I have a garage 70 meters away from my house and I have a switch in the garage that is connected to the local network in my house. What is the best way to extend the reach of a Homey Pro in the house to the garage?
I’ve been trying to figure out this by reading different forum posts, but I haven’t really found anything. It should be a pretty common use case so maybe I’m just not looking hard enough.
Can I add a second Homey Pro that acts like some kind of slave to a “master” Homey Pro in my house? Ultimately I would like to use the Bridge as an extension, but from what I’ve read this is not possible. It really should be! It would be extremely convenient to just connect a Bridge to a LAN port in the switch in the garage and then have access to all Z-Wave, ZigBee etc. device in the garage from the Homey Pro in the house.
My home setup is an ISP router, cat 7 to Netgear switch. A Mesh WiFi AP attached to that switch for the house and then a second AP attached to that switch for the garage and shed outside. As long as the devices are on the same network then Homey should be able to find them
Additional, instead of putting a 2nd Homey Pro in the garage, you could consider (after you plugged in an WiFi accesspoint that is):
• using WiFi iot devices like Shelly (what Philip said)
• putting a Tradfri or Hue wifi2zigbee bridge in the garage.
This way you can connect/control the garage with Homey.
(It is quite silly one cannot use the new bridge for that (yet… you’ll never know) ).
Ok, thanks. So a second Homey Pro is actually a solution, although an expensive solution? Will they act as a master and slave and behave as one system? That is, can a I have a switch in the house that turns on the lights in the garage? I’ve never used Homey before so the answer may be obvious to someone who has, but I’m just trying to do my homework before buying one or two Homey Pro.
I do have a Wi-Fi access point in the garage, just didn’t mention it. So Wi-Fi devices are definitely an alternative. As is a WiFi2ZigBee bridge. But it would be great to just throw in a Bridge and have access to all protocols in one single small device…
As far as I know:
With the MQTT apps on both Homey pro’s, you can control home > garage and garage > home. Master and slave at the same time so to speak.
This way it is not relevant in what room, building (or even location, with a vpn) the 2nd Homey sits.
You’ll have to program things using the flows for that (if… and… or… then… else…). (2 Homey’s can not be made aware of eachother by some kind of “link” or coupling thing)
So a garagedoor sensor can switch the kitchen light, a bathroom smart switch can switch the outside light of the garage.
If it were me I’d just use Wifi based devices for your garage… Those are generally also cheaper than Zigbee and Zwave devices…
If ya really had to have Zigbee / Zwave / 433mhz / bluetooth , etc etc , the only cheapest solution i can think of is Raspberry Pi with Home Assistant and use MQTT to communicate everything back to your Homey Pro… Will take a bit of time to setup though…
There are plenty of Wifi based devices on the market. I’d just stick with those … Simple, easy, cheap…
Thanks! Ok, I’ll probably go with Wi-Fi devices as a start and then see what my needs really are before doing something more complicated. And who knows, by that time the Bridge may work as a “Homey Mesh node”…
Yep, I don’t think local communication between the Pro and the Bridge on the same LAN would be technically possibly…
Theoretically Athom could possibly create a cloud based mesh later on but there would be a lot of work involved which I don’t think they would be bothered to do… Also I dare say the bridge will still require require a subscription…They gotta pay for those big servers. Don’t think I’d pay €3.99 a month to run a couple of Zigbee devices in my garage. Lol
I suppose to forward TCP or UDP communication from a Bridge to another Homey Pro is not very intensive (a tunnel) and requires no local ‘smarts’ processing. This would have allowed for a second or third location type of operation supporting over the Internet links or requiring a Cloud subscription. This could have been a potential extra source of revenue for Athom. But it appears unfortunately they haven’t catered for this option.
How I would see a “Homey Mesh node” working is basically how the Bridge works now already: receive local signals (Zigbee/Z-Wave/etc) and pass them to a server running the actual apps. But instead of that server being a Homey Cloud server, it could be a Homey Pro.
However, passing local network data is much more difficult, it’s not just a matter of passing TCP/UDP data but also additional protocols that are used for, for instance, auto discovery. Without local processing on the Bridge, it would mean it needs to pass everything to the Pro to be processed there.
An additional complication is that the Bridge isn’t a “simple” device running a proper OS like Linux. It has quite a lightweight IP stack, and a lightweight OS. It also already has to deal with the various UART’s for the RF chips, so I wonder how much actual headroom is left for additional stuff.
From the sounds of it according to Athom and also those on here that have assessed this thing it was essentially made without a brain …
Just enough brain to get Zigbee and other similar traffic up and down from the cloud but that’s it. Amazon’s servers are basically doing all the work… Trying to monitor IP traffic on your local LAN would essentially require all your LAN traffic to go up to Amazon… eerrmm no thanks.
Has half of the abilities, has half of the connectivity, you have to throw away all your existing wifi based devices in your house , you have to keep paying money for the rest of your life for your house to work (until the day you die), zero independence from greedy IOT companies that want you to keep paying and paying even after your already spent a premium price on their gear , zero independence if your internet goes down, and has created a complete and utter marketing mess with the existing Homey product
Was bored, so looked what was was possible with Homey cloud version. As a PoC I wrote an app for my Homey Pro that connects to Homey (cloud version, no bridge though) and was able to subscribe to devices so capability changes are seen in realtime. I was also able to change the presence status of users, so changing operating device will also be possible.
So in theory an app running on a Homey Pro could operate devices connected to the Homey bridge. Creating a workable app is something else though… The app would always need Web Api keys, and those aren’t handed out very often; I’m still awaiting a reply on my request for a key pair for the Timeline Manager app. I guess they are very busy
