I want to provide a potential area of investigation to the Rachio team for troubleshooting HomeKit support. In summary, I have HomeKit working 100% of the time now after also running into all the issues described in post after post here. How I solved it? Keep reading…
Homebridge
For those of you that are not familiar with Homebridge, it is an open source project that essentially HomeKit enables products not “officially” supported otherwise. I decided to give it a try after some other home automation devices I have wouldn’t work with HomeKit. I setup a Raspberry Pi with HOOBS (hoobs.org) on it — super simple, you don’t need to be a developer to do this. If you can setup a HomeKit devices, you can setup HOOBS.
Once setup, I found someone had written a Rachio integration which uses their web socket API. After following the developer’s instructions, I had all my Rachio controller valves pop up in the Apple Home app!
Since I did this, I have had zero issues with status and controlling my Rachio managed valves through Apple Home app.
Web Socket is the answer?
I will fully admit, I am now over my skis here, but my Homebridge setup clearly demonstrates the Rachio controller can operate via HomeKit without a hitch. But why? Does the Homebridge do a better job of acting as a hub than the Rachio controller? Is the use of a web socket based API the answer (btw, I have no clue what the API method is for HomeKit itself, it could be a web socket based api too for all I know).
Regardless, since I did this I have had no issues whatsoever. I genuinely hope this helps the Rachio devs figure out what’s up (if they don’t otherwise already know).