In my last post I discussed how I was able to get my Liftmaster garage door opener working with HomeKit, even though it wasn’t officially HomeKit compatible. I used a HomeKit bridge called Homebridge, running on my Mac, to accomplish this (Linux would work, too). Setting up Homebridge and the first plugin (Liftmaster) was the hard part. From there, getting the Wemo plugin set up and installed was easy.
To add the Wemo plugin, I first stopped Homebridge. Check out the “How to automatically start Homebridge with launchd” section of the Homebridge page for instructions on how to do this. After doing this, I started with step 2 of the installation instructions on the “homebridge-platform-wemo” page. (There are at least a couple of Wemo plugins out there. The “platform-wemo” plugin is the one I used). I then updated my config.json file, setting it up for both Liftmaster and for Wemo:
{ "bridge": { "name": "Homebridge", "username": "CC:22:3D:E3:CE:30", "port": 51826, "pin": "031-45-154" }, "description": "JSON API", "platforms": [{ "platform": "LiftMaster2", "username": "YourMQEmail@mailaddress.com", "password": "YourMyQPassword" }, { "platform": "BelkinWeMo", "name": "WeMo Platform", "noMotionTimer": 60, "ignoredDevices": [] } ] }
The final step was to restart Homebridge. I opened up the Home app on my iPhone, to find that the Wemo had been detected.
I had plugged my home’s candle system into the Wemo. Toggling that button let me turn the candles off and on. Sweet.