Possible to connect WeatherCat to new Apple HomePod? Integrate with Apple Home?

[ceciltheturtle]

Just spitballing an idea, I've got no idea how feasible this is. I've got single pipe steam in my house and I've often thought about getting/making a number of temp/humidity sensors for indoors and have them connected up to WeatherCat. I could spread them around the house to see how effective my radiators are and and help tune the house to get all the rooms heating to the same temp.

I was reading the Verge article below about the new Apple HomePods temperature and humidity settings, and I immediately thought about how it would be cool to get one or two of them and be able to save their temp/humidity information in WeatherCat. Possible? Not Possible?

https://www.theverge.com/23574268/homepod-temperature-and-humidity-sensor-how-to-use

[elagache]

Dear ceciltheturtle and WeatherCat "feature-o-holics,"

You have put your request in the correct section of the forum.  Now you will have to wait for our fearless leader (Stuart Ball, WeatherCat developer) to get around to answering your question.

Edouard

[The Grand Poohbah]

Apple would have to provide a HomePod API (Application Program Interface) to enable any software application to access the HomePod temperature and humidity readings. I just did some Google-ing for "HomePod API" and there doesn't appear to be one available.

[ceciltheturtle]

I believe the API would be through HomeKit, not directly to the HomePod. Again, I'm not a developer and have only a cursory knowledge of how this stuff works but if WeatherCat can be connected to Apple Home, then I think it would open access to a number of new sensors. Up to you if you want to take WeatherCat in this direction, but thought it was worth bringing up.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/homekit

[mikegf]

Depending on how you want to complicate it, you can pretty much do this using Home Assistant, mosquitto and Weathercat synthetic channels.  Have a look at some of the previous posts in Weathercat Integration.

That said, Home Assistant is about all you would really need unless you are keen to specifically graph in Weathercat.  HA installs on plenty of platforms via VMs but the simplest by far is via a dedicated Raspberry Pi 4 (if you have one or can find one as they are pretty scarce.  An RPi 3 will also apparently work).  You can then pick the sensors based on the best fit for you.  I have a Zigbee adapter (for my lights and switches) so run a couple of Zigbee (Xiaomi) temp/hum sensors (and a temp sensor in a Hue motion sensor) via that. 

I also get other temp/humidity data into HA via EspHome (part of HA) using some custom boards and ESP32 and sensors, as well as from WeatherCat via AppleScript and MQTT (mosquitto) - also in previous posts.

So in HA I can see all the outdoor weather sensors (via WeatherCat/MQTT), my greenhouse air and hydro water temps (via ESPHome and custom boards), my greenhouse heater temps and state (via MQTT) and my internal temps (via Weathercat for Davis console and via Xiaomi sensors/Hue sensor using HA/Zigbee).

HA has come a long way in the last 2 years so is much more user friendly for a lot of stuff (more UI than writing YAML).  And HA has a HomeKit integration if you actually wanted to get sensor data from HomePod.