Homekit and Rooms

I'm looking for some clarity or perhaps a change in how Homekit "imported" rooms are treated.

First, should I be able to "hide" homekit rooms from the dashboard? Even if I de-select "Add to Dashboard" from the room settings, the homekit rooms still appear in the dashboard (is this a bug)?

Related to the above, is there any way to prevent a room's homekit devices from being added to the Homebar? Can a setting be added to the room for this?

Jeff

This sounds specific/non-generic and as usual need to see the config to make sense of what you're seeing so please send via the button that enables such.

Just to be clear. If I de-select "Add to Dashboard" for a room, that room should no longer appear as a selection on the dropdown menu from the main dashboard or room home page? Correct?

If so, I can send you feedback showing that's not happening for me.

In any case, I don't think this will do what I'm looking for.

What I'd really like is a way to prevent/block homekit sync for specific rooms.

Or alternatively, if it makes it more straightforward, a simple setting that when enabled would only synchronize homekit rooms when there's a corresponding Roomie Room in the home, i.e. ignore other homekit rooms.

Without knowing your use case, that doesn't make sense to me. We're the home control system, including for HomeKit. So what is the idea behind blocking some rooms specifically for HomeKit?

As an example, here's my use case.

I have a HomeKit room named "Virtual". It contains accessories that are never meant to be controlled manually. For example, it contains timers and other commands from the Homebridge Cmdtrigger plugin which are used as part of Homekit automations (these appear as switches).

sounds specific/non-generic

That's an extremely narrow use case. I'll keep it in mind in case other uses for such functionality arise.

This is very common use case just create a room name in RR same as the one in HomeKit and keep all devices in that room…for instance l have a room named Misc devices and hubs…how does it matter if they get synced into RR?

The rooms from Homekit will get synced to RR whether or not a corresponding RR room exists.

The devices/accessories in my "virtual" homekit room are just cluttering things up. They appear in the homebar and I don't need them there. They get added to the device list. I don't need them there either.

It's not a huge issue or a deal breaker.

One path is to recognize useless devices. For instance, we do not import any HK accessories we consider useless or that the user basically can't do anything with. These include Hubs – we import Arlo cameras but do not import the useless Hub that drives them. So possibly if you have a bunch of placeholder/useless accessories, we can tweak our ignore logic to ignore them.

Unfortunately, in my case, most of these devices appear as normal switches or lights. So I don't think there's a way to help that.

Again, not a huge issue. So I can live with it the way it is.

I am seconding this request (suppress Homekit Rooms from view when they don't have any devices needing an action panel). In my case, I have 19 HK rooms, but only want Roomie to control 6 of them (as selectable rooms). So, when I try to navigate to one of the 6 rooms, I am confronted with 13 other choices that obscure easy navigation. Trying to find "Great Room" amongst the 19 HK rooms is challenging.

Another use case. I'll renew my suggestion that the fix simply be only do homekit sync for rooms with already defined corresponding RR rooms. Don't create new rooms. Don't sync any devices from those unmatched rooms.

I think the best way is to allow custom selection of rooms and devices that you want to sync this will cover all use cases, hope this is possible.

I’ll renew my suggestion that the fix simply be only do homekit sync for rooms with already defined corresponding RR rooms. Don’t create new rooms. Don’t sync any devices from those unmatched rooms.

This idea seems reasonable.

I think the best way is to allow custom selection of rooms and devices that you want to sync this will cover all use cases, hope this is possible.

I can guarantee that path would be a user nightmare. HK Accessories are a little slippery, they appear, disappear, get deleted and re-created, etc. So if you internalize a thousand checkboxes to turn on rooms/accessories, there will be drift over time such that some amount are just wrong and then it's hard to clean up.

The path suggested at top is easy, reliable, and sticky.

Will, I agree with you. That's why I landed it. The more complex method of listing or checking which rooms/homekit accessories to include/exclude seems prone to error due to the dynamic nature of homekit.

Will,

Thanks for implementing this in the latest beta build. Seems to be working fine. Although a little tricky since I had to set the switch to on delete the unwanted rooms in each client to stop them from popping back in.

Jeff

This setting does synchronize across all devices, but that probably won't be active for another day or two on the cloud side.

The setting synchronization seems to be there today!

Tested beta version, it’s a great addition, thanks Will…

On a different note, any chance of adding the capability of importing HomeKit Scenes into RR?

HomeKit Scenes

It is on the list. Every time I think about doing it, I re-convince myself it's totally useless because you can create the same command sequences and usually better ones inside Roomie. What is the use case that cannot be accomplished that way, or is it just a convenience?

Sure one can do the same in RR with sequence of commands, however it’s duplicated efforts also a particular use case for my case, I have 30+ hue devices and to change colors it’s one too many parameters and different (non display slide bars) in RR vs the simple GUI interface in HomeKit…this would be true for any color adjustable devices.

Hi @Will_Price & @Sphome, My .02... Convenience definitely a big piece of it, but status tracking would be a big benefit too. A scene triggered on/off from Siri / the Home app is not reflected in Roomie (in my experience). Having that operational (particularly if it's bidirectional with Homekit (as everything else seems to be)) would be huge!