Homematic Home Control Unit HmIP-HCU1 Plugin Feature.

[mike4president]

Any plans on creating a plugin for the new Home Control Unit making Matter or HomeKit possible?

[marcsowen]

I watched parts of this YouTube-Video about the new HCU and they answer the question again when they will support Matter directly. Answer again is: "We look into it." They don't want to support a standard which doesn't support every single actor yet. This is a crazy argument since I don't believe Amazon Alexa supports every single actor available. Sadly it seems they are not interested to do it directly for now.

Regarding HomeKit, there is an article about the future of HomeKit and it seems that Apple is focusing on Matter and won't add any new features to HomeKit. Therefore I think we should do the same in the long run.

Back to your question: Since the HCU is still compatible with the cloud service, I would expect hombridge-homematicip to work seamlessly when you switch from the HAP to the HCU. But since the HCU supports local interactions, it would be much better to support a local connection without the cloud. Maybe they answered it somewhere in the video, but I didn't hear anything about the local protocol yet. Apparently, the HomematicIP App connects locally to the HCU when in the same network and connects via the HmIP-cloud when leaving the house. So there must be some local port to connect to. Would be interesting to find out what protocol is being used. Maybe it's the same protocol as with the CCU2/3. In this case you could just use homebridge-homematic (without IP). If not, we could add support for the new protocol to homebrige-homematicip if they provide good enough documentation. If not, we need to reverse engineer the protocol again.

Another interesting topic is the possibility to add custom plugins to the HCU itself. Depending on the API you could think about adding a HomeKit- or Matter-plugin to the HCU itself. Or at least develop a plugin which provides a well-known REST-API to control all the devices locally and add "our" REST-API to homebridge-homematicip.

We will see. I currently don't have plans to buy a HCU yet. If someone gets one, I will be interested to hear about any of the things mentioned above. If there is a nice local API I might consider switching from HAP to HCU.

[mike4president]

Thanks for the quick and informative reply. I watched this video completely https://youtu.be/rQEyWrWDmb0?t=524 and found the plugin related part quite interesting. I am quite tired of eQ3 ignoring HomeKit and Matter. I only need Matter to control my devices via Siri. I don't need it for anything else at the moment. They said the HCU will use a Raspberry Pi 4 as a base. Sounds like there are a lot of hardware parallels to the CCU3. I was hoping that the custom plugin feature would allow some sort of matter plugin. I have already ordered the HCU. Once I get it I will be more than happy to help if it is not beyond my capabilities. I pretty much just ordered it for now because I want to control all my Hue devices locally without a cloud to cloud connection. I have way more than 10 Hue lamps, the HCU removes that limit.

[mike4president]

• The Homematic IP application is used for the HCU
• Raspberry Pi 4 Compute Module with 4GB of RAM and 32GB of storage.
• The HCU provides offline functionality.
• When offline, the application only works within the home network.
• All data is stored on the included USB stick. 100 data points and more, but only 100 are supported.
• 2 plugins are pre-installed: Philips Hue and CCU device import
• HAP Migration Assist is expected in 2025
• New timer functionality for automations (if window open longer than, then do this and that...)
• Others can program plugins
• The plugin software interface will be open to developers later
• Cloud plugins are possible, they do not have to run locally.
• Backup function
• energy management EEBUS, Energy dashboard

More information about the plugins: https://youtu.be/rQEyWrWDmb0?t=1185 https://youtu.be/rQEyWrWDmb0?t=1347