My TV serves as my HomeKit HUB. The AirPlay and HomeKit screen shows my hub as Connected. The Hubs & Bridges screen of the Home app on my iPad shows the hub as in Standby. The Automation screen has “! Home hub not connected” next to every automation. Nevertheless, the automations work (most of the time). When a motion sensor detects motion a notice pops up on my iPad and a light may come on (if so programmed).
So I have three different indicators of the status of my HUB, all at the same time and the “not connected” indicator is clearly inconsistent with the behavior of the system.
Recently, I have experienced flakey behavior with the automations. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. For example, sometimes I will get a notice that a motion sensor was triggered, but the light that was supposed to come on in that event doesn’t come on. If a light doesn’t come on automatically when it should, I can open the Home app and manually turn it on from the app.
My TV is set to never sleep, of course, because otherwise it wouldn’t always be available to serve as a hub. Still, it is behaving as if it’s sometimes sleeping and sometimes as if it’s not connected, even when it seems to be. When I set the system up many months ago, following the instructions in Josh Centers’s excellent Take Control of Apple Home Automation, it worked very well.
Perhaps it’s an issue with the latest tvOS. I’m running tvOS 13.3. Has anyone else had similar problems?
Yes - all of my automations stopped working with the update to tvOS 13 a month or so ago. We noticed something was up when a light that comes on 30 minutes before sunset and goes off at midnight was never shutting off, and, after shutting it off manually, it never turned back on. I was also unable to access either of my homes unless I was on the same LAN.
Logging out of iCloud on the Apple TV and then logging back in is what solved the problem for me. What’s interesting is that doing so in one home cleared the problem somehow in the other one - I was getting ready to make the two hour round trip just to do the log out/log in cycle when I suddenly noticed that I was able to see the other home from a remote location, which I was unable to do since (I presumed) the tvOS 13 update.
I’m sorry to hear that. I’ve had a lot of issues as well, which has been part of the holdup with updating the Home Automation book (I don’t feel great about offering instructions when I’m unsure that they will work consistently). I’d try Doug’s suggestion of logging out of iCloud and back in, since that does seem to fix a lot of things.
On a more positive note, I’m glad the book helped you get set up!
I forgot to mention another problem behavior I’ve seen recently: excessive delays in the automation. In some cases where I might have thought the automation didn’t work, it actually did, but with a delay of 20-30 seconds between the detection of the motion sensor and the activation of the associated lights.
It’s not out of the question that all of the failures I’ve seen lately where lights are supposed to come on with motion detection are actually delays of this sort, but who is going to stand in the dark for 30 seconds wondering if the lights are going to come on?
While I know I’m running tvOS 13.3, I do not know if I’m running a beta release or not. It’s possible that I am, because I do sometimes try betas. Perhaps I have beta code with debugging code embedded that is causing the inordinate delays.
Just checked my Homekit devices and my Wemo devices had “no response”. I woke my ATV and the Wemo devices connected. So it seems that it has something to do with the ATV no longer waking when it gets a Homekit request.
In any case, IMHO, the whole system is now flaky and so is questionable for critical home automation tasks.
I logged out of iCloud and logged back in on my TV, as Doug suggested. I had some initial glitches, including all my Hue lights being marked as unavailable (or something like that), but after fiddling around with the Hue app and updating the name of one of my rooms, the error message on the lights went away. My automations now seem to be working normally again (knock on wood).
So while it may only be a coincidence, it looks like Doug’s suggestion had a positive effect on eliminating my problems. Thanks, Doug!
Well, so far Dougs solution has not worked for me.
The Home App on the Mac looks fine.
The Home App on my iPad is fine.
The Home App in my iPhone with iOS 13.2.3 shows Home hub not connected. The result is that automation is working that are time based but automation that triggers when I Leave or Arrive home (only carry iPhone) is not working. This issue started when I upgraded the phone to 13.2.3 a couple days ago. Prior to that it had been rock solid.
I now have a solution! I was triple checking my ATV4 and I clicked into system and both Auto Updates is ON and Beta updates is on. I would think that any updates would automatically have been installed, but, not so. I clicked update and lo and behold, An update to TVOS 13.3 (17K5445a) is available. I installed it and now HomeKit seems to be working as intended.
It seems to have gotten better with recent updates. For a while it wasn’t correctly showing the status of my accessories, but I’m no longer seeing that.
I’ve also seen the app not displaying the status of my Hue lights correctly. Often just changing screens in the app will cause it to update. It’s also slower to respond than I like.