Hot on the heels of the big Connected Home over IP announcement between Apple, Google, Amazon, the Zigbee Alliance, and other major players in the IoT space, Apple has made a hobbyist version of their HomeKit Accessory Development Kit available to the public on GitHub.

At WWDC 2017, Apple introduced some integral adjustments to HomeKit that aimed to push the smart home platform forward by making it easier for manufacturers to get their devices to market.  The first was doing away with the need for a hardware authentication chip opting instead for the ability for existing manufacturers to integrate HomeKit support via software. 

In the 18 months following this shift, the number of HomeKit-compatible products has definitely increased, though the variety of products still lags behind the competition.

The second big announcement was the release of the HomeKit Accessory Development Kit.  This would allow MFi partners quicker and easier access to the nuts and bolts of HomeKit accessories thus streamlining the development process.  Alongside this, Apple also released a part of that ADK to registered developers: the HomeKit Accessory Protocol.  This meant that registered developers had easier access to the standards of communication to the platform. 

A portion of the HomeKit ADK, including the HomeKit Accessory Protocol, is now available to anyone meaning that you can now build your own video doorbell.

Though HomeKit accessories developed outside of the MFi program cannot be sold commercially, we’ve seen project kits utilizing Arduiinos and Raspberry Pis for different HomeKit applications 

The HomeKit Accessory Protocol will be a significant contribution to Project Connected Home over IP and will hopefully provide a standard for security and privacy in smart home devices that adopt this protocol in the future.