TIL: home assistant is incredible
back in september, i had my first generation wemo stuff go totally flaky with the wemo homekit bridge. the bridge it turns out has been abandonware for a while now and i was blithely skating along on borrowed time. i was loath to replace the working wemo outlets with new ones and i didn’t have the inclination to spend a lot of time digging into replacement options and shell out again.
in cometh home assistant which seems to have support for nearly everything and a remarkably robust homekit bridging function. i was able to enable the legacy wemo devices as being natively supported inside of home assistant and then enable the homekit bridging function to expose these to the homekit elements in the house.
the documentation onthe homekit bridging behavior is a little oblique. 20s of searching yielded this gem of a home assistant + homekit video from australia which i was able to watch at 1.75x to get the gist of the bits that i need to stitch together.
total time from downloading the home assistant rpi4 image to having the wemo shit back on the homekit network was less than 40 minutes.