iOS app compatibility

[mpjalexander]

I’ve been frustrated by Hive’s lack of HomeKit support since having the system installed over a year ago. Therefore I was really happy to come across your hivekit system. After a bit of trial an error with installing Go and setting up GitHub on my Mac, I finally got the hivekit command to run.

Before I spend £11.99 on Home, I thought I’d test things out on a free alternative. So far, I’ve tried Ezzi Home, Insteon+ and MyHome App. All of them “see” the HomeKit Bridge on my network, but all fail to add it as a device, either giving a “Error – Client request error when communicating with the accessory” or “Unsupported Operation – The requested operation could not be completed” error before any request is made for the PIN.

I’m running homekit via the following command:
./bin/hivekit -username <my username> -password <mypassword> -pin 80808080 -verbose

The console output I get is:

2016/02/22 10:24:18 [VERB] Refreshing Hive status
2016/02/22 10:24:18 [INFO] Accessory IP is 192.168.1.108
2016/02/22 10:24:18 [ERR] bonjour: Failed to bind to udp6 port: listen udp6 :5353: bind: address already in use
2016/02/22 10:24:19 [VERB] Syncing status with HomeKit
2016/02/22 10:24:24 [INFO] Close connection and remove session

I believe the “bonjour” error is safe to ignore. The “refreshing” and “syncing” messages are repeated periodically, which I assume shows that hivekit is successfully communicating with the Hive website. The “close connection” message is shown every time I try to add it as a device.

I’ve tried the iOS apps on an iPhone 6 running iOS 9.2.1. The hivekit command is on a Mac mini running Mac OS Yosemite (10.10.5). Both devices are on the same Wi-Fi network. I’ve restarted the Mac and iPhone and the errors still persist. I’ve also tried resetting the HomeKit configuration on my iPhone (Settings -> Privacy -> HomeKit -> Reset HomeKit Configuration…) but that didn’t help either.

So, I have two main questions:

1. Does anyone have any idea what may be going wrong for me? Is there any further level of debug information that I can access that may help diagnose the issue?
2. Has anyone tried hivekit with any of the free HomeKit apps, specifically the three I’ve tried so far? Are there any other free apps I can try that you know should work?

[mjf2708]

I'm keen to know how you set this up on your Mac - I've followed the clone & build instructions. I assume the second line is 'cd hivekit', not just 'hivekit'? When I enter 'make dist' I get the error 'make: gb: No such file or directory'.

[njpatel]

@mjf2708 sounds like the build-dep step is failing (https://github.com/njpatel/hivekit/blob/master/Makefile#L4). Are there no other errors? Do you have a golang install working?

[mjf2708]

Following that error I get: 'make: *** [vendor] Error 1'. I followed the golang.org Getting Started instructions, and successfully ran the 'hello, world' example.

[mjf2708]

Solved, by copying both gb and gb-vendor to /usr/bin.
Built OK.
Got it working in both Home and Eve (occasional disconnects, as per Troubleshooting), by adding an accessory.

[mjf2708]

After initial success, I can't now get my Homekit apps (Eve, Home) to find the Hive Kit accessory when running from my Mac. I've built Hivekit on my RPi, and the apps see it, but as soon as I click on 'Add Anyway' on the 'Add Homekit Accessory' dialogue, Hivekit closes the connection.

[mpjalexander]

@mjf2708, this is exactly the same issue as I’ve been experiencing.

[mpjalexander]

One thing just occurred to me… The instructions for building hivekit state that Go 1.5 is required ("you will need a working Go 1.5 installation and workspace to build and run HiveKit”). I actually have Go 1.6 installed (the version available at the time I originally tried to set up hivekit; 1.6.1 appears to be the latest version). Could the difference in the version of Go have any impact on the issue?

[mjf2708]

@mpjalexander I originally installed Go 1.6 and got the disconnect problem, so I uninstalled and then installed 1.5, but still experience the problem - it's just dropped after 12 minutes.

[njpatel]

With the latest iOS update, I haven't been able to work get things to work properly, even with the Home app. I have a bit more time now so I'm in the process of porting HiveKit to the latest upstream version of HomeControl (the HomeKit library it's based on), to see if that helps. I'll be testing with other apps at the same time.

The main issue is the entire API has changed upstream, so I'm having to change a few things for it to work. I'm aiming to have it ported by Saturday at the latest. Will keep you all informed.

[travellingnashes]

Im getting exactly the scenario as defined at the start of this thread. Start hive kit. App appears in Apples home kit test app. Select Hive Bridge, when selecting Add it says client request error on screen on app. Server at that point says close connection and remove session. Then server more rapidly cycles through refreshing hive status and syncing status with HomeKit.HiveKit bridge does not now appear in the add accessory view until you stop and start the server

[njpatel]

Hi guys - I've just merged the update to HiveKit into master. This update rebases HiveKit on the latest HomeControl by brutella. There has been a ton of fixes upstream and, so far, things seem stable with Home & Ezzi. I'll keep an eye on it throughout the next few days. Please test and let me know how you get on.

FYI, I'm using Go 1.6.1 and running on a mac (though I'm hoping to get a docker file up, so i can run it on my NAS)

[mjf2708]

I've not tested this rigorously yet, but it's disconnected on me several times, and the Hot Water switch displays a strange behaviour: after switching on, the switch goes to off after about 2 seconds (but the hot water itself stays on), meaning I can't actually turn it off. Conversely, when hot water is off, switch displays on, and turning switch to off causes it to slide back to on again! Tested with both Home and Eve.

[JayShallcrass]

i've been testing with Home and Devices but can't seem to get to the PIN section, just times out after Add Anyway prompt within the app then I get:

Network or other communication failure occurred.

If you try to press the Hive_Bridge accessory again it says Operation in progress

Running Go 1.5.4 on Fedora 23
iPhone 6 Plus iOS v9.3.2

Anyone else had any luck?

[JayShallcrass]

I had some similar issues getting Homebridge setup this weekend, accessory showing in the 'Home' app but not PIN prompt.

Turns out it was a MAC address issue in the configuration.
Am curious if any changes to this need to be made in HiveKit

[JayShallcrass]

Speaking of Homebridge.... can this not be ported across and made into a Plugin?