I received 4 HomePods on Friday and really like them so far.
We had a collection of mismatched wifi speakers throughout the house (GGMM, Sonos, etc) and my wife used them to play music from her Macbook or iPhone. The lack of Airplay 2 support was frustrating and so was the fact that some of the GGMM radios broadcast an SSID on 2G which couldn’t be disabled.This added interference into my network and occasionally caused problems.
For my use (Wifi music throughout the home with Airplay 2 upgrades soon), the HomePods are perfect. Sound is great, no stuttering or losing sync of each other and totally pass the 1-click wife test.
It’s also great that I can use Siri to select music or mood music from any room in the house without changing the music on all speakers.
I’ve just ordered a Rasp Pi and will attempt to get Siri to Homekit to ST working soon. Then I can remove Alexa from my system. If you have a home full of iDevices and Apple Music the HomePods are awesome. I might order a couple more to fill in some gaps in the house.
So now I have ‘Siri set the cabinet lights to 10%’ from any HomePod with a simple virtual bridge.
And most importantly, no complaints from the wife or kids (which is about as good an indicator of my network efforts as I get)
After seeing all the threads moaning about ST integration with other voice assistants, it good to have solid Siri integration via Homebridge - at least so far. Not sure what will happen after Groovy support ends, though. Being unable to control my home though my HomePods might finally be the thing that pushes me off SmartThings.
Yes, Tony has already stated he is not developing the Homebridge plugin anymore so when Groovy dies so does Homekit integration for ST. I have already shifted to the Home app for control as the current ‘new’ ST app is not getting any better.
Sad but inevitable end for HomePod. Just too expensive and too good as a single room speaker and not good enough to replace you home theatre setup. Glad I went Sonos.
I have both, and while the mini is definitely more versatile, it doesn’t match the sound from the original unit.
I have a couple of Sonos, which also have great sound and are AirPlay 2 compatible, but as they are not able to listen for Siri commands, they don’t help with voice control.
I guess when Groovy dies I will find a solution to Z-Wave and Zigbee device control. I’m not concerned about the automation itself, as between HomeKit native automation, the ability to use the Shortcuts ecosystem, and Node-RED on my Homebridge server (a Pi 4), HomeKit automation is already more powerful than SmartThings automation, and a darn sight less weird to program.
All experiences with bridging Homebridge to Z-wave and Zigbee devices welcome, BTW - might as well start planning.
As far as sound quality, absolutely, the original HomePod was better than the mini, I was only referring to it as a home automation Device. The HomePod was just awkwardly positioned for the market: too expensive for a simple smart speaker but lacking the features of the higher end multi room sound systems.
And one last note: the developer who wrote the homebridge plug-in that most people use for SmartThings now has a similar one for Hubitat, so I know quite a few people are using that to bring Z wave into homebridge. But again, we should probably take further discussion of that to a different forum.
While I have not used Zigbee2mqtt myself, I know others who have used it to directly integrate with Node-RED. Looks like there are HomeBridge plugins as well…
And here is an example of a possible way to connect Z-wave devices to HomeBridge…
OR, you could very easily pair all of your Zigbee and Z-wave devices to Home Assistant or Hubitat, and then simply share all of those devices with HomeBridge. (As @JDRoberts mentioned above)
I don’t have much Homebridge experience, but I run docker and have containers running Home Assistant, Node Red, Zigbee2mqtt, and zwavejs2mqtt. My zwave and zigbee devices are still mostly on Smartthings and I use the Smartthings integration with Home Assistant that works well.
The Home-assistant Smartthings integration here SmartThings - Home Assistant this is also API based and should still work even after they shutdown the Groovy IDE.
As far as zigbee2mqtt and zwave, open zwave is deprecated (and was not great) and has been replaced with zwavejs2mqtt ZwaveJS2Mqtt . It’s the official zwave Integration for Home Assistant now so there’s a lot of buzz over there about it Search results for 'Zwavejs2mqtt ' - Home Assistant Community
they just missed the mark with the first one.
