Homey Community Forum

Homey and UWB communication

Ideas & Suggestions
#1

Hi,

I was wandering are there any thoughts about supporting UWB in the Homey? UWB is already used for indoor locations services, but looking at CES 2021, this technology is going to be used more and more in the future by different devices. Cars, phones, sensors will standard be equipped with UWB and support location and secure key services to unlock doors and cars. Seems to replace bluetooth as it performs better and is more secure.

What if Homey is going to support UWB in a new version, e.g. Pro+ and install a new UWB chip. Homey can in that case continue to play a vital role in our household and becomes part of a new ecosystems.

It is key for Homey to support all wireless communication protocols including UWB, this is an unique value.

Any thoughts on this topic. I did not see any UWB topics in the search, so please comment…

#2

UWB in positioning requires at least 3 sensors in a carefully designed configuration to be effective. It’s not a matter of just 1 sensor in your homey. Besides, there aren’t many silliconvendors yet that actually provide UWB solutions (for now only NXP and Renesas have sillicon available if I’m not mistaken).

1 Like
#3

Perhaps Athom should focus on getting the existing wireless protocols in Homey to work properly first :wink:

2 Likes
#4

And then Thread, as it seems to be way more important :soon:™-ish

#5

Good point Joost, Homey doesn’t need UWB communication for precision location services, I’m trying to imaging some interesting use cases for a possible future homey supporting UWB. Use Case location services: A person carrying a watch support UWB while walking through the house and the house is equipped with carefully placed UWB anchors. The propagation delay between the watch and anchors is captured by anchor and send to the Homey, instead to a vendor based solution, to calculate the position. In this case homey can connect to open and rather cheap UWB sensors with existing communication protocols (e.g. Wifi, Zwave or Zigbee). Conclusion, no need for UWB support on the homey, unless there is a mesh UWB network to transmit data to the homey.