I’m using Apple Home and the white series fan switch. I commonly use the command “turn on my lights” to turn on all of the lights in my room. I don’t want the LED bar to act like a normal room light and turn on/off with the rest of my room lights. Is there a way to prevent this?
No.
You could make a scene that included all lights that you want to turn on and exclude that one for each room and call for that scene instead.
As CroVlado said at this point No. Requests have been made to Inovelli to modify their code and also to Apple to fix Homekit to allow Siri to ignore certain devices (the LED bars in this case).
The only alternative that I know of the moment is to use Home Assistant (HA) and pair the switches with that. You can then expose just the switch/dimmer element of the switches to Homekit (Apple Home).
This is what I have done and it works really well. In my case, Home Assistant runs on a single board “tiny” PC (an Intel NUC) purchased from Ebay for ~$80. I have the Home Assistant PC’s Ethernet port attached to my Router so it does not need a Thread adaptor card (my Apple TVs and Homepods are taking care of that). Others here have used a RPi4 or RPi5 to host HA though I prefer the PC approach. I would not recommend anything less than a RPI4 to host HA.
On the downside, Home Assistant has a fairly steep learning curve but on the plus side animations are much more powerful than those in Apple Home. Over my 4 months or so with HA I’ve moved about 80% of my devices and 90% of my animations onto HA. I’m still anything but an expert with it, however the implementation allows the family only to interact with the home only using Apple Home and they only see the devices that they need to interact with.
As an example, I have a couple of white dimmers that are “paired” with fan/canopies. The power is just connected through (not switched) at the switch (so that the fan canopy gets power all of the time) and I have Home Assistant animations setup so if someone turns the light switch on, the canopy light turns on (and vice-versa) and a similar arrangement for the fan. In this case only the canopy fan/light entities are exposed to Apple Home and the wall switch is “invisible”) which eliminates a bunch of confusion about what turns on what.
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Thanks. This is helpful information. Do you use Homebridge to bring home assistant devices into HomeKit?
Home Assistant includes its own HomeKit gateway in the default installation package, and there is nothing else that needs to be installed. It just works…