Hunter Fan Homekit Controller Integration Unavailable

[DaveKram]

The problem

I (and a few others) on the HA Community forums link to thread, have bought/installed Hunter fans. Mine specifically:

Link to Hunter Fan

These fans utilize their SIMPLEConnect app - but people have found out they show up as Homekit Controllers within HA. Myself, and the others, have been able to add these fans into HA, but within 15 minutes, the fans (and associated light) becomes unavailable.

I reached out to Hunter, and they just flat out told me they don't support HA - even after I tried pushing that 'they support HomeKit'. So without any help from them, I'm reaching out to the maintainers to maybe get some insight as to what's going on.

When I added my fan, I added it through the SIMPLEConnect app process, which then the fan also showed up in HA. I added the Homekit Controller integration, and entered the paring code on the inside of my remote. It then errored out with 'Invalid flow specified' - however, after closing the dialog, the fan was still added to HA. Adding the card to my dashboard, it worked for about 15 minutes before coming unavailable.

Hard to tell if this is a Homekit Controller issue, fan firmware issue, or something else (like router? seeing things in the documentation about IGMP settings - this is my first Homekit device so haven't investigated this yet).

What version of Home Assistant Core has the issue?

2022.2.6

What was the last working version of Home Assistant Core?

No response

What type of installation are you running?

Home Assistant Container

Integration causing the issue

Homekit Controller

Link to integration documentation on our website

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/homekit_controller/

Diagnostics information

homekit_controller-0c0084b7e804927d20a7204fb4b1368e-SIMPLEconnect Fan-b2333f-6386cb09bd32274e74e13952ada8c8f7.json.txt

Example YAML snippet

No response

Anything in the logs that might be useful for us?

No response

Additional information

No response

[probot-home-assistant]

homekit_controller documentation
homekit_controller source
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[probot-home-assistant]

Hey there @Jc2k, @bdraco, mind taking a look at this issue as it has been labeled with an integration (homekit_controller) you are listed as a code owner for? Thanks!
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[Jc2k]

Hi it's late here but it would be really helpful if you could get me some logs.

I'm on my phone so I can't give detailed instructions but I need aiohomekit logs setting to debug.

Unavailable means the TCP connection died and it's failing to establish a new one. The logs will give some clues about why.

[DaveKram]

Set the homeassistant.components.homekitcontroller to debug in my configuration.yaml fille. Restarted HA. Re-paired my fan through SIMPLEConnect and then through HA. Please see the attached log (took a snippet of where the controller was discovered).

HA-HomekitIssue.txt

There seems to be an exception raised further down in the file.

Edit: You can also see me apparently click the light button as it was in the process of being updated in HA (which obviously didn't work)

Also, if this doesn't seem to be useful, I can run this as many times as needed.

[Jc2k]

So that exception is not very useful on its own. It just means the accessory was disconnected, but it could mean the accessory spontaneously disconnected or has been disconnected a while. You'd get the same one if you had turned the device off.

I need you to add "aiohomekit" to your logging config, again at DEBUG level.

[DaveKram]

Ahh sorry, didn't realize aiohomekit was the actual component, I thought it was a typo. I will rerun the test tonight after work.

[Jc2k]

I do make a lot of those 😆

We'll be able to see the raw traffic with those logs - is it managing to "login" or is it failing to connect at the OS level. The HA logs only have stuff about mapping between the HA API's and the HomeKit API's, not the transport bit.

I don't believe there should be any fundamental issue supporting your device, we have a couple of happy users in this ticket for example: #26180. Always the possibility of a regression on our side OR in the fan itself of course.

Though we do have to work around a lot of really crap HomeKit implementations, so I can't make promises. Including devices that can't generate valid JSON, devices that can't parse valid JSON, devices that just randomly restart...

While i'm at a computer I can shed some more light on IGMP settings. HomeKit relies on Bonjour/Zeroconf quite a bit. That involves lots of UDP broadcasts on port 5353. Lots of network gear tries to be helpful and filter out stuff it doesn't think you need to know about. This is a problem for all HomeKit implementations, even the Apple iOS client. There are lots of annecdotes about how your router settings can help, for example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeKit/comments/pwikxj/finally_found_the_silver_bullet_igmp_snooping/

Unfortunately for one of the UniFi settings I found, some people have to turn it off and some people have to turn it on. It's a really unsatisfying situation.

It shouldn't be the root cause of this unless the device is frequently rotating its TCP port or its ip. Port rotation does happen on some devices, but not normally very frequently.

[DaveKram]

Was able to get this tested before work. Here's the new log with the right setting :)

HA-HomekitIssue-2.txt

Seems to just lose connection with the device and then start an exponential backoff for retries.

Also, I only slowly started to look into the IGMP stuff - I have a Netgear router, which in all honesty, doesn't expose a lot of options and potentially could be hiding settings that cause an issue (specifically around IGMP). If it does end up being the case, I could always end up having to flash my router with pfsense or something similar - but that's going to be a very last resort sort of thing (obviously) - unless I can get buy in from some Netgear techs that specific settings do specific things.

Thanks for the help so far.

[Jc2k]

So yeah, after the failure it doesn't establish a TCP connection with the device, and it doesn't get to do "login". It's like the device stops responding.

When you restart HA, is the port the same?

[DaveKram]

Yes, the port is the same. Did a HA restart, ip and port is: 192.168.1.14:55056 - which is the same as before the restart.

The logs immediately just mention 'Attempting connection to 192.168.1.14:55056', which then is immediately followed by: 'Connecting to accessory failed. Retrying in 0 seconds' - and then so forth.

[Jc2k]

What happens if your curl or wget that ip:port? (Curl --verbose would be ideal)

[DaveKram]

Instantly get a connection refused.

curl --verbose 192.168.1.14:55056

Edit: Pinging the ip address itself does work.