Use Signals for HomeKit to Power a Spooky Halloween
Signals for HomeKit on your Mac can automate your home in ways you’ve never seen before. Have a little fun this Halloween, by spooking your trick-or-treaters!
What you’ll need:
A Mac running Monterey or later that you can keep running, with Signals for HomeKit installed
A HomeKit device to trigger you event — a doorbell works great, but a motion detector can work as well
A HomePod (or you can put your laptop speakers near a window - if it’s not raining!)
For added fun, throw in a few colored bulbs!
The Setup:
Let’s say we want our trick or treaters to be surprised when they ring the doorbell - we want to play a spoooooky sound, and flash the porch lights red. We can do this with two separate automations — a Shortcut, and a Signal. Shortcuts run commands one at a time, so by splitting them up into separate automations, we can play our spooky sound and run our light effect at the same time.
First up - the Shortcut. Get an easy start by downloading this one. This is a super simple Shortcut that plays a creepy laugh from an encoded sound file. You can customize this Shortcut to play any sound you want - there’s a comment inside the Shortcut itself with some simple instructions.
It may not look like it, but that big block of text is a creepy laugh!
Next up, we’ll create a Signal to flash our porch lights red for a few seconds, and keep them that way. In Signals on your Mac, Click the ‘New Signal’ button - give it a name like ‘Trick or Treat!’, and pick your favorite icon and color. Next, click ‘Customize Effects and Finishes’, find the bulbs that you want to flash, and drag them into the ‘Effects’ section.
Click on each bulb to open the detail panel. Here, you can set each bulb to ‘Flash’ for 5 seconds, and don’t forget to select a color - I went with a basic red.
To make sure the bulbs stay red when the effects finish, drag each bulb configuration from the ‘Effects’ sections down to the ‘Finish’ section, click ‘Edit’, and ensure that they’re both configured to have their power on, full brightness, and to stay at the color red. Here’s what my finished Signal looks like:
The Automations:
Now that we have our actions, it’s time to put things together. As I mentioned, we’re going to run our Shortcut and our Signal separately - start by click ‘New Automation’, selecting the device that you want to use as a trigger, and clicking ‘Create Automation’. Starting with the Signal, simply open the dropdown to list the Signals you’ve created, and choose your ‘Trick or Treat!’ Signal. If you’re using a doorbell as your trigger, that’s it, you’re done!
If you’re using a motion detector, spend a little time adjusting for sensitivity. Every motion detector behaves a little differently, and some will fire as often as every 10 seconds when a car drives by — probably not what you really want. If you do have this problem, you can use the Sensitivity Adjustments to dial in the behavior. The ‘Event Log’ on this screen gives you a running list of all events that come from that trigger, so you can try to use it to better understand how it’s reporting to HomeKit, and get just the right setting.
Once you have that dialed in, Click the ‘New Automation’ button again, select the same device, but this time, choose ‘Run Shortcut’, and then select the ‘Trick or Treat!’ Shortcut from the drop down. Be sure to change the Sensitivity Settings to match the Signal!
The Final Setup:
One last thing — Shortcuts currently lacks a way to reliably play a sound like this on your HomePod, without going through Apple Music. The easiest way to complete our setup is to actually set the output of your Mac to the HomePod directly - you can do this by by opening the Control Center, clicking the ‘AirPlay’ icon, and selecting your HomePod. Just don’t forget to change this back later!
All that’s left is to find a nice dry place on your porch for the HomePod, and let the spookiness begin!
Want to give it a try? Get Signals for HomeKit today!