Arduino-HomeKit-ESP8266 VS HomeSpan

The feeling of creating your own accessories is awesome! Though, I have been using Arduino-HomeKit-ESP8266, cause an ESP32 feels like overkill.

Are you into programming? If yes look at this lib: Arduino-HomeKit-ESP8266 Otherwise you can setup a Raspberry Pi with HomeBridge or ioBroker with the yahka-adapter. But that's probably only worth it if you want to add more accessoires in the future.

Hey, i tried to turn on an LED through the apple home app and it worked perfectly. I tried tweaking the code a bit and it stopped working so i went back to the original code ( that worked in the first place ) and it never worked the again even when i use it untouched straight from the examples i got from - https://github.com/Mixiaoxiao/Arduino-HomeKit-ESP8266 - So what may be the problem? I am making sure that i am setting the wifi SSID and password correctly. Can it be because the board i am using is cheap ( from ali express ). I am using an esp32.

I used an Arduino, heatpumpir, and HomeKit ESP8266, it works great

https://github.com/Mixiaoxiao/Arduino-HomeKit-ESP8266 you mentioned above, is a port of the espressif lib to nonos/arduino core. It shares the wolfssl lib used by espressif, but as it is portrd to nonos, wifi disconnects during srp and devices cannot connect to it. There’s an improved version here: https://github.com/Yurik72/ESPHap which have patched wolfssl that I have changed to prevent wifi disconnections on SRP calculations. Yuri (the Author) made a great job improving original port, like memory management, moving pairings storage to the file, and so on. It still has wolfssl, which is at least redundant as arduino core already have bearssl bundled. Also, this lib has a memory leak during the pairing process, which is not so important as pairing usually made just once. I am currently trying to find where this leak is, but looks like it is somewhere in between the lib and wolfssl. So, I’d like to replace wolfssl with bundled bearssl, if I’d have a free tome to do that.

From there, you can use a standard 12V power pack connected to an ESP8266 (eBay, like $10). You can flash these with a homekit compatible firmware (https://github.com/Mixiaoxiao/Arduino-HomeKit-ESP8266), and you magically have a Homekit powered lock ..

I have found another solution. I am going to send a pulse using an esp8266 and a relay. The esp8266 can be made HomeKit enabled. If somebody is interested here is a link to a GitHub project

There’s also this project

this was written specifically to work with the NodeMCU in the picture.

and https://github.com/HomeSpan/HomeSpan

You can check out Homespan. Together with an ESP32 you can mostly hook it up with whatever appliance you want. Some soldering/tinkering might be neccesary though, but it’s really great.

If you have an iPhone or iPad you can even do it through apple's HomeKit using the HomeSpan library for ESP32-Arduino. It's really well documented and that way you don't have to program a new app for your phone in addition to the esp32 code.

Also, for esp32 the situation is much better. As arduino core for esp32 is rtos based, it is possible to simply use espressif hap sdk from arduino corr or directly from bundled RTOS. Esp32 is much faster, SRP, which is the most time consuming, takes a second on it, while it could take up to 20+ seconds on esp8266. There’s also a nice HomeSpan app example for esp32/arduino https://github.com/HomeSpan/HomeSpan. Author calls it “library”, but it is more like a complete app, which can be highly customized and, I suppose, it is also possible to reuse just a necessary parts of it, just like a library.