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Homebridge: The Missing Link for non-HomeKit Accessories
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Ahhh, the good ol' Harmony Hub plugin errors. You'll never really be able to get rid of them, but you can mitigate a couple ways, to the point of eliminating the crashing altogether. The best way to do that is by powercycling the Harmony Hub itself--this seems to reset its connections, dropping the ones it's accumulated from Homebridge. I've got mine on a programmable plug set to turn off the hub every night at like 4:00AM, and then power it back on a minute later. Additionally, you can add a crontab entry to restart the Homebridge service a few minutes later. This essentially does away with the problem altogether, from an end-user perspective.
Glad to hear you’re up and running now. Hope it goes smoothly from here on out.
My Harmony plugin has been rock solid for a long time now. For me the issue was that I had 8 activities setup in the MyHarmony software. Once I dropped them down to 6 my problems disappeared.
Of course I’ve got an auto-restart script set up, just in case there’s a brain fart.
Yeah, if you're running Homebridge on Linux, there's basically nothing you can do to prevent it from eventually crashing out every couple days--short of powercycling the hub and/or rebooting Homebridge. If your Homebridge is running as a service set to auto-restart 10 seconds after a crash, you likely just haven't noticed the Harmony plugin taking it down because it recovers quickly. Do a
and I bet you'll find it's crashing periodically. Check out the plugin's github issue threads to see all the machinations folks have gone through to try to mitigate it, but nothing really does the trick like rebooting the hub and homebridge daily.
Code:
sudo journalctl -au homebridge -eI'd love to agree with you, well to a degree I certainly do, I've said myself a few times how flaky the Harmony plugin can make things.
But my own Homebridge, on a Pi3 which to be fair only runs Homebridge and a print server and camera streamer for one of my 3D printers has a current uptime of just over a week without a single crash. The only reason for that timeframe is because last week I installed my new smart thermostat, so I had the power in the house off for half an hour.
I never reboot my Pi's otherwise, they run 24/7. Perhaps check out some of the forks of the Harmony plugin, there's been a much higher success rate as far as stability is concerned when not using the "official" version. Or maybe even the 0.3 alpha release which is also more stable.
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I believe that's a known problem. While I was setting up my Homebridge, I read that the MyHarmony plugin becomes unstable with more than 6 activities.
It is, I've had that problem since pre-0.1.0 but that aside I've no problems these days, albeit I've been using the 0.3 alpha for quite a while now.
Im installing Homebridge on my Mac, and I'm in the nano Homebridge/config.json screen.
The instructions say :
https://github.com/nfarina/homebridge/wiki/Install-Homebridge-on-macOS
6) Create the config file
But when I go ^XY and Enter, nothing seems to happen.
Anyone have any idea what I'm doing wrong?
The instructions say :
https://github.com/nfarina/homebridge/wiki/Install-Homebridge-on-macOS
6) Create the config file
- Enter the following command: nano /Users/YourUsername/.homebridge/config.json
- be sure to change the YourUserName to your particular username
- Paste in the content of the sample config-sample.json
- Delete the entitreity of line 5 (the port number) to avoid any issues with your particular setup.
- Modify the username
- Modify the PIN
- Type ^X then Y then ENTER to save your changes.
But when I go ^XY and Enter, nothing seems to happen.
Anyone have any idea what I'm doing wrong?
The user name in the config is actually a MAC address (mac as in networking, not the computer) can be any combination you like so long as it conforms to the format, you can even use the one in the sample if you wanted but I’d recommend modifying it a little to make it unique.
The pin is a code that HomeKit uses as an identifier for compatible devices and should be in the format 000-00-000 again there’s normally a sample one in the config, just change the numbers to make it unique.
If you’ve entered either of these wrong in the config.json file, it won’t work, so go back in and double check it.
Also, especially when editing the file on a Mac, the inverted commas can get messed up to a style Homebridge doesn’t like. So be sure to run the code through an online JSON validation tool to check it first. Or use something like TextWrangler to do the editing.
That’s just a couple of things to start for error checking.
It's not the commas, it's the smart quotes. And they will mess you up.
Edit the file using the terminal window with the nano text editor or TextWrangler.
The config.json file can be validated here:
https://jsonlint.com
Same difference, single or double quotation marks are also known as inverted commas. With the biggest differentiator being American or British English as to what they are commonly referred to. The other being single IC/IQ are for quotes within quotes, whereas doubles are for direct quotes.
Well, live and learn. I had no idea that's how it was referred to in the UK. Here it's quotation marks or apostrophe. My apologies.
Don’t apologise, trouble with forums is you never know where people are or what they call this, that and the other, I just take pot luck
Man, you’ve must’ve found the lucky formula somehow for keeping it stable because all you see on the github page is people posting about this problem. I’ve also got mine running on an RPi 3 and have tried 0.1.1, 0.2.x and now the alpha 0.3.x plugin versions all with roughly the same problem. The most uptime I get out of it is about a week or so—usually it’s more like a couple days. The number of activities I’ve had usually is between five and eight and had no apparent bearing on stability.
Seriously, if you’ve happened upon some special installation method or use-case whereupon your plugin doesn’t crash Homebridge, there are tons of people who’d love to know how you achieved it.
I wish I had some secret sauce to share, but I don’t, it’s just a standard install.
The only thing that’s really changed between getting crashes several times a day and being stable is buying a new router, which unlike my old one, has good strong blanket coverage of my house.
I changed up to alpha 0.3 last year, but I was stable on 0.1 before that anyway.
Obviously I’m only using one Harmony Hub and keeping activities to 6 or below.
But that’s it, nothing unusual.
Only other thing I can think that may affect it is the combination of plugins. I used to run the Harmony Hub plugin on its own, dedicated Pi Zero, as it used to be the only way I got it to be stable.
But it’s been fine integrated back into a single Homebridge install for a while now.