Using SmartThings With Apple HomeKit

I’ve been using SmartThings for a number of years now. For several months, I’d found that I would leave for work, get halfway to the office, and realize I had no idea if I’d closed the garage door when I left. When you get 20 minutes away and have to drive back to look, it’s pretty disruptive. The garage door was only open once, early on, and I had only been a few minutes away. In attempt to stem this problem, I had tried to create a new routine: Back out of the garage, watch the garage door close completely (causing the event to more likely register in my memory), and then drive off. This helped some, but there were times I was just not sure.

For Christmas in December 2015, my wife bought me a SmartThings hub and a door contact sensor. Her thinking was that I could put the sensor on the garage door, and I’d at least be able to check the status of the garage door remotely. By the time we left her parents’ house to head back to Florida a few days later, I had assembled a list of Amazon items that would not only allow me to set up a home security system, but open or close the garage door remotely as well. In her words, she had created a monster.

When we moved to North Carolina a year and a half later, we set up a similar home security system here, but also focused on convenience, scheduling lights to turn on or off when we come or go, activating certain lights at various times of days.

Since moving here, SmartThings has taken a dive. The hub still works fine, but they’ve stopped making hardware and their mobile apps are two of the worst I’ve ever seen. My iOS app is worse than my wife’s Android app, but both are pretty terrible. They take a ridiculous amount of time to connect to the devices (often 30-45 seconds) and sometimes the app just doesn’t refresh at all. In general, I’d like to move away from the z-wave technology platform anyway, and with Apple’s HomeKit platform becoming more and more advanced, I started to look at transitioning to a compatible ecosystem.

I realized pretty quickly that there are some significant differences to what is available for HomeKit. For example, I was buying z-wave door/window contact sensors for about $20, whereas the ones that work with HomeKit are about $50. There are cheaper versions of light switches and garage door openers, but there are no options for interior sirens. Replacing our z-wave smoke and CO2 detectors (which cost about $50) was going to cost ~$250 each, though they do double duty as smart smart speakers.

All in, replacing our devices was going to run about $1500 and we would forfeit the interior sirens.

So I began to look at migrating over time, using the SmartThings devices until they fail and attrition out. Since Apple Home is not compatible with z-wave devices, I needed an intermediary system. Enter HomeBridge.

By installing HomeBridge on a dedicated linux-based device, and installing a plugin on SmartThings that talks to it, I can use it to expose the z-wave devices to Home as though they were compatible devices. This allows me to continue with my current setup and replace devices over time, and I can even keep the sirens on the SmartThings hub since there isn’t a HomeKit-compatible device. Since the SmartThings hub works fine, I can eventually stop using the app entirely and rely on Apple Home exclusively.

As an unexpected bonus, I decided to test a couple of wifi-based cameras before tossing them (they were no longer supported by SmartThings and were a headache to connect to my wireless network since they prefer 2.4 gHz band) and found they work beautifully in HomeKit, so I kept those, and discovered that I could buy compatible cameras for $60 instead of spending $200.

And here’s the guide I used to install HomeBridge on the Raspberry Pi running Raspbian.

Finally, here’s the guide I used to install HomeBridge as a plugin on SmartThings.

Here is another resource I thought was pretty good: HomeKit Automation Guide.