we know you use a Garmin Fenix 8 and that doesn’t integrate with Siri‘Well, yes, it does, and with Home Assistant too, but I’ll tell you about the Garmin another day at
details). The thing is, I finally bought a few Sonos to do tests, some Ram for the children’s rooms, an ERA 300 for the living room… and they’re working great, but I didn’t sell the HomePods, Even if HomeKit fails again I heat up and make the final jump, but right now I have them all together. And when they sound at the same time it looks like this Fabrik… or Spook, for the Valencians like me who live the time of the Valencian macro-discos.
Damn, how easy it is to get me to talk, go down Ubeda’s hills and lose the main goal. I don’t know how we got to Spook since I wanted to tell you about the new version of Controller for HomeKit.
The point is, from Home Assistant it is very easy to create an automation and put a condition. It’s super intuitive. However, when you want to do an automation from the Home app you immediately realize that you have very little options. You basically have the options of ‘When you get there’, ‘When you get out’, ‘At a time of day’, ‘When you control an accessory’ and ‘When a sensor detects something’. It is true that for several versions of iOS, you can tell the automation ‘Convert to shortcut’ and there you can already do more advanced things and put conditionals of the type ‘If the room temperature is lower than X and I am home, enc
recommend the boiler… but if I’m not, don’t light it as cold as it makes’. You can put in all the conditions you want, for example you could tell the previous automation ‘If I’m at home you light the boiler at 21 degrees, but if I’m not at home and my wife is, then you put it at 22 because she’s cooler’.
Creating this type of automation from shortcuts is not very intuitive You have to know very well what you want to do and then create several conditionals within each other, it’s easy to get lost. However, from Controller for HomeKit, the creation of automations becomes much easier and you can create several conditions. One of the new features of version 7.1.0 that was presented a few months ago is that you could create conditions with AND and OR, which gives a lot of flexibility to automations and you can have only one for several things.
They also took out the 3D map that mapped your house on a very cool 3D plane, we talked about that a while ago at the podcast: https: / / csahuquillo.mumbler.io / c / mapea-la-casa-con-control-for-homekit I still have the widget on my iPhone’s Start screen and with a simple touch you see all the devices of the house in their respective rooms in a super visual way.
And now, The Controller boys have presented version 7.2 with more interesting options!
To begin with, taking advantage of the new features of iOS 18, are integrated with the new Control Centre, so on the main screen of your iPhone Control Center you can put anything you have on Controller, an action, a Workflow, a scene, whatever you want. In an active way you have the tab to go to the Control Center screen dedicated to the Home app, but there are many click for my taste, in fact I have a shortcut on the action button that opens me a menu with the actions that I do most at home as can be open the portal, open the home door (of this also I will tell you soon that I have not dizzy the whole family
testing the latest versions of electronic locks… until I finally got the final one and that in my opinion is perfect, the Tedee Go, I didn’t know the Pro that many of you have through the purchase of the Telegram group. I’ll tell you now. Nono, don’t put them on sale yet at Wallapop, wait a little because my real needs don’t have to match yours, don’t think you new like that because you do.
Another interesting feature is that If your TV is compatible with HomeKit, you can now also integrate it into Controller for HomeKit. Also I told you about this years ago when the first HomeKit-compatible televisions came out. Because they didn’t bring anything really useful, you could create an automation so that when we all left home the TV would turn off… but let’s see, the TV is not a thing that is usually turned on, one thing is the light of a bathroom or the jacket closet… and another the TV, so beyond a p
I didn’t bring anything too much over there. They then introduced the possibility of changing the source of entry from the Home app, so you could run a shortcut so that the TV would go directly to the HDMI of Movistar or the Play as my friend Martin Guiroy of the Telegram MacIllustered group has had and has sometimes counted on his podcast Mini.
There are devices Apple has’ kidnapped ‘to say in some way. For example, the HomePods we discussed earlier, as it is not possible to create an automation for HomePods from outside the House app. You don’t directly see those elements, like they’re not. However if you use for example the Eve app that has a functionality to show all your Thread elements, as a kind of wifi radar where you see all your connected devices, because there you do see the HomePods acting as border router, but you can’t interact with them or send them music. The Apple TV is the same… and so far it was also the TV.
This element was not published in third-party apps. Well… Now you can create those automations or scenes directly from Controller for HomeKit and so have all your automations in the same place and more importantly, be able to create a backup as Controller allows you to create automations backups and configurations.
But the most interesting news is that of virtual switches. For those of you who have the Shellys flashed with Mongoose, this is the way Detached. It means that when you integrate a switch or a smart relay like the Shellys, Sonoff or Aqara’s, in addition to the physical switch you see in the app and that you can turn on or off to send the light bulbs, you have a virtual device that allows you to do other things. For example, if you have smart light bulbs that you can’t cut off the power supply to, you can make when the switch is pressed, the virtual switch is turned on and it tells the light bulbs that ilu
They lie to 100%, while if you press it again it puts them to 0% without cutting the current, so you can do more with them like tell them that from 22: 00 at night they turn on only 50%, in warmer tones, or that of the 10 alogens that light up the aisle as if it were the Bernabéu, if you press the switch at night just turn on 2 of them.
Normally, Virtual switches are used to deceive some security devices. For example, you can make the alarm come to me automatically when they all leave the house, but you can’t make it ‘disarmament’ when you get home. It’s a safety element and you can’t. Just like you can’t automatically open the lock when you’re in front of the door without any interaction. It’s supposed to be for security, so you can’t tell the alarm to disarm and open the door just when your cell phone approaches because if someone who isn’t you approaches the cell phone it would open the same, without authentication
car or faceID or print or anything… but you still need this to work! When I get home after making the purchase or very loaded with a thousand things in my hand, there’s nothing that bothers me more than having to leave things on the floor to open the door. I feel like the Croods when they had to manually remove the rock from the front of the cave. Why do I want a smart lock if I have to drop everything to get in? But I do. You can have the alarm or lock unlocked on another device, for example if a virtual switch is turned on. This way, what I do is that when I get close to the door, what’s activated is that.
virtual switch and when the alarm detects that that switch has been switched on then it disarms and opens the lock.
You can make a virtual switch activate when you’re not home so there will be a lot of other automations that look at the status of that virtual switch. For example, I have a room called People where there are virtual switches with the names of every member of my family. If my wife is home, the virtual switch turns on, so looking at the People room I can know who’s home and who’s not at a quick look. Or you can turn on a virtual switch when the Modo Cine is activated in the living room and that as long as that virtual switch is on, the motion sensor you have in the living room for
turn on or off the lights, so they won’t turn off as still as you’re watching the movie. Imagine doing that with a conditioned automation! Virtual switches are basically a way to simplify automation a lot as you can do what you want with this button and other automations do things depending on the state.
