Skip to content
Colorado Four Wheeler edited this page Jan 17, 2018 · 9 revisions

Homebridge Buddy Overview

Homebridge Buddy (HBB) started out as a means to manage the Homebridge-Indigo system. When Homebridge-Indigo was first released I found it difficult to copy and paste the device and action ID’s as they were constantly being changed and the whole process turned me off to using HomeKit. So HBB was designed to managed the configuration file and to be able to easily add and remove devices as needed.

As HBB got more use, there were needs to add wrappers and aliases so that you could create your own pseudo devices for HomeKit or have HomeKit refer to your devices as a different name than you had them in Indigo (i.e., Front Porch Sconce could become simply Porch).

It became clear after so many users were struggling with the manual installation of Homebridge and all the various plugins for it that people needed an easy way to add HomeKit support to Indigo. The Indigo devs approached me to roll Homebridge-Indigo into HBB and I worked with the author of Homebridge-Indigo to create a portable copy of Homebridge and his plugin and added that as part of HBB.

Today HBB is a full Indigo to HomeKit system, allowing the end user to simply install a single plugin and have a very robust Homebridge system. This has limitations as a portable version, more complex add-ins, such as cameras and ffmpeg, pose problems for portability and are still not included in the portable version and require the full Homebridge Indigo implementation to utilize. As HBB matures more and more of these capabilities are added.

Homebridge Indigo Server

Homebridge is limited to 99 devices, so HBB allows you to create as many server devices as you need in order to overcome this. Each server runs in its own thread and as a separate instance, you simply add multiple servers to HomeKit to get as many devices for HomeKit as you need.

Aliases

Alias are new Indigo devices that basically send all commands to a child device, allowing you to keep your Indigo device/action group naming system fully intact but be able to pass it on to HomeKit as something else. Like stated in the overview, this allows you to call your Front Porch Sconce Light simply Porch in HomeKit by using an alias device.

Wrappers

Wrappers are similar to aliases and carry all the same functionality, except you can assign each major function of your device to anything in Indigo. Wrappers are dimmers, so you can pass On, Off and 1-100% Dim to any device or action group and each device can use a different device or action group. An example of this might be to use each function as an action group to control the shades in a room and then type it as a Window Covering so that in HomeKit you can simply call "open shades" or "close shades" or "set shades to 50%" and each of those commands executes a different device or action group.

Clone this wiki locally