Everything on these pages is free to download. The Engine is the heart of your Homylon house; agents connect it to your devices (Hue, X10, CoAP, MQTT, Matter); monitors and remotes let you watch and control it. They can run on different machines: on your home network they find each other by themselves.
Most downloads come in three kinds:
- Mac: a ready-to-run app.
- Linux: for a PC or a Raspberry Pi, running in the background as a service.
- Sources: the open source code (MIT licence), to build yourself with Xcode or Swift, or to learn from when you write your own agent. The iPhone, iPad and Apple TV apps are only available this way for now.
This is the heart of Homylon, the Engine. It needs to run in the background on a stable machine. That can be a Mac or a Linux Mint Intel/AMD 64 bit machine or even a 64 or 32 bit ARM Raspberry.
On a Mac just run the app. It will "live' in the menu bar. From there you can launch your first Homylon scene or package by opening it from the pull down menu.
On Linux you need to install it first and then start it with Homylon script as parameter.
>>> ./homylon install
>>> ./homylon start myhome.homylon
If all goes well, you won't see much. The Engine will wait for "events" as you have described in the scenes. It's a good habit to start a Monitor as well. That can be a tiny python script running in a terminal doing nothing more than receiving UDP messages from the Engine and dump them on screen. Elsewhere on this site you will find some examples of that. Also there are more sophisticated apps for Mac and iPhone/iPad written in Swift open sourced (MIT). This apps are a good start as an example t write your own Homylon agents and tools as well.
Download here:
To monitor what events from devices or time are flying around and what the engine is doing with it, the engine can log its activities with messages. In your Homylon scene you can define a monitor with its whereabouts (IP address, port and protocol) and also what you want to see. If you are testing a home written app or trying to find a something going wrong "ALL" or "JSON" is a good option. Usually you want to see "EVENT" "LOG" "WARNING" "ERROR" and "ENGINE". You can have a number of different monitors displaying different sub sets of messages.
Below are some example monitor apps. A simple one in Python you can run in a terminal and a MacOS/IOS/TVOS app with its sources to run on Apple hardware. These sources are free to use as opensource (MIT licence) so they are a great starting point for your own agents and tools.
Simple Python Monitor Mac app Sources (iPhone/iPad, Mac, Apple TV)
The Hue agent connects your Philips Hue bridge to Homylon. It finds the bridge on your home network by itself and reads all its lights, rooms, motion, temperature and light sensors and switches, with the names you gave them in the Hue app. Changes made elsewhere, with a switch on the wall, in the Hue app or by a motion sensor, reach the Engine within a moment. After every command the agent reads the light's real state back from the bridge, so your scenes always know what is really on.
There is a Mac app (macOS 10.14 or later) and a Linux version for a PC or a Raspberry Pi, and they do the same. The first time, both ask you to press the round button on top of the bridge: the Mac app in a window, on Linux the command homylonhue pair. The Linux version reads the bridge's changes with curl, which nearly every Linux already has.
How to download and install: see the Introduction.
Download here:
The Network Kit is the piece of Swift code every Homylon app and agent uses to talk to the Engine. If you want to write your own app, tool or agent in Swift this is the place to start. It runs on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV with Apple's own network framework and on Linux with SwiftNIO. Version 1.0.1, open source under the MIT licence.
What it does and how to use it, with a complete example: see Network Kit - the foundation in the Architecture section.
Download here:
The CoAP agent brings your lights, plugs, remotes and groups connected to certain CoAP compatible hubs, like the ones from IKEA, into Homylon, It should work with both the known original round gateway and, on the Mac, also with the newer square hub. The old round gateway is easily overloaded, so the agent treats it gently: it asks for changes every 10 seconds, reads everything again only every 5 minutes, and always says goodbye when it stops. A change made with a original remote can therefore take a few seconds to reach the Engine.
The Mac app needs macOS 14 or later on a Mac with Apple silicon (M1 or newer). The Linux version runs on a PC or a Raspberry Pi and works with the round gateway only. Pairing needs the 16-character security code printed underneath the gateway: the Mac app asks for it in a window, on Linux you type homyloncoap pair. The round gateway does not announce itself on the network, so the first time you may have to type its address; your router shows it.
How to download and install: see the Introduction.
Download here:
The MQTT agent connects Zigbee2MQTT and Z-Wave JS UI to Homylon. These popular free programs talk to hundreds of Zigbee and Z-Wave devices and share them through an MQTT broker, usually Mosquitto. The agent listens to that broker and announces plugs, motion, temperature, light and power sensors and button remotes to the Engine, with the names you gave them in Zigbee2MQTT or Z-Wave JS UI. In this first version plugs can be switched on and off; everything else is reported to the Engine as it happens.
The Mac app (macOS 13 or later) connects to a broker on the same Mac; the README in the download shows how to point it to a broker elsewhere. The Linux version for a PC or a Raspberry Pi asks where your broker is when you install it, and keeps that in its settings file. The agent needs no MQTT software of its own: it speaks MQTT itself.
How to download and install: see the Introduction.
Download here:
The Matter agent brings Matter devices into Homylon: curtains and blinds that you can open, close, set to a position or stop, and water leak sensors, for example the ones behind an Aqara hub. Matter lets a device have more than one controller, so your devices stay in the Aqara or Apple Home app as well; Homylon simply joins as one more.
The Mac app (macOS 13.3 or later) is a Matter controller itself: you add a device by pasting its pairing code into the app and choosing Commission, and once your devices show up you tick the box that lets it announce them and accept commands from the Engine. The Linux version for a PC or a Raspberry Pi works through python-matter-server, a free program that holds your Matter devices and runs on any machine in your house; the agent only needs to know where it runs. Use either the Mac app or the Linux version for the same devices, not both.
How to download and install: see the Introduction.
Download here:
The Sound agent lets your house speak up through the loudspeaker of a Mac: a doorbell, a gong at dinner time, a dog that barks when somebody comes to the door while nobody is home. It comes with twelve sounds (buzzer, church, dingdong, dogbark, dogwhoo, gong, hello, knocking, laser, scream, thunder and xylophone) and announces itself and its sounds to the Engine as soundmachine, so a rule needs no definition at all: sound dingdong on soundmachine.
It is a small Mac app (macOS 10.14 or later) without settings: start it, and the Engine finds it. An old Mac in the hallway or the study makes a fine doorbell. There is no Linux version yet. The example "Somebody at the front door" shows it at work.
How to download and install: see the Introduction.
Download here: