Our coop has a Run-Chicken door that opens in the morning and closes in the evening. We control it with the manufacturer’s app over Bluetooth, which reaches about one meter, so remote control meant standing right next to the door and connecting manually, which often took up to a minute. In the evening, when one of the chickens missed the schedule and was still outside, that didn’t work reliably.
The door is in Apple Home now, and this is how I got it there, in case you have the same door.
You need three things: Home Assistant, the community integration ha-run-chicken, and an ESP32 board near the coop running ESPHome as a Bluetooth proxy. The proxy is on your Wi-Fi and holds the Bluetooth connection to the door, so Home Assistant can run anywhere in the house. Mine runs in Docker on a Raspberry Pi in my homelab, and the coop is out of range of the Pi’s own Bluetooth.
For the proxy I use an M5Stack Atom Lite, a small ESP32 board, with my own ESPHome configuration. It’s not much:
esphome:
name: run-chicken-proxy
esp32:
board: m5stack-atom
framework:
type: esp-idf
wifi:
ssid: !secret wifi_ssid
password: !secret wifi_password
logger:
api:
encryption:
key: !secret api_key
ota:
- platform: esphome
password: !secret ota_password
esp32_ble_tracker:
scan_parameters:
active: true
bluetooth_proxy:
active: true
The proxy has to run in active mode (bluetooth_proxy: active: true), because opening and closing the door requires a Bluetooth connection, a passive proxy only receives advertisements. The four !secret values go into a secrets.yaml next to the configuration.
I flashed the first firmware over USB, updates go over Wi-Fi. If you’d rather not write a configuration, ESPHome has a browser installer for a ready-made proxy firmware.
The Bluetooth chip in the Run-Chicken door just isn’t good, so put the proxy close to the door: at one to two meters without a wall the signal was there, at three meters through a wall there was none.
For all of this you need a Home Assistant installation. In Home Assistant, add the proxy with the ESPHome integration, using its address and its API encryption key.
Copy the folder custom_components/run_chicken from the ha-run-chicken repository into the config directory of Home Assistant and restart. Then add the Run-Chicken integration for your door. Ours is a T-80. After you set up the proxy, it can take a few minutes until the door shows up.
Add the HomeKit Bridge, include only the door, then pair it with the Home app on your iPhone. If Home Assistant runs in Docker, start the container with network_mode: host, otherwise the bridge doesn’t show up in the Home app.
The door reports open and closed but no position, and without a position Apple Home shows it as a window covering. I’ve chosen garage door as the device class instead.
Now we see the status of the door in Apple Home, and when a chicken isn’t in the coop yet, we can open and close the door remotely and check with the camera in the coop. I might move the automation from the Run-Chicken app to Apple Home next.