
This means that you will need one Apple device at your house powered on in order to control your home devices when you are not on your local network. It will not function as a Home Hub, which is necessary to control smart home devices through the Home app away from the local network. The Raspberry Pi only serves as an interface between the non-HomeKit device on your network and an Apple device on your network. This is the web interface you will use to connect new smart home devices and add additional plugins. On your first visit, you will be asked to set up an account, then you will be greeted with the interface. To connect to the HOOBS device, open your web browser and go to if you are on a Mac or on a PC. You can set up HOOBS over Wi-Fi, but directly wiring it will provide more reliable results. The Raspberry Pi should be powered with a USB-C cable and connected to your home internet with an ethernet cable. The SD card can then be inserted into the Raspberry Pi. It is important that this SD card is empty, as flashing the image to it will entirely erase the card and any files left on it. Once the “hoobs-#.xz” file is downloaded, you can use a program like balenaEtcher to flash the operating system to an empty micro-SD card. Be aware that you’ll have to put in payment details to download even if you’re not donating. It’s free, but you can opt to donate a custom amount to support the software if you like. If you opt to install Homebridge/HOOBS yourself, it is actually very straightforward. HOOBS can be downloaded for free and installed on your own Raspberry Pi, or you can purchase an all-in-one box kit with it ready to go. I personally use HOOBS, which is an easy-to-use version of Homebridge with a nice web interface. Homebridge can be run on Windows, Linux, macOS, or a Docker container, but I prefer to run it on a low-cost Raspberry Pi. There are thousands of smart home devices otherwise limited to Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant support that become accessible through Apple’s Home app with the use of Homebridge.

Homebridge is a piece of software that connects to an unsupported smart-home device in order to make it accessible through Apple HomeKit.
