You don’t need HomeKit. You need oxygen, water, food, shelter and a few other things.
Except for a couple of users who have created sophisticated automations, HomeKit won’t even make your grass greener, or significantly reduce your water bill. It just makes life a little more convenient.
There are two common applications:
- Hands-free control, e.g. when cleaning or adjusting heads, so the phone need not be touched with wet and dirty hands.
- Simple interlocks, e.g. don’t water on days when the gardener is scheduled, or don’t start the robot mower until the grass has dried.
Although it would of course be best if Rachio would fix the problem, there are (at least) two ways it could be greatly mitigated without their help, using the collective brainpower of the community:
- Document how to easily implement these functions without HomeKit.
- Discover why HomeKit connections are lost, and find easy ways to minimize these events.
For example, you can easily set up Google Assistant, then tell your iPhone “OK Google, please water ‘front west’. … OK Google, stop watering.” Unfortunately, that doesn’t work via Apple Watch. I don’t have one, but surely someone with this watch could find a simple and reliable way to turn zones on and off by voice, which many users here would appreciate.
I don’t believe that his Synology APs have a secret sauce that maintains connection. If we understood the pattern better we could prescribe a fix, e.g. “assign a fixed channel” or “set up this $25 AP dedicated to Rachio”.
Finally, I would think that
is not only a great solution, but Homebridge adds many capabilities to HomeKit that many users would want. Why is it not well accepted?