HomeKit Accessories

In HomeKit you control your smart home based using the Home app or Siri. HomeKit supports a set of specific accessory types with mandatory and optional characteristics. For example a light has the characteristic “Power” to turn it on and off. If you want to control the brightness of a light, you can use the characteristic “Brightness”.

KNX group addresses are used to connect the HomeKit characteristics with the KNX data. You can import an ETS project to make the assignment of group addresses to characteristics easier. But that’s not required.

Accessory Information

For every accessory you can enter the name, room, manufacturer and model information. The name is mandatory, all other information are optional.

Before you choose the name for an accessory you should think about the following.

• Accessories are grouped into rooms. This means you should not include the room name in the accesory name. There is a separate field available for the room name.
• You can use Siri to control your accessories by voice commands. That’s why you should choose an easy-to-speak name.

The following examples shows you how the Home app shows the light “Ceiling Light” in the room “Kitchen”.

Kitchen

Ceiling Light

On

Organising Accessories

A well-structured ETS project uses buildings, floors and rooms to organise a smart home. You should use this structure also in HomeKit asl well to be consistent. For every accessory there is field room which should be used to group accessories into rooms. You can use the same rooms from the ETS project, but you don’t have to.

If you don’t specify a room, the accessory is moved into the Default Room.

Configurator App

When you make changes to your accessories, you might have to synchronise these changes to HomeKit. For example if you change the room for an accessory, the change won’t be synchronised with HomeKit automatically The reason for that is that the HomeKit protocol doesn’t contain this kind of information. You have to use the Configurator app to synchronise the changes with HomeKit.

How to synchronise the data with HomeKit?

1. Download and install the Configurator app
2. Open the app and choose your HomeKit home
3. Choose “Search for HKKNX”
4. Select the found bridge or enter the IPv4 address of the bridge manually
5. Tap on “Synchronise with HomeKit”