Integration to the IHC platform

Our house has an IHC installation, which should give a smarter home. It does, but not as smart as I want it to be, but lets be fair. IHC is an old platform developed for several years ago before smart home was a thing.

One of the reasons why I chose Home Assistant as our smart home platform is because of its ability to integrate to IHC.

The integration is pretty straight forward, when you know how to do, but I started off going in a lot of wrong directions and had to get experience from others to get it to work.

The official documentation from Home Assistant is located here, and it describes quite good what’s required to run the integration with both manual and automatic setup of the IHC platform.

I used a lot of time on the automatic setup feature, but I stopped – I couldn’t get it work. I read different places online that the reason could be an old IHC controller version, issues with your IHC project file etc. So instead I did the manual setup, which is also the preferred method from others because you select which entities you want to add from IHC to Home Assistant. This is a huge advanced because the automatic setup create all entities, which could result in you losing track on what is what. It also enabled me from the beginning to name my entities from IHC the name I wanted them to have in Home Assistant.

When going down the manual road, you need to find resource IDs on the IHC entities you want to add. There are multiple methods to do so, but I used the software called IHC Alternative Service View. I couldn’t use the installation software for it, so I just downloaded the program files, unzipped them and started the program directly. With the software running I just needed to login to my IHC controller and then I could find the resource ID for the specific resources I wanted to add to Home Assistant.

But now to the more interesting part – how my YAML configuration looks like.

In my configuration.yaml file I added the IHC integration, but since I use a filesplittet configuration.yaml file, it just refers to another file where my IHC configuration is placed.

configuration.yaml

integrations/ihc.yaml

After a restart of Home Assistant I now have access to the entities that I added in my IHC configuration. I can set them up directly in my Lovelace UI, so it’s possible to turn on or turn off the entities directly from Home Assistant. I can also use them in my other integrations, or in my automations, scripts etc.

2 thoughts on “Integration to the IHC platform

  1. Hej
    God inspiration…
    Spørgsmål fra en nybegynder.
    Det er lykkedes mig at få IHC integrationen til Home Assistant til at virke automatisk.
    Jeg kan styre lys og stikkontakter. Mit problem opstår, når jeg vil lave scener og automation. IHC lys og stikkontakter er entiteter (ikke enheder) og det er enheder der skal tilføjes, når der oprettes Scener/automation.
    Jeg kører HA på en RPI4 8 GB med 32 GB SD kort, som en start.
    Har du nogen erfaring med det??
    På forhånd Tak
    Erik

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