How to control HomeKit with Stream Deck

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Egg, chicken, chicken, egg. While HomeKit remained less successful than, say, Google’s Alexa ecosystem, third-party companies can only develop for Apple’s Home app as an afterthought.

Hopefully this will change as Apple and others move forward with the Matter system which means they will all work together. But in the meantime, neither Elgato’s Stream Deck nor the third-party plugins it supports can control HomeKit.

However, the very basic thing any Stream Deck can do is open an app – and you can leverage it to do everything you need to with your smart home.

It doesn’t matter what you specifically want to do with HomeKit, the process is always the same. You want one Stream Deck button to trigger at least one HomeKit light or door or whatever.

So your first step is to decide what you want to happen and then the second step is to turn it into an app. This has nothing to do with Stream Deck yet, you create a very small Mac app – and you do that by using shortcuts.

1. Open Shortcuts on Mac
2. Click the plus sign to start a new one
3. Give it a name like Office Light, or Kitchen Light On
4. IN Search for apps and actions box, type Home
5. From the actions displayed, select the one that begins Control and the name of your home
6. In the action that now begins with “Set”, click where it says Scenes and accessories
7. Select the room, then the light or other accessory you want, and click Next
8. Click to choose whether you want the accessory on or off
9. Close this new shortcut
10. Right-click the shortcut in the gallery and select Add to Dock

You’ve now effectively created a Mac app that turns on your lights, or unlocks your door, whatever you decide to do. It’s an app in the Dock and the last thing you want is a dozen HomeKit apps there, but the last thing you want to do is remove them.

Before you bother with that, open Stream Deck to start making the simplest version of this. There are reasons to get a little more complex, but start with the simplest.

1. Click an empty, unassigned button
2. In the column on the right, click in the search box
3. Search for Open
4. Drag the Open entry that appears to the button
5. click on Select…
6. Find your new shortcut app – and see the note below
7. Select that app and you’re done

If you struggled to do this at all, it’s by finding the new shortcut app you created. That’s because it’s an application, but it’s not stored where you normally install your other apps.

Instead, go to the top level of your Mac storage, then select Users. Then click on your name and then select Applications. You will find your newly created app there.

The result of all this is that you have a Stream Deck button that you can press and the light turns on. But it doesn’t turn off again when you press the same button, plus you have your new app still in the Dock.

Go to Shortcuts and duplicate the new app. Edit it by clicking where it says Set followed by the name of a lamp, or accessory, in your home.

Click to turn off the device. Then close the new app, right click on it in the gallery and select Add to Dock.

You’re done with shortcuts now, so right-click on the apps this has added to your dock and select Alternativesthereafter Alternatives.

There is nothing stopping you from duplicating every step so far and using a new button for the off switch. But it’s unnecessarily confusing, and very soon you’ll find it necessary to store some buttons on the Stream Deck.

So instead, change the button you created to a Multi Action Switch.

1. In the Stream Deck app, click the button you want
2. Look for it in the search field Multi
3. Select Multi-function switch by dragging it to the button
4. Then search for Open and drag it into your new Multi Action
5. click on Select…
6. Find your “on” shortcut app
7. Select that app and you’re done with what happens the first time you press a button
8. click on 2 at the top of the screen, next to it Multi action
9. Search again for Open
10. And drag it again to Multi Action
11. click on Select and find the Off app you just created
12. Click on the top of the screen where there is an arrow next to it Multi action

You’re now back with all the Stream Deck buttons on screen, and one of them is an actual light switch. Press once and the light can turn on, if that’s what you’ve set, and press the same button again turns it off.

The way this is done, the Stream Deck doesn’t care if your light is on or off, it just sends the on or off command regardless. So, in the same way, it is not reset if you – for example – choose to turn off the light through the Home app on the iPhone.

But for the most part, you now have a button — except it doesn’t look amazing. Stream Deck buttons are basically all little screens, and by default they show one of various little drawings that you want to swap out.

In whatever image editor you have, create some Stream Deck button images. Elgato recommends 72 x 72 pixels in size.

Make yourself an On and an Off image. So back in the Stream Deck, click to select the button you want.

It will change to show you the first of your two multi-actions, and it will be the default image at the bottom. Drag your new On image on top of it.

Then on the small dots below the image, to go to what should be displayed when the button is off. Drag that image in.

Since you have the Home app on your Mac, you could argue that it’s faster and easier to just launch it when you need to do something. Except it’s not easier and certainly not faster.

The first time you set up a Stream Deck button will take the longest. With second and subsequent times, it will definitely take a longer period of time – but mainly because you will be fiddling with getting exactly the right image for the button.