Home Kit - A first look

Smart homes are gaining grounds – Connected home concept enables user to remotely switch on/off lights, adjust home temperature via devices connected to the Home WiFi network. 

Multitude of Home Automation vendors and device and proprietary protocol 

Hard for each vendor to inter-operate, custom integration needed to bring services together between vendors 

Philips Hue Bulb example 

Provides REST based Lights API, Group API, Schedules API, Configuration API etc

Developer makes REST API calls to turn control the devices 

A number of APIs available http://developers.meethue.com/1_lightsapi.html

Belkin WeMo SDK 

SDK available at http://developers.belkin.com/wemo/sdk

Provides intefaces such as WeMoDiscoveryManager, WeMoDevice etc to control the devices

As can be seen, there is fragmentation, and it is going to grow as many players enter into market. 

Home Kit provides seamless integration between accessories that support Apple’s Home Automation Protocol and iOS devices 

Home Kit allows 3rd party apps to perform below 3 functions 

Discover accessories and add them to a persistent, cross device home configuration database

Display, edit, and act upon the data in the home configuration database

Communicate with configured accessories and services to get them to perform 

The home configuration data base is also available to Siri, so a configuration made in the app and user can invoke that via the Siri by saying “Siri, turn on the lights in the living room”

From the perspective of Home Kit, below are the entities in home automation scenario

Homes

Rooms 

Accessories

Services, Zones

The main components of Home Kit  framework are 

HMAccessoryBrowser => A network browser to discover new accessories

HMAccessory => represents a home automation accessory, such as Light bulb, Garage door

HMHome => Allows to communicate with and configure different accessories 

HMHomeManager => Manages a collection of one or more homes

HMRoom => Represents a room in home 

HMService => Represents a service provided by an accessory. Such as lightbulb, switch, 

HMServiceGroup => represents a collection of accessory services so that easier to address services as single entity   

HMTrigger => Represents an action set. 

HMZone => Represents a collection of rooms that user thinks of as a single area or zone 

Xcode 6.0 provides a simulation kit for Home Kit that will help developer to simulate the accessories and bridges