Adding my Samsung Fridge Freezer to HomeKit

A couple of years ago, before I moved into the house, I bought a new fridge freezer. I bought , what is known in the uk as an, American Style. I asked the owners if they'd take delivery and when it arrived they called me to say "When you said fridge, we didn't realise you meant a Tardis". I have forgotten that what the UK calls a fridge is what is known as a bar fridge in Australia. I had just got used to large fridge freezers.

Obviously it had to be connected, which really meant that it had to be either Samsung or LG. At the time, Samsung had signed up to Matter and LG had not, so that swung it for me. So I bought what is known as a Family Hub.

Since then, Samsung has basically said that they'll not be a bridge, but only a controller of Matter devices which is extremely disappointing for me. This has meant that I've had to find new ways of connecting my Fridge Freezer up to Apple Home. Not quite as easy as I'd thought it would be.

Getting the Basics

When I first started down this route, my go to integration engine for Apple Home with non compliant devices was Homebridge. Fortunately, there's a fairly good Homebridge Plugin into many things Smartthings, which is Samsung's smart home engine. Whilst it's not really aimed at washing machines, which I also have, and fridges, it actually does expose a fair amount of the capabilities.

Configuring the plugin

You will need an API token from Samsung. You do this by going to https://account.smartthings.com/tokens and creating a new token that has all of the device permissions and, potentially, list all the locations. I only have one location, so that was not an issue for me. You can also add a Webhook token, which will speed up the integration as it is not polling devices, but states will now change much more in real time. I decided to not do that as I would have to pay for it and I'm not that bothered about the real time status of my fridge or washing machine.

When I restart home bridge, and I added the SmartThings config as a child service, I see a number of new accessories in Homebridge, which I then moved to the utility room. You can see the Washing machine as well.

I did find that I got a number of doors, so I had open the doors to find out exactly what they are. These all appeared in Apple Home.

Adding the Internal Camera.

One of the things that the fridge can do is enable you to look inside the fridge. There is a Camera in there. You can see it from the screen on the fridge door or from inside the Samsung SmartThings App.

Which is great, except I want to see this in the Home App. (BTW, in the clear container with a red lid are Jalapeño Sausages from my local butcher, and they are superb!), but I couldn't work out how to see the camera feed from the fridge and to see it in Apple Home.

As it happens, due to wanting to keep an eye on my solar and understanding what is generated, I have also set up an instance of Home Assistant and it also has a SmartThings integration and one, specifically for the Camera.

In the home automation subreddit, I often see that people suggest doing all your automation and integration in Home Assistant, and then just use the Home app to display the accessories. My view on this is that Home Assistant (HA) is not for the faint hearted. I grant that it is very powerful, depending on the integrations, and that it does have a great deal of integrations, and that it has come on leaps and bounds since it was originally developed. The current UI has made it much easier to use. However, it isn't an easy platform. You do have to spend a great deal of effort on learning it to get the best out of it.

I was hoping, once I started using HA that I would be able to retire Homebridge, but the Samsung integration is a superb example as to why I can do that. Generally, the HA integration isn't as powerful as the Homebridge one.

Above shows what I can get from the fridge and the washing machine.

But, when I add the camera integration, I can see what is inside the fridge. This also means that I need another token.

I could probably get away with using a single token for all the integrations.

When I have configured the camera, I can now see the following in Home Assistant.

As you can see, it actually splits it up, so you can see each individual shelf.

Getting the Home Assistant camera feed into Apple Home.

As part of Home Assistant, there is an Integration calle the HomeKit bridge. If you want to do anything really sophisticated, you really have to go down to editing configuration files which are in a format called YAML (Yet Another Markup Language), which is VERY finikity. However, if you want to do something relatively simple, you can do it in the UI.

You can see that I've already configured the 3 cameras. They are defined as bottom:21072, middle:21071 and top:21070.

If we take a look at the top camera, I would've originally clicked on "ADD ENTRY" at the bottom of the window.

This, then, took me to the next window where I could define a bridge or accessory and if I wanted to include or exclude. In this case I wanted to include a Camera accessory, which I got from a drop down list, and then clicked on SUBMIT.

Then it was to select the actual camera I wanted to show.

By reloading the integration, the cameras now appeared in Apple Home.

Setting up in Apple Home.

I found that actually putting all of the new accessories in the Utility Room did not work for us. So I created another room called "Utility Room Fridge Freezer"

and now you can see what we can see. The temperature, that all 4 doors are closed, and the status of the ice maker. 

Why is this useful?

Well, I must admit, it was mostly an intellectual challenge. But still, I have set up an automation so that if any of the doors are left open for too long, it will sound off the "Star Trek Red Alert" sound on the HomePod in the kitchen.

It's actually useful too when you are out at the super market and you can't remember what you have in your fridge.

Mostly, though, it once more enables us to have a single user interface rather than many.

What do we use the screen on the door for?

Well, not much. It is very much orientated towards SmartThings and/or Google. As we are an Apple home, that means even the calendar function is not much good, although we did use that to keep up to date on who was visiting my mum as she now needs care and we needed something that worked across Android and Apple.

We do use it to see inside the fridge, rather than opening the doors. This reduces energy usage. We also use it as a display for our overall energy usage, showing Solar, battery charge/discharge, and grid usage as well as individual accessories. This is all from Home Assistant and will be another post.