HomeKit for Control4

UPDATE: Commercial alternative available

When I wrote this guide there was no other way of using Siri or HomeKit with Control 4. However Varietas Software have built a plug and play offering that you can use to quickly add the features to your setup. It saves you from having to do it yourself as detailed in the guide below. You can find information on their solution here:

http://www.varietassoftware.com/control4

The main benefits over the diy approach are

• All supported devices show up as their appropriate device types in HomeKit
• There is no Control4 programming required
• Since devices are appropriate types, all standard Siri grammars now work appropriately (E.G. Siri, open the garage door)
• The solution is event-driven, rather than requiring frequent polling, which greatly improves system responsiveness and also significantly reduces the load on the director
• The solution supports system complete system feedback.  Changes made in Control4 or via physical switches will show up in HomeKit.

Or if you want to do it yourself please read on:

Why HomeKit?

So you have Control4, why would you need HomeKit?

Good point, two reasons I can think of.

1. Using HomeKit you can program your system to do things quickly and easily using your phone.
2. You can use Siri!!!

Siri is something that I didn’t care about so much before, its not accurate enough that I would let it fail to find something on the web before I had to google anyway. But when I want a very specific action, its great. Saying “Bedroom Lights On”, or “Switch House Off” is pretty deterministic. Its not like it can get it wrong, and it can’t be done quicker than any other method from where ever you are. Better still if you have an Apple Watch it means you can control your house without taking your phone out of your pocket.

But Control4 doesn’t support HomeKit. Will they in the future? Who knows, they don’t support an external API yet, so I’m not going to wait.

Luckily its fair easy to set this up using some Open Source running on a computer as a piece of middleware between HomeKit and Control4.

The Raspberry Pi is perfect for the job – https://github.com/nfarina/homebridge/wiki/Running-HomeBridge-on-a-Raspberry-Pi
There is a pre-built image for the Pi here – https://s3.amazonaws.com/c4drivers/homebridge-pi.img.zip

How it fits together?

Simplistically HomeKit has a couple of parts. Firstly it runs on Apple iOS devices (and Apple TV/Apple Watch) and it runs on devices that support its protocols.

On iOS it contains a common database that holds all the information about the devices. Once you populate the database it can be accessed by any application, with Siri being one of those.

Each of the devices you have are called an Accessory. Some Accessories have native support for HomeKit, some don’t and for those you need a Bridge to access them.
With Control4 obviously it doesn’t support HomeKit so you need a Bridge to access the devices in Control4. It would be nice if they added a bridge directly into the home controller, but what are the chances?

So we need to create a bridge between HomeKit and Control4.

HomeKit -> Bridge -> Control4 -> Devices

Lets Start at the End

We have to start at the Control4 side to make things work. The first thing is that we need a way of being able to run commands on devices in Control4 via some sort of API.

The best way to do this is to have a driver where we can send commands to it and have it run commands on the Control4 side.

Luckily there was already a driver to do this, its here http://untestedhacks.com/2013/web-events-driver/

There are some downsides to it, mainly that it has no security. What that means is that anyone on your network would be able to send commands to the system without any authentication or encryption. You need to take a view if this is a problem. The worst that can happen is down to you. If you only create commands to turn lights on and off, then thats the worst someone could do. But if you create commands to do things like disabled your house alarm, then someone can do that if they get access to your network. Ideally Control4 would implement an API that uses authentication and encryption, but that doesn’t seem likely with the closed system. You could try building this into the driver, but I didn’t see anyway of changing the CreateServer function to run SSL – so you are going to have to build your own.

Once you have grabbed the driver then you need to install it, doesn’t matter where you put it as its unseen from any normal users interface.

You can then go to programming and select the driver in composer, then you can select Command Received underneath it.

How the driver works is that when you send a http request to http://home-controller:8080/YOURCOMMAND the COMMAND variable contains whatever you put for YOURCOMMAND.

This means that in your Script you can match the command that you are sending, and then run some action on it.

You can try this by dragging this into the script, then having it do something like this example here which turns off the lights in my study when I send a http request to http://192.168.1.11:8080/study_off
Obviously replace the 192.168.1.11 with the IP address of your director.

Go ahead and test that its working from your web browser by putting this into the web browser. You should see the following if it works

Connection Successful.

Command: study_off

Thats it, all you need to do is create different commands for each of the things that you want to control with HomeKit. If you are doing lights, then just create an on and off for each of them. Or a room off for each room etc. Like this

Its going to take a bit of time to do this, I created all my COMMAND EQUAL TO first, then added the actions afterwards to stop going back and forward, but still it will take some time.

Lets add the Bridge

The next thing that needs to happen is we need to add a bridge to work between HomeKit and Control4.

To do this you need a computer where you can install Node. Node is the environment for running Javascript programs, which the bridge we will use runs in. It supports most platforms, so you can run it on your windows or mac desktop, or install it on a Linux device – like a Raspberry Pi.

I’ve built an image for the raspberry pi which you can get from here:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/c4drivers/homebridge-pi.img.zip (the md5 is 4f35686b1f87916f142ca5fcfaab463e)

Once you have imaged your pi you can access it with ssh pi@homebridge.local (username pi, password raspberry).

If you want to do it yourself instructions for the Raspberry Pi are at the following link https://github.com/nfarina/homebridge/wiki/Running-HomeBridge-on-a-Raspberry-Pi

To do it manually on something else follow this:

Get Node and install it from http://nodejs.org

Once you have installed Node the next thing you need is HomeBridge. You can get this from here: https://github.com/nfarina/homebridge

You can install using

npm install -g homebridge

npm install -g homebridge-http

On Windows platforms you will need to install git – http://www.git-scm.com/downloads
On Linux you will need to install missing packages
On Mac OSX you may need to install Xcode from the app store.

Once you have completed this you just need to configure the bridge.

Configuring HomeBridge

All the configuration that needs to be done goes in the config.json file to find out where this file needs to be run the homebridge command, it when it fails it will tell you where the config.json should be. If you are using the raspberry pi image the config.json is in /home/pi/.homebridge

homebridge

The file is in json format and an example is this:

{
 "bridge": {
 "name": "Your Homebridge",
 "username": "CC:22:3D:E3:CE:31",
 "port": 51826,
 "pin": "031-45-154"
 },
 
 "description": "This is an example configuration file",

 "platforms": [],

 "accessories": [
 {
 "accessory": "Http",
 "name": "Study Lights",
 "on_url": "http://192.168.1.11:8080/study_on",
 "off_url": "http://192.168.1.11:8080/study_off",
 "http_method": "GET",
 "username": "username",
 "password": "password"
 },
 {
 "accessory": "Http",
 "name": "Master Bedroom Light",
 "on_url": "http://192.168.1.11:8080/master_on",
 "off_url": "http://192.168.1.11:8080/master_off",
 "http_method": "GET",
 "username": "username",
 "password": "password"
 }
 ]
}

As you will be editing this file, its good practise to paste the contents into http://jsonlint.com to make sure that you haven’t made any mistakes in the formatting.

For the first section you can specify the name of the bridge, enter a username if you like – but the default will work fine. The pin is used for authenticating the bridge into HomeKit, and you can change it but keep the format the same.

The next part we will be changing will be for each of your devices that you created commands for. If you remember earlier you tested your commands from the web browser http://192.168.1.11:8080/study_off
These are the commands that you will need to change here for the off and on url to match. You should also change the name to be something that Siri will like, although if that becomes an option we can create scenes later for specific commands.

Just be careful of the formatting if you don’t know json format. If you want to add another device, then you would need to add a comma in-between each section like this

 },
 {

Once this is done you can start the HomeBridge by running the command

homebridge

from the command line.

Or if you are using the raspberry pi image homebridge is set to run as a service. So you can stop, start or restart it with

sudo /etc/init.d/homebridge [stop start restart]

Lets link it to HomeKit

The final step is to link it to HomeKit. iOS doesn’t come with its own app to setup the HomeKit database, but there are plenty out there. I’ve been using Eve from Elegato and its perfect.

Elgato Eve on the App Store – iTunes – Apple

When you first open it you will be asked to Add Accessory

Then you will need to give your home a name, keep it simple something that Siri will understand

Its then going to find your HomeBridge on the network, so select it

It will then want to pair it and warn you its not certified, what can you do about that?

To add the Accessory you will need to enter the PIN (same as in the config.json file). You are best entering it manually, its too much hassle trying to get it to recognise the screen.

Then choose the default room, or Add another Room to your house.

Click Next and its all done.

You can then give it a try by running Siri and saying “Study Lights On”. If it doesn’t work straight away, then give it a minute or so, it seems to need this for backend synching to happen.

But everything is a light?

In the eve app everything will appear as a light because the Http accessory is for controlling lights. This can also cause some problems when adding things like garage doors because Siri wants it to be a specific type before it will do anything.

I spent a couple of hours writing a http driver for other things, which was a bit hit and miss because for things like garage doors the driver has to show the state, check for obstructions etc.

Then I realised actually you just need to add devices using the on or off url, for open or closed. Then to make it work for Siri you can create a scene using the Eve app. When you create a scene Siri doesn’t care about the device type it just seems to do what you called the scene. So I have a scene called “Open Garage Door” which sets the garage door accessory to be on, and another called “Close Garage Door” which sets the garage door accessory to be off.

So the only problem with everything being a light is if you want to use the Eve app to control your devices. But seeing as you have the C4 app why would you?

All Done

You should be all done, but there is more you can do from the iOS side now. If you want to add specific commands to group different things together you can go to settings in Eve and add Scene’s. The nice thing I found about Scenes is that you can enter your own command names in here and Siri will respond to what you called the Scene.

If you want to allow the rest of the family to use Siri on their devices you can go to users and invite people. They will now be able to use Siri as well.

Hope it all works for you.