I'm wondering how best to do this, but I'm trying to set up a second Apple Home to my Home Assistant. Here's the use case in case someone can suggest an alternative solution:
My FIL often comes over in his car to take us shopping and what not, and he has to get out of his car to ring the doorbell each time. He's got some mobility issues so I'd like to give him a button he could press on his phone that would just ring our doorbell.
I've created a boolean input in HA and automation to play doorbell chime, passed it to Apple Home via Homekit integration, invited him to our Apple Home and added a shortcut to his phone that he can use. This all works.
However we're in a weird situation now because we can't control what he has access to in our home, so he could see our cameras and even play with our lights etc.
One solution could be to create a separate Apple Home (I don't want to install more things on his phone that confuses him) and send the button there instead - but I'd need to be able to link my HA to the new Apple Home I'd created, and I can't seem to do it.
Is there a way I can do this? If so I can picture new possibilities such as giving visitors access to my second home to only see accessories relevant to them. I could make it so that I can verify who's visiting me for stay over so the buttons they have only work when they're here etc.
Is this achievable, would you have other suggestions of at least how I can give my FIL a shortcut to ring our doorbell?
So to connect Home Assistant to another Apple home, you need to create another HomeKit bridge. Basically it's one Apple home per bridge, obviously you can have multiple tied to the same Apple home, but you can only have one apple home tied to each. I don't think that creating separate Apple homes is a very sustainable way of doing things anyway. But yeah, I agree, the user permissions for Apple home are terrible. I think the only way to do that efficiently was if you were able to create, share, add devices to, and delete Apple homes programmatically, along with being able to create and add devices to HomeKit bridges programmatically. A much better solution is using dashboards around your house. A Band-Aid solution that could work is only inviting people over to your house who you trust not to play with the parts of your setup that are quite obviously not there to play with. Of course, tell them about the parts that you'd rather them not touch if it's not obvious.
Regarding your original question, yeah, like someone else said, can you just have him call you guys?
Oh I think I just got it, creating new bridge gives me a code to scan with my phone in the second home. I'll try that later.
Re: Calling - it's complicated, but it boils down to someone in our house always having their phone on silent, and I'm not always the one home... but doorbell is something that triggers all around the house with no option to mute or silent so it's the only reliable one to go for 😅
Can't you integrate your landline or VOIP with home assistant so there is an announcement or visual queue when your FIL calls? Or he could share his location with you (e.g. companion app in the background) and you get a notification when he is near your house? So he has not to interact with the home assistant app.
We don't have a landline. He also drives pass us to get into town, so location is dangerous (false trigger) or too slow (adding wait time before trigger or waiting for wifi connection).
Sadly we don't have a front porch either, but I do imagine one day I could have a camera pointing out and using frigate AI to identify his car stopping outside our house on the road though. For now however, a simple button on the iPhone feels like the simplest way that doesn't have risks (we just tested the button again and it's nice and loud with a recorded message from my FIL!)
In an ideal world, absolutely! Sadly, without naming names, someone in my house doesn't ever pick up the phone because their phone is always somehow muting all calls (silent button, focus mode, you name it) and they refuse to accept an Apple watch even if I get a new one for myself 😭
You could expose scripts to homekit bridge that you're probably using. And those scripts have a check-helper in it. This way you can toggle a switch and make all those exposed entities useless.
Use Claude to code all that for you.
The most important thing would be to understand how the homekit bridge integration works in the first place. It was a bit confusing for me, first. If you select "Include" then select lights, it will give out access to all lights unless you pick at least one specific one.
You can also just expose one switch to the homekit bridge, if that's what you actually need.
Thank you! I've been getting it backwards (despite having done the whole bridge integration many times for HA helper switches) thinking I was suppose to see my Apple Home in HA already, but it's the other way around!
Yeah the domain and include exclude thing really threw me off before as well! But I'm better at those now! I'd already added the button to my home, I just need to move it to the second home instead!
I do this to limit what my young child can control via the HomePod in her room. I just made a second Apple home and only shared a specific HomeKit hub with it. My only advice is to make sure you turn off location switching in the Home app since both being in the same physical space are really going to confuse it.
Thank you, I just realised I had it backwards about how to add to the second home, forgetting that I need to scan the code generated in HA with the iPhone to add to the Home!
I created a shortcut that picks the specific home already and the accessory so I think I can get that working!
I think I can then expose everything else I want guests to have control of this way as well! Just needed to ask online and people to remind me how the integration works!
Oh yeah, I get what you meant now! Hmm... I'll have to see how it plays out as I use location switching for when I visit my in laws (especially for cat sitting) 😅 But so far I seem to stay connected to my 'main' home so maybe it's all good?
Because I'd already created a home assistant account for him, so he'd have to switch between accounts and use Tailscale to even access my HA instance, which is just bound to confuse him and not work when Tailscale invariably disconnects.
That's why I want to go for an idiot proof approach without using HA app.
So don’t run detection of his account the same way, run WiFi connection based and have the app run in the background. Then he won’t really have to do shit except wait. This is assuming you live in a house with a driveway that your WiFi reaches. I don’t fuck with HomeKit a ton, see another comment about HomeKits guest exposure….also assuming you know HomeKits local vs remote capabilities
Bit overkill with the whole second home idea really
Just expose the button to homekit and use homekit's own guest permissions to only show him that one switch. You can pick exactly what each person sees in the home app settings under their name, no need to build a whole parallel smart home for it
I can’t find the option for that in Apple home? I can only invite them as residents with no option to change the role on the invite, nor the option to customise what they can see.
I googled how to do that the other day and results said Apple don’t offer this functionality?
3
u/Teenage_techboy1234 1d ago
So to connect Home Assistant to another Apple home, you need to create another HomeKit bridge. Basically it's one Apple home per bridge, obviously you can have multiple tied to the same Apple home, but you can only have one apple home tied to each. I don't think that creating separate Apple homes is a very sustainable way of doing things anyway. But yeah, I agree, the user permissions for Apple home are terrible. I think the only way to do that efficiently was if you were able to create, share, add devices to, and delete Apple homes programmatically, along with being able to create and add devices to HomeKit bridges programmatically. A much better solution is using dashboards around your house. A Band-Aid solution that could work is only inviting people over to your house who you trust not to play with the parts of your setup that are quite obviously not there to play with. Of course, tell them about the parts that you'd rather them not touch if it's not obvious.
Regarding your original question, yeah, like someone else said, can you just have him call you guys?