Adding my old Vacuum cleaners to Apple Home

 One of the classes of devices we've been waiting for the longest in Apple Home is the ability to add Vacuum Cleaners and that finally came with a combination of Matter 1.4 and iOS/iPad OS/TVOS 18.4.

Whilst Apple still has not implemented the whole of Matter 1.4, it did actually do it for Vacuum cleaners. Indeed, it even delayed the capability to make sure that the full functionality of Matter 1.4 was included.

This was great news for anyone who bought a new Vacuum cleaner that is Matter compliant, and there are a few of them now.

Not such great news for those of us that already had Vacuum cleaners that the manufacturers were not going to upgrade to Matter at all. In my case it is a mixture of iRobot and EcoVacs. It was particularly annoying for me as I'd just bought the T20 having given up on iRobot due to their terrible Customer Service.

I digress.....

For sometime I'd actually had my iRobot Vacuum cleaners in Homebridge, and I found the integration there to be superior to Home Assistant. Indeed, I found it extremely difficult to add them to HA. When I got my T20, I then found the integration with HA was far superior than Homebridge. In both cases, they would appear in Apple Home as a series of switches which, whilst useful, was not really fantastic.

Then a few things happened :

• The aforementioned Matter Support for Vacuum cleaners which came in Matter 1.3 and was further improved in Matter 1.4
• Apple Home supporting Matter Vacuum Cleaners
• Matterbridge
• Matter Hub ported on top of Home Assistant.
• I finally got my iRobot devices into Home Assistant.

So, Matterbridge is to Matter what Homebridge is to Apple Home. That is, it takes products and gives them Matter capability. When I first looked at it, it had very little functionality in terms of plugins.

Matter Hub started off as a port of Matterbridge on top of Home Assistant, and then got completely re-written to what it is today as is more akin to the Home Assistant HomeKit Bridge.

In writing this blog post, I took another look at Matterbridge, and it seems they now have a HomeAssistant plugin, so there are two options for implementation. I, though, am using Matter Hub.

Adding the Vacuum cleaners to Home Assistant.

Deebot Ecovacs

This integration I built into Home Assistant, so it is a standard integration. Nothing extra to download.

You have two choices:

1. via the cloud and so is reliant upon your internet connection, or
2. locally via what is referred to "self-hosted"

Self-hosted does require downloading and setting up more. The cloud integration just requires user name and password for your Ecovacs account. At the time of writing I am using the cloud integration, but I will move over to self hosted when I have the time.

When set up, what you see is:

 as well as the map it is using.

iRobot Roomba

This is also a standard integration but it is far from easy. You will need to run some CLI commands to get the info you need, which is the BLID and password of the device. There's a really good write up on how to do it on Tanner's tech.

As I have two Roomba's I initially see:

Then when I click on "Daneel Olivaw":

The interface for iRobot isn't as good as Ecovacs, such as no map.

Integration with Apple Home via Matter

Setting up the Matter Hub.

First of all you have to install the Matter Hub. This isn't an integration, it's an Add-on. You go into "Settings" in HA, and you'll see a list. 5th one down is Add-ons.

Clicking on "Add-ons" will take you into that area of HA.

Now you can see that I already have the Matter Hub installed (@nd down in the right column), but if I didn't then you click on "Add-on store", which takes you into a list of Add-ons. Unfortunately, Matter Hub is not in the list, so you click the 3 vertical dots, and select "Repositories"

You know are in "Manage add-on repositories" where you can add a new repository.

Using this link: https://github.com/t0bst4r/home-assistant-addons, press Add, and it should appear. You can see it at the top of my list.

There is a Matter Hub control panel that you can use to make some setup changes, as well as start the Hub.

You can see my choices.

Adding the Vacuum cleaners to Matter Hub.

You open the Web UI, and then you want create a new bridge. Due to an implementation issue with Apple Home, you have to have a seperate bridge for each Vacuum Cleaner.

Note: you'll see the version is 0.0.0, that's a bug in the version I have installed.

on Creating a new bridge, you go into config.

The port is automatically chosen for you, and starts at 5540

Whilst it does say you do not need the country, I put it in anyway. The list of codes is here. You get to choose your name.

Then you get into includes and excludes.

The Domain included is "vacuum" and I told it to exclude the other two robots by name. If you only have one robot, then you only need to use the include statement.

Click on Submit and the bridge will be created for you.

Her you can also see the one I created for Marvin, the Ecovacs Deebot.

If you click on the bridge, you will now be taken into a new screen that shows the QR code.

Note: The name says "Test Olivaw" as I had to create another bridge for the screen shots.

Adding the Matter Bridge to Apple Home.

This is as simple as adding any accessory.

It's not very descriptive, but where either says "Matter Accessory" is the bridge from Home Assistant.

If you then scan in the QR code from the Matter Hub, then you re good to go. It will say it is an "Uncertified Accessory", but just select "Add Anyway", and carry on as normal.

Eventually you will see it in Apple Home.

What can you do with it in Apple Home?

Well, not a lot. You can :

• start and stop it, but you can't restrict it to a specific room.
• make it play a sound so you can locate it.
• get it to return to Dock.
• monitor it, and it will tell you if something is wrong.

Apparently this is more of a limitation in Home Assistant so that rooms, when they are known, are not passed through to the Matter Hub.