Moving on and ditching Homey!

I fully understand your frustration regarding the missing webinterface. I also think it is definitely the wrong decision to only focus on the phoneapp (which won’t work without internet btw). Despite all the “hosanna” sounds there are many users that feel the same. The phoneapp is nice but the lack of making flows with a big screen and a normal keyboard is a showstopper for many. I however think that Athom sooner or later will start to realize that a Homey without a decent way of making flows will not be enough to keep the users happy and keep up the sales. And at the moment there are financial consequences they for sure will take action. With the new API it shouldn’t be a huge effort to give the (future) users what they actually need. So before I will throw my Homey in the bin I will wait a while and see what will happen. Until then I will stay on 1.5.13 and maintain my flows via the webinterface.

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I guess it needs a repeat:

Whinning about the missing interface has its own topic, please do it in there, this is the last repeat.

So what are people allowed to whine about here? It gets confusing…

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They have a different set of problems there. Lack of interpreting more devices, zigbee that isn’t working properly yet they refuse integration of the hue bridge, unstable crashing system and nobody has an answer why it is happening, flows are rather limited and no if then or else, HomeKit is still beta etc.

I switched from homee to Homey :joy:

I do think AtHom needs to be a lot more active here in the forum. I just find it weird that they don’t really interact here

I have moved to iobroker. Works fine now with all components and the signal strength is much better. I am using a MSI cube with 8 GB of memory and now i have no problems with my large amount of components.
And I have my Desktop to configure my Smart Home.
And I have at last a german interface.
I think Athom has a great product, but now … from prosumer to consumer.
Too bad :frowning:

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Indeed quite strange that Athom is not active on the forum. Are they not interested in their own product and customers? Many future customers DO read this forum and make their decision whether to buy or not based on user experiences from others. To me sometimes it looks like Athom doesn’t take their customers seriously and only focus on what they think is right. Some others confuse positive feedback with whining which is even worse.

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Tough subject. To be honest, I understand @Rockhoppers and may be going the same route that he has taken.

I bought Homey for my SmartHOME and not SmartAPARTMENT or SmartFLAT. What I want to say here is that I have a House (not a Villa, Chateau, Mansion, etc) and I seem to be expecting too much from the poor chap.

Now let’s take a look at a HOME shall we? You have at least 2-3 Bedrooms, one living room, one kitchen, a laundry room, maybe a home office and a garden. Now my rooms all have 1 motion sensor, 1 Thermostat for the radiators, and a switch for the lights. I have over almost 40 Zwave devices in my house, but do not think FOR A MOMENT that I can get a good mesh network going with homey. I have Tx errors all over the place although there are 4 devices that aren’t even 2 meters away from homey. Strangely THOSE are the ones causing the most trouble.

Now let’s start adding apps shall we? I have Chromecast devices, Philips Hue, RING Doorbell, a house full of Bosch Home Connect devices, and a Tado smart Thermostat (Thank god I have this. At least my presence now works since THAT controls it).

Homey is a damn good concept! I love the fact that my devices are in one place and I can have one device trigger when a totally different device does something. For example: When the Ring Doorbell detects motion and the sun has set, turn on all the lights in front of the house! Or when TADO notices that I am at home, then set my Status to “AT HOME”! Brilliant!

But not all is good in the Homey universe.

To put it simply: I am suffering MISERABLY with Homey.

  • Fibaro Devices aren’t running smooth. Some have had Tamer alarms for weeks if not even MONTHS now. Since the update to v2 my dimmers are acting strange and not slowly diming the lights on or off when a flow is triggered
  • My Spirit Zwave thermostats aren’t working as they are suppose to. 1) I have the Fibaro Motion Sensors telling the thermostats what the current temperature in the room is but that only works on a couple of thermostats.
  • For some reason my Fibaro switches just shut lights off for no reason.
  • The BOSCH HOME CONNECT App is about as usefull as wiping your bottom before taking a dump. I have no idea why that was even built since I can’t even turn on my coffee maker in a flow, let alone turn it off.
  • As everybody has noticed: Presence detection is a hit or miss. (More miss than hit)
  • Flows are great! But have no use whatsoever when a flow is triggered and the communication with the device fails and the flow just kind of “gives up”. Example: When the last person left, and nobody is home -> turn off all devices. I have no idea how many times a light was left on because the flow just broadcast an order for all devices to turn off, but doesn’t really confirm if it has been turned off.
  • Fun little thing that I have NEVER got to work: When the battery of a device is less than 5%, then send me a push message saying “the battery in DEVICE_WITH_LOW_BATTERY is low. CHANGE IT!”
  • Google Home integration: Ooooooh boy. I have no idea how many times google told me that my Harmony account is not linked. It got so bad that at one point I almost bought a harmony (whatever the hell that is) just to shut google up.
  • Now shoot me if I am wrong: But wasn’t homey 2.0 suppose to have some kind of room presence function built in it? I could SWEAR that I read on one of the blogs that they were going to integrate that so we wouldn’t have to have 2394729384 Timers running. Did I miss this function? Is there and I can’t find it?
  • Desktop app: WHAT IN THE WORLD WERE THEY THINKING?!? Yes, if you have a SmartAPARTMENT or a SmartFLAT then you probably COULD manage everything with a very Very VERY sexy app (yeah, the new app is sexy!) But a HOUSE?!? Dear god…I dread the day where I have to reset Homey and do ALL my flows all over. And then I saw the app on my iPad. At the risk of repeating myself -> WHAT IN THE WORLD WERE THEY THINKING?!? I mean COME ON, if you are going to make Homey completely APPtastic then put some effort into it. Give me a better experience when I am using the homey app on a tablet and not on a phone!
  • No Firmware updates for my devices. (Okay, not really Athoms fault…but a big drawback when using a third party vendor)

And here is the moment where I stand a a crossroad. Finding an alternative for homey really isn’t that simple. We are in the year 2019 and it really isn’t easy to find a unit that does zwave+! Then you have the question of weather or not you can connect ALL your devices to it.

But then on the other hand….would I rather have a system that can do less, but do that perfectly, or do I want a system that can do a lot…but not that good?

Cheers!

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:gun: The blog stated it would be coming after 2.0. - off the top of my head I think it was June’s blog.

Then I was half wrong :smiley: You can shoot me in the leg :wink:

+1

I was also only half right, here are the details, talking about security update, cameras, sharing flows, wifi set up etc.

Are you so disappointed with this platform that you want to switch to a hard to set up system like HA? Yes!

In stead of spending money on the new Homey Pro (which I would have if we still had the desktop / browser user interface) I bought a Celeron based NUC. It cost exactly the same. Actually a little less. And then with a Z-wave stick from Aeotec the cost is more or less the same.

I threw my favorite Linux distro on it (Ubuntu Mate) and installed Hass.io via Dockers. I know nothing about Dockers. I just followed a step by step guide and it went fine.

Is it easy to setup or difficult?
It is difficult to learn the YAML language. But I also clearly remember how much time I spent getting the flow approach into my head on Homey. It took weeks before I understood what the different things meant, and even longer to find the user contributed apps that were needed. I spent a week writing my own version of the Aeotec app to add a Z-wave very common Aeotec sensor. A contribution that Athom ignored for 6 months even though many needed it and when implemented it still did not work. Homey was not a smooth ride either and there are many things I wanted to do and could not. E.g. Google Home is still not supported so it works.

With Home Assistant there are two sides.
There is 1000s more help in the HA community. The moderators are not aggresive and unfriendly like they have been here - sorry to say that. The HA documentation is far from perfect but it is plenty in comparison with Homey. And the number of Youtube videos for HA is also a huge resource.

Setting up Philips Hue was simple. Press the button and it is discovered. Done!

Setting up Z-wave was a total pain Homey. I had so much trouble with discovery.

With Home Assistant it is even worse! Z-wave on HA is a pain in the ass. If you are not a geek like me and you have many Z-wave devices, I would at least try and see. Z-wave is complicated. Homey got a lot of this right. HA has not. Removing a Z-wave device and readding it and you cannot give it the same name unless you hack some xml files. And often when you restart HA Z-wave is not working at all until you restart again. Z-wave - not so good.

MQTT however is brilliant on HA. Once you get the hang of that and tinker around with the many cheap ESP8266 solutions the world is open to you.

With Homey - they had a student making the Homeduino project which is great. But since Athom has ignored it and never taken advantage of its potential. I implemented an NFC reader for my alarm system for Homey. I ported this over to Home Assistant changing it to MQTT. Easy as hell. No need to code and code. Just copy paste code from examples from other users that were easy to find.

And in the two weeks I have already created automations (flows) that are far more advanced and cool than I ever could in Homey.

I have ONE thing left on Homey. I have a Philips remote control that I have not paired with HA yet because it is another USB stick and integration to learn and I expect it to be a painful thing. So Homey is standing there. … All devices deleted except one Zigbee remote. All flows deleted. All except a few that translate button presses from the Philips remote to MQTT (again a user contribution and not something Athom did). And it is only a matter of time - then I either take the time to integrate Zigbee on HA (I use Philips hue hub for all other Zigbee and will continue to as it works well), or… I replace the single Zigbee remote with a home brew ESP8266 thing or a Z-wave remote.

And then Homey will be smashed to pieces and I will make a Youtube video of it!

In summary… to Athom. You had so much potential. You dummed your product down and you failed! You never understood your customers. You had a niche. The geeks that want to tinker. Now you can compete with Samsung Smarthings and the other dummed down products where you will drown in the noise as they perform much better and support much more devices

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Let me know you’re price and I will buy them if it’s good.

V2 rocks

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Maybe I have too much money. But I am so pissed off that I’d rather smash it and put the video on Youtube. I know it is sick. But I am in a state of anger about the whole thing. I will admit that

This is it, Homey is state of the art, even with the issues you’re having (not all Homey’s fault) it’s the best there is…

But a video of smashing Homey will be a sure hit on the internets :slight_smile:

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one can never have 2much money. :joy:

My €5,00 offer still stands; might help you to cool down! :slight_smile:

Duck with whisky

Get yourself a duck of about 1.5 to 2kg, and two large bottles of Scottish whisky, bacon strips and a bottle of olive oil.
Put the bacon around the duck, and treat the inside with pepper and salt.
Preheat the oven for 10 minutes at 180 degrees Celcius.
Fill a large glass with whisky.
Drink the whisky while the oven is preheating.
Put the duck on a fireproof platter and fill out a second glass of whisky.
Drink out the second glass of whisky and put the duck in the oven.
After 20 minutes, put the oven to 200 degrees celsius and vill 2 glazzes of whisky.
Drink out the glazzes and pick ub the piecez of the first glazz
Fill anozzer half glazz and drinkit.
After halven our, open the ovven to cheq the duck.
Fetch the burninjury oindmend in the bathrthroom and pud it on the ubber zide of the lef thand.
Vill anozzer two glazzez of whiskey.
Open the ovven after the first glazz izz embdy and biggub the bladder.
Pud the oindmend on the inner zide o the righdhand.
Biggub the dug.
Biggub the dug again and use a towel to rrremovve the oindmend from the dug.
Degreaze th hand with visky and biggub the oindmend dube whisj is laying onthe ground.
Clean ub the brokan glazz and put the dug bag in the ovven.
Pig ub the dug and open the ovve firs.
Open the segond boddle of bisk and pud id straight ub again.
Get ub from the fllloorr and puz the bagon under ve cabined.
Geddub again and siddown aniwey.
Pud the boddle on the flooj.
Dring fromve boddle since the glazzez are borken or unreadjable.
Switch ovv the ovven, gloze your eyez, and ffffall over.

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@KennethLavrsen Can’t wait to see your take on that classic :

This thread has clearly gone very off topic and I will be closing it.

Thank you for your contribution and good luck in your future endeavors.

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