Adding my Samsung Fridge Freezer to HomeKit
<Re-written 4th December 2025>
In 2021, before I moved into the house in Cornwall, 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.
LG has now signed up for Matter and, it seems, is a bit more multi-vendor friendly.
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 Homebridge 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 wasn't 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 saw 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.
Homebridge vs Home Assistant
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. It's been nearly 2 years since I originally wrote this post, but my overall 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. Having said that, I have now retired Homebridge, and have moved my integrations over solely to Home Assistant.
Initially, the Samsung integration was a superb example as to why I couldn't' migrate away from Homebridge as the HA integration wasn't as powerful as the Homebridge one.
Above shows what I could get from the fridge and the washing machine.
Now, there has been a great deal of work done on the SmartThings integration, and the list is much more extensive, almost double.
The integration actually takes you through the steps you need to see most of the devices, but it still does not include the cameras.
When the accessories are set up in Home Assistant, you use the HomeKit Bridge Integration to get them into Apple Home.
I have a General HomeKit Bridge.
You can see it is set up in bridge mode, and that I have included a great deal of different types of entities, known as Domains.
From there, you can then define the specific entities you want to include rather than them all. For the HomeKit Bridge and the Fridge, I included:
- Fridge Door
- Freezer Door
- Cubed Ice
- CoolSelect+ door
- Freezer temperature
- Fridge Temperature
There are other things I could have added such as some controls to cause Cubed Ice to happen now, but it was more about monitoring for me.
When you've created your bridge you add it to Apple Home as normal.
Note: when you first add the accessories they'll show up in the room where the bridge is, not the room where they are in Home Assistant.
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.
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. I have subsequently also added a remote capability, called Nabu Casa, which means I can use the Web hooks I didn't bother with in Homebridge.
When I add the camera integration, I can see what is inside the fridge. This means that I need a token.
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 3 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 is covered in another post.
Nice post.
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