- Do you currently have smart home products that you love,
but they are not compatible with home kit.
But today I'm going to show you a simple little device
that bring a lot of this over
into your favorite platform home kit,
and it's called hoobs.
Let's check it out.
Welcome back friends.
If this is your first time here, my name is Eric.
If you're into smart homes, home automation,
and especially homekit,
you're definitely in the right place.
Today's video is a part of my homekit series.
And to starting today I'm starting a new series with Hoobs
and am gonna be doing a lot more Hoobs videos
or products that work with Hoobs
and the homekit.
So if you want to see
a lot of these awesome products
that you have from other companies
that are not compatible with homekit
but bring him into homekit
definitely hit that subscribe button down below.
Full disclosure Hoobs did. send this out to me
for full on this review.
But that's not gonna sway my opinion in one way or another.
If I like something, I'm definitely gonna let you know.
I'm gonna be leaving affiliate links down below
we can get more information on this.
If you guys Wanna see a full updated pros and cons list
about the website,
I'll leave a link down below.
Now in a nutshell,
Hoobs is simply bridge between
your favorite Smart Home device and homekit.
Now it's not gonna work with every single device out there.
Some of the biggest names in smart home are compatible.
They're smart things Ring, Nest, Dyson, iRobot, Honeywell,
broadlink, wink, simply safe, LogItech, Harmony,
and many, many more are actually over 2500 plugins
currently on Hoobs.
You can actually check out these plugins for free
go plugins.hoobs.org,
you can look up your favorite Smart home products
to see if it's in there.
Now you want do a little bit more research
because some of those plugins are not working.
If it happens to be certified,
it's pretty much guaranteed to work.
If It's not certified.
You do want to do a little bit more research
just to make sure it's actual working plugin.
You can check out the reviews, look at the updates.
Make sure the developer is actually actively
updating it on a regular basis.
You can even take it even a little bit further
there they homebridge
and hoobs discord,
there's a slack,
there is a subreddit,
you can ask people just to see if that actual plugin
There's actually three different options
to get Hoobs paying on what technical level
that you're comfortable with
and are willing to put in the time for.
If you want build up your own Raspberry Pi,
you can actually download the software for free,
but if you're at that level,
you might just go ahead and jump right into homebridge,
next Option is if you already have your Raspberry Pi set up,
you can actually get an SD card with Hoobs on there
and go ahead and install it.
I'm not quite sure what goes into that.
To me, I'm just all about being easy.
So I took the third option
and got the Hoobs in a box.
Now inside the package,
it does come with everything
that you will need to set this up
and clean the hoops in the box,
power adapters, Ethernet cable,
micro USB cable, everything is there.
And it's super, super easy.
You do want to plug this in to your rather
you do have an option to WiFi if you want to
but I do highly recommend that you use a hardwire
it's just a little bit more stable.
As I know what to say,
that is a mess got cleaned that network up.
And I'm actually in the process
of getting everything I need for that.
I'll be posting photos over on my Instagram account
if you want to see the process of that.
Now set this up.
You just go to our browser,
go to hoobs.local,
Once you go in there, make sure you change your username
and password, and your C,
first your user interface
which is pretty simple.
That's a nice thing about Hoobs.
Anything that you do in Hoobs
are automatically come over to home kit,
which is awesome
and super, super easy.
Now we're not gonna look at the advanced options here.
That's just not what I'm all about.
If you guys are more advanced, other videos for you,
and you're probably in the homebridge.
Anyways, here I'm all about the easy setup, easy use.
I don't want go through the headaches
of maintaining something, it's gotta work,
Now setting us up with homekit
you have your home kit code right there on the main page.
Go ahead, go into your homekit app,
hit the plus add accessory, scan the QR code
and it will let you know
that this is a non-certified device.
It might not work correctly.
I can tell you this thing has been working great for me
for the past few months, no issues whatsoever.
And there are many other users that love this device, also.
Just read the reviews.
If you're worried about privacy,
or make sure you have good password management,
use different passwords for different devices,
and also have a network segregation
to keep your Smart Home products off of the same network
that you're checking your bank statements.
So first thing you want to do
is search for whatever products that you have.
Of course, with each plugin
there will be a little bit set up,
a little bit programming,
some are easier than others.
Some are no programming at all,
you just give them your username and password.
Now I gotta tell you,
I've set up probably about five or six of my nets,
today, I'm gonna show you three of my favorite ones.
And they were all
maybe took me 15 minutes each.
No problems whatsoever.
I'll put it this way.
If you can follow the instructions for a Lego set.
You can definitely follow the instructions for Hoobs plugin.
A lot of people say that
Hoobs exact same thing as homebridge
but with a UI or user interface.
I personally never used homebridge.
But watch lot of reviews on it.
In my personal opinion, time is money.
And if you guys spend all this time setting it up
and going through the hassles of,
you know all the little problems that you might have,
just setting it up is not worth it to me
I'd rather spend a little bit of money
and get a system that works out of the box.
With that being said HooBs in the box is not cheap.
It's actually 170 dollars currently,
but in my opinion, that is totally worth it
just because it really brought my smart home together.
It brought things that were not compatible with homekit
in the home kit,
and really made my smart home complete.
In the next couple of weeks.
I'm gonna be doing a couple of videos
in my Hoobs series,
bringing in some amazing Smart Home products
that are not available anywhere in the homekit ecosystem
that you gotta have for a smart home.
It's been stuff that I've been looking for,
for a very long time.
but never put the trigger
simply because it did not work with homekit.
But now with Hoobs,
it now works with homekit.
So definitely, if you're brand new here,
make sure you hit the subscribe button,
and that video is available.
Check that out right there on my Hoobs pray list.
So the three that I actually set up
is one is my Harmony Logitech remote,
my ring doorbell
and my two Honeywell Total Connect thermostats.
Lemme show you how easy it is.
First thing you wanna do is find the plug in
just go search type in the plug in that you want.
Here, I'm gonna do the Ring first,
you wanna go into details
and see what the requirements are.
See how you do it.
each one's got to have a description
step by step on what to do
with the Ring they have you set a refresh token,
which is super easy to do. All you need to do is
copy the code that's in the instruction
and then good to your terminal,
which is in top right
and then you hit terminal.
Your paste that code that they just gave you.
Hit Enter it'll do a little magic tip of thing
then ask you for your username and password.
If you have two factor authentication, ask you for that.
And then it would generate this special code,
you then go back to the plugin,
go to your configuration
and put in that token right where it tells you to.
Now there's a couple other settings that you can play with.
But if you just wanna set it up
and test it out,
all you need is that token, hit Save,
and then go to the Home app
and you should see your Ring stuff there
is simply that easy,
I'm only able to test a Ring doorbell
even though other products are supported.
I gotta tell you, it's pretty good.
It's not as good as being in the Ring app.
When you're talking to someone at the door.
Sometimes you do get some feedback
and some delay
but it wasn't really that bad.
If you have other devices
or want play with the settings
you can go back into the configuration,
play around with it
and set it up the way that you want to set up.
Now moving on to the Harmony Hub,
you will have to have a reserved IP address for Harmony Hub.
So you will have to go into the router.
Each router is a little bit different
but the general idea is the same.
And then go back into Hoobs configuration
type in that IP address
a couple basic information like name of your hub.
Now you there's a bunch of settings that you can play with,
you can just leave them alone for right now
and find out the ones that you want to change later.
Let's just get into homekit.
Now one thing I did notice
when I first got this in the home kit,
the presets that you have in the Harmony Hub
are the ones that are going to come over
so I have five presets TV, Apple TV DVD,
and I forget the other two,
but those are the ones that are gonna come over
so wherever you program into the Harmony Hub
are also going to come over your homekit
and you're gonna get icon for each
and every one.
Now, ideally, that wasn't exactly what I wanted.
And I thought I would just have an icon for TV
and then have it select
by the way find this until I actually search for it
actually had to go at acessory
and say that didn't have one
and then it found it.
It automatically did it.
And now I have a single icon
with those five options.
Now the way that use these this
is not like the Harmony remote,
you can turn on the TV you can turn it off very easily.
But to get around
to search for programming in the TV
and use, you know, use the remote like you should
is a little bit more difficult.
You can go into the Apple of TV remote,
which you just slide up from the bottom
hit the Apple TV remote that you want
for the minds called the family room,
but it is very limited on what you can do with it.
When you came to volume though,
you can actually use your iPhones
volume control on the side to control the volume of the TV,
but they also give you two tiles
one for mute and one to control the volume
inside the home app.
(music play in the background)
And now moving on to the easiest one of all
is the Honeywell Total Connect comfort.
I literally all I had to do
was put in my username and password
and it brought over my two Honeywell thermostats.
Now of course you set this up
ahead of time in Honeywell.
But once you did that
it put right in the home kit just like that.
I gotta tell you
this is one of my favorite products to date.
It is super easy
and some must have for anyone that's in the home kit.
It brings a lot of devices
that I've had over the years in the home kit
and they'll have to throw them away
I don't have to sell them.
I can actually use them in my home kit home.
Plus allows me to get some devices
that are not available in homekit.
And as I mentioned,
I will be picking up these products
and sharing them with you
and telling you how I can use these products
in my home kit home,
even though they are not officially homekit.
If you guys want to see those videos,
make sure you smash that subscribe button down below
if you want to see the next video in my Hoobs series.
Check that out right there.
Thanks for watching.
I will see you on the next video.
No nothing can break me.