The day started with Torah Study and Shir Shabbat, as usual.

After lunch, we drove over to Central Computers and picked up my new Raspberry Pi 400 – I resisted playing with it until after dinner.

I decided to take the path of least resistance this time around and used the new Raspberry Pi imager program to create the SD card that the Pi boots from; I even let it install the graphical desktop so that I could take advantage of the HomeBridge configuration tools instead of editing JSON files by hand.

And then I attached the Pi to the monitor in the office, powered it up, and…nothing. The green “On” light was lit, and I could even see that it had gotten onto the network briefly, but I couldn’t connect to it, and the monitor said that there was no signal no matter what I did. After about an hour, I took a close look at the way I’d connected the Pi to the monitor and realized that I’d actually connected it to the HDMI output of the Mac Mini in the office. I connected it to the monitor and hey presto – I could see the Raspberry Pi desktop on the monitor!

The rest of the setup was easy; they’ve even made it trivial to move the system from the SD card to a USB-attached SSD drive.

I installed HomeBridge and it worked; I got as far as installing a plugin for the Sonos speaker in the living room and that worked, too – I can turn the speaker on and off, set the volume, and choose various Internet radio stations.

Tomorrow, I’ll install the rest of the plugins I need to interact with the devices in the house and see if I can get the automations set up. I’ve set up remote access to the Pi so that I don’t have to have it physically connected to a screen, so I can put it somewhere out of the way.

I sat down this afternoon to define more shim devices in Indigo to let me use the abandoned HomeBridge plugin for Indigo to expose the real devices to Apple HomeKit (and therefore to the Home app). And then I thought about what I was doing and realized that relying on abandoned software was not a good long-term strategy.

Instead, I decided to buy a Raspberry Pi and put real HomeBridge on it to see if getting rid of the indirection through Indigo will work for me. Buying the RPi wasn’t as simple as I’d’ve liked – the chip shortage has made most models unavailable. Strangely, the only one that’s easy to find is the Raspberry Pi 400, which is a Raspberry Pi 4 built into a keyboard. I ordered one from Central Computers in Santa Clara and they have it ready for me to pick up tomorrow.

I spent the next few hours going through the automations I’d set up in Indigo so I can move them into HomeKit when I get HomeBridge set up.

Making life easy is hard sometimes.