Homekit Infused 5
Content
About Me
Hello everyone my name is Jimmy (jimz011) and I proudly present to you the latest version of Homekit Infused. I know there was a long ‘silence’ before I came with an update. I can certainly tell you why. Homekit Infused has been completely rewritten from the ground up. It took me months to rewrite all of it but it is finally done. (Take in account that I have a full-time job so time is a luxury product)
So to start off, I must sadly announce that there is no upgrade path from previous versions of HKI, the reason for this is simple. The code has changed too much! It would be like trying to release the youtube app as an update to the facebook app. This is obviously not ideal and I had to choose to either continue the old project, or create a new one that should be better, especially considering the future. So I chose to rewrite everything and boy it was a lot of work, not only did I rewrite it, I also found ways for a lot of the config to be easier to set up. As a non-developer (I am a bartender) you can imagine all the headaches it caused me to figure out a way to do this. But I have found ways, they might not always seem very beautiful, because remember I’m not a programmer. But hey it works, which is all that counts.
One of the major changes, which I might consider the biggest change of all is the removal of decluttering-cards. All templates are now handled through lovelace_gen as well as global configuration. Lovelace_gen was a requirement for a global config to happen. For all the users that made lots of customizations with this project not all hope is lost. All old decluttering-templates and cards can be cut/paste in the new config just like it was in the old one. So if you did make customizations you could still use them, but it might require you some extra work to put them on the right places. I will however advise you to switch over to lovelace_gen templates in the long term as this is the mod that we will see more and more in the future on other HA setups, mark my words. You can find tutorials on how to do this in the future in these docs. Why did I change to lovelace_gen? Well first and foremost it is a mod and not a card, it modifies the yaml parser and allows us to do templating stuff in lovelace. It also allows us to create decluttering style templates that can be used in a similar fashion that decluttering-card used. But it is more than that, it is currently also the only way I know of that is capable of building a global config. That is what this entire update is about, simplification. In the end only a few files will need to be edited to get you up and running fairly quickly.
Anyways, lets not make this any longer than it should be and get into the project as I would love to tell you more about myself and why I use Home Assistant, but you can find a lengthy interview of me that I did a while back here. It isn’t very recent anymore, but you will certainly get the idea.
I hope you enjoy this release,
Yours Sincerely,
Jimz011