Andrew O'Hara
On this week's episode of the HomeKit Insider podcast, we talk about how Chamberlain's MyQ blocks third-party API access, we discuss the best HomeKit light switches for 2023, and special guest Mikah Sargent joins the show.
MyQ has had a rough time in the news cycle as of late. First the company announced it was discontinuing HomeKit support for its smart garage door opener. Soon after, Google Home support was discontinued too.
Now, the company has announced it is purposefully blocking all API access, meaning plugins like HomeBridge are now DOA.
Launching in 2024, Matic previewed its new robotic vacuum cleaner that, while it carries a large price tag, is designed to never get trapped or stuck like existing smart home vacuums.
Finally, your hosts break down the best light switches currently available, including an upcoming model that is launching on Kickstarter.
Links from the show
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Wesley Hilliard
Christine McKee
Malcolm Owen
Amber Neely
William Gallagher
3 Comments
The MyQ Homekit Hub still works with Homekit. I have one. It works.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/23/23318157/chamberlain-myq-home-bridge-hub-discontinued-homekit
Another fairly easy option to deal with the garage door opener issue is Bond Bridge. (I skipped the MyQ thing altogether because it was expensive and seemed to require a subscription and works through the cloud, which is entirely unnecessary). Bond Bridge is a WiFi device that sends out RF signals to ensmarten dumb ceiling fans. Turns out it can also read and copy your garage door opener signal. Bond Bridge doesn't directly integrate with HomeKit because it's dealing with one-way communications, which is a no-no in HomeKit. Your garage door opener uses a single radio signal to toggle the opener, opens if it's closed and closes if it's open, and it doesn't send any signal back to let you know if it worked or not.
The other two things you need besides a Bond Bridge device, then, are a contact sensor and to write a shortcut that allows you to verbally command the Bond app to run the garage door toggle command. (The Bond app does integrate with Shortcuts.) In my case, I found a good spot in the garage door mechanism to place an eve contact sensor (which does communicate with HomeKit) that will let me know if the garage door is open or closed. If you have more patience than me, you can write two separate "close door" and "open door" shortcuts that will read the contact sensor to determine if the garage door is open or closed, and then decide whether or not to actually issue the toggle command (so it doesn't open an already closed door when you tell it to close the garage door) and then wait an appropriate amount of time to confirm that the door has indeed opened or closed. In my case, I just wrote a simple shortcut that issues the toggle and then if I can't visually confirm the garage door is closed or opened, I can ask Siri, which will tell me via the contact sensor what the deal is.
There is an unintentional but useful security benefit to this setup. Shortcuts live on your iPhone. As such, a verbal command to your HomePod won't run the shortcut if your iPhone isn't connected to the WiFi network because you're not home. As such, nobody can stand outside your window and yell at your HomePod to open the garage door when you aren't there. HomePods are also supposed to be keyed to your voice, which adds an additional layer of security, so it all makes it very improbable that someone can surreptitiously open your garage door without you knowing about it.