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Home Connect Local

Step 2: Download your appliance profiles

In this step you download a profile for each of your appliances. This is the only step that uses the internet and your Home Connect login. You do it once, on a desktop or laptop computer.

What a profile is

Section titled “What a profile is”

A profile is a zip file, one per appliance. It holds three things:

  • two XML files that describe what the appliance can do, such as its compartments, doors and modes
  • the appliance’s key

The key is a secret that the appliance checks before it accepts a connection from your home network. The Home Connect cloud hands out these keys, which is why this step has to go through the cloud. Once Homebridge has the profile, it talks to the appliance directly and never needs the cloud again.

Get the download tool

Section titled “Get the download tool”

You use a free tool called homeconnect-profile-downloader, made by bruestel. It is a separate project, not part of this plugin. These steps are for its version 1.0.2.

  1. On your computer, open the 1.0.2 release page.
  2. Scroll down to Assets, a list of files.
  3. Download the file for your computer, as shown in the tab that matches it.
  1. Download homeconnect-profile-downloader-win32-x64-1.0.2.zip. If you are not sure which file you need, take this one.
  2. Open your Downloads folder.
  3. Right-click the zip file and choose Extract All….
  4. Click Extract.
  5. Open the extracted folder, and any folder inside it, until you see homeconnect-profile-downloader.exe. Double-click it.
  6. Windows may warn you that the file could be dangerous, because it is not digitally signed. Click More info, then Run anyway.

The downloader window opens.

Sign in and download

Section titled “Sign in and download”

The downloader window is titled “Home Connect Profile Downloader”. It has two menus and a button.

  1. Next to Region, pick the region you registered your Home Connect account in: Europe, North America or Greater China. Sign-in only works in the region you registered in.
  2. Next to Target, leave openHAB - Home Connect Direct Binding selected. Home Assistant - Home Connect Local works too. Do not pick hcpy: it saves a .json file instead of zips, which this plugin cannot read.
  3. Click Fetch appliance profile data. The Home Connect sign-in page opens inside the same window.
  4. Sign in with your Home Connect login, the email and password you use in the Home Connect app. Home Connect calls this a SingleKey ID.

The window says “Loading…” for a moment. Then it shows a page headed “Profiles etc.”. That page shows a folder location, and below it a list of files with one zip per appliance.

Find your zips

Section titled “Find your zips”

The folder on the “Profiles etc.” page is a temporary folder on your computer, where the downloader saved the zips. Open it now, and keep its window open for Step 3.

  • Windows: select the folder location on the page and copy it. Open File Explorer, click the address bar at the top, paste, and press Enter.
  • macOS: select the folder location on the page and copy it. In Finder, open the Go menu, choose Go to Folder, paste, and press Return.
  • Linux: open the folder location in your file manager.

Each zip name starts with homeconnectdirect- if you kept the openHAB target, or homeconnect-local-hass- if you picked Home Assistant. The plugin accepts both. The full name looks like this:

homeconnectdirect-<type>-<brand>-<model>-<mac>_<date>.zip

The <mac> part is the appliance’s MAC address, a hardware ID unique to its network chip. Do not paste a zip’s name into a public post or a GitHub issue.

Do Step 3 on this same computer. Then the zips never need to be copied anywhere else.

Treat the zips like passwords

Section titled “Treat the zips like passwords”

Each zip holds the key of one appliance. Anyone who has a copy and is on your home network can control that appliance. Do not email the zips, upload them anywhere other than your Homebridge, or share them. Step 3 tells you when to delete them.

Known problems

Section titled “Known problems”
  • The “Continue” button on the sign-in page stays greyed out. This is downloader issue #15. The sign-in page could not load a file over IPv6, the newer kind of internet address. The person who reported it got through after turning off IPv6 on the computer running the downloader.
  • You get an HTTP 406 error, and your account has a demo appliance in it. This is downloader issue #21. Version 1.0.2 fixed it. Check that you downloaded 1.0.2 or newer.
  • An appliance has no profile, or no key. An appliance only gets a key once it has finished pairing with the Home Connect cloud. If it cannot pair, no tool can make a key for it. hcpy issue #278 is a known case where problems on the cloud side block pairing.

How you know it worked

Section titled “How you know it worked”

The folder from the “Profiles etc.” page holds one zip for each of your appliances.

Next: Step 3: Import the profiles.