Athom Homey users out there? (Lost interest in HA, and would like to step a bit back on it)

1

Hi everyone,

Now, before anything, I have to say I really appreciate all the hard work that developers have put into Home Assistant. It is a prime example of what open-source software can become, and I am sure it will continue to grow.

Personally, unfortunately I have lost the enthusiasm and interest I had when beginning. Therefore I have decided to move to a proprietary system, so I can greatly reduce my commitment. If anyone is interested in the reasoning, I will try to give this, while letting off a little steam. I have been way too stressed out using Home Assistant lately, and feel like it is not rewarding enough for the time I put into it. It is just so demotivating to spend hours on doing something cool, and when I want to show it off to the family and put it to use, I am often met by a “page not found” cause Z-wave crashed my home assistant, buttons that are not working forcing me to reboot the device to clear caches or other very inconvenient setbacks. I feel like I have gotten to a point where I am not improving my setup, but just constantly chasing something to keep it running. You know, resetting OpenZWave, fixing breaking changes, figuring out why this and that is throwing errors etc. Also I feel like building UI, is mostly juggling a work-arounds to get stuff I want to show in lovelace. For example I feel stuff like all of thomasloven’s custom cards are necessary to do much at all in lovelace, yet they all seem very unnecessary, and seem to be work-arounds for a limited system, rather than functionality. It seems the UI is super limited by trying to maintain a structure so it can show on a wide-variety of screensizes, browsers etc. This is also what I understood from the latest podcast, where Paulus was talking about not wanting to implement multiple lovelace configs, because people do not want to add the same stuff multiple times. My opinion is, I would much rather create a seperate UI for each individual device I own, and have complete free hands to place and show stuff how I like, as apposed to fighting with the limitations in lovelace currently. I do not know if I am alone with this feeling, but I just always feel like I am so close to something great with Home Assistant, but I never get there.

Therefore, as I said, I about to buy into a proprietary system, to get something that is easier to pair my smart devices with, and easier to keep running than Home Assistant. My hope is to keep Home Assistant running as well, but just not having to rely on it, and being able to just spend time on it as I wish and follow the continued development till it eventually reaches a state where I feel I can commit again.

For this, I have been looking into Athom Homey, as it seems to have integrations for everything I own basically. I just have a bunch of questions I would very much appreciate to help answer before diving in. I hope there are users out there that use both Home Assistant and Homey, that can help me answer these questions. Before you ask why I do not just ask these questions on a Homey forum, it is because I do not want advice from people blindly loving a simple system like Homey, but would much rather hear it from people from this forum with wider experiences.

— Home Assistant - Homey Integration Questions —

  1. In regards to Home Assistant, is it possible to integrate Homey, so I can see everything connected to that?
    I only see this request for a component: Homey athom hub integration

  2. The other way around, it seems to be possible to add stuff I only have in HA to homey it seems? Is that working well? https://github.com/rogro82/io.homeassistant

— DIY Questions —
For specific DIY solutions, I would also like to know how well I can get that working in Homey. I know there is a homeyduino add-on, but I am not sure I can reach the same functionality as Home Assistant. Therefore I hope you can comment on my DIY projects I am currently making, to let me know if that is actually realistic to get working without the freedom of home assistant. Especially the ability to just create a generic thermostat in Home Assistant to control heating with a DIY application, is something I do not know if can be done. Can you comment on these?
3. DIY thermostats with NodeMCUs, screens and DHT-22
4. DIY underfloor heating controller using a Wemos D1 and a relayboard to control on/off of the thermoactuators with info from the thermostats.
5. DIY LED lighting using LED strips and an ESP8266
6. DIY ventilation controls using 2 x Sonoff 4CH Pro(for controlling by-pass, switching between original controls, my controls and full manual etc.) + 1 x Sonoff PoW R2(just to see some numbers) + Qubino 0-10v dimmer(for fan speed)
7. DIY bed presence detection using load cells and a NodeMCU
8. DIY wall switches using either ESP8266s or maybe something like blebox inbox ( https://blebox.eu/en/products/32-inbox-wireless-button-module.html )

— Other Questions —
Now I already made another thread about having a seperate to run in parallel with Home Assistant, and I really appreciate the feedback I got there. There I did not provide as much information as to why, or my use case. Therefore, I would like to challenge the research I done that showed that Homey would be the best solution for me.
7. Do you have any other suggestions as to which way I should go?

Sorry for the long thread, I hope someone will stick with me and can help me with some good insight :slight_smile:

The “smart devices” I own and wish to connect as much as possible of are:
Sony Bravia TV
OSMC Vero 4K+
Denon AVR
NEEO Remote
Nanoleaf Aurora
Fibaro Dimmer 2
Hue bulbs
Hue motion sensor
Beoplay
Xiaomi temperature
Xiaomi vibration
Xiaomi door
Xiaomi vacuum
Xiaomi switch
Xiaomi cube
Yeelock cabinet lock
Fibaro Smoke detector
Milight LED spot
iPhone
iPad
Lenovo Android Tablet
NVIDIA Shield
UniFi networking
Windows PC
Roomba
Logitech Harmony
Synology NAS
Netatmo Presence
Netatmo Healthy Home Coach
Google Home Mini
Google Chromecast
Sonoff @ Tasmota
Qubino 0-10v
Broadlink RM Mini 3
Broadlink RM Pro
ConBee (Not needed I assume)
Aeotec Z-Wave (Not needed I assume)
Shelly
Blebox Inbox

2

I think this would be more appropriate on the athom forums or whatever their support channels are.

3

As mentioned in OP, I did consider that. I obviously will also do that, but I would value insight from here much higher.

Before you ask why I do not just ask these questions on a Homey forum, it is because I do not want advice from people blindly loving a simple system like Homey, but would much rather hear it from people from this forum with wider experiences.

4

I meant that part asking about which of your devices will work with Homey.

5

Oh I see, I agree on that. If that was all I wanted to know, I would for sure have gone there straight away.

1 Like
6

I would personally keep most of the devices in HA ( as that offers more integrations ) and only move the ones that are better handled using Homey. Atleast thats what I did, but in the end it depends on why you would like to move to Homey… For me the Homey is mainly used for its interface ( new app ), free and easy Alexa integration and some Dutch apps and as the general alarm ( Heimdall App for Homey | Homey ).

Besides HA and Homey I use OpenHab for z-wave and Deconz for ZigBee.

Using the integration you can add most (light, switches, sensors etc) of your devices directly to Homey and besides that also use them in the Homey flow-editor. In case you need additional things you can also call HA services from a Homey flow.

The repo also has a custom-component to pack multiple sensors and switches into one entity so that it will be easier to manage within Homey

7

What did you decide to do in the end?

8

Actually I went through Homey, Hubitat and more platforms, but I was not satisfied with any of them. Homeseer and Indigo was also a terrible experience.

After trying most everything in home automation by now, I guess I have come to some personal conclusion. In my opinion, home automation is not worth the effort currently. No solution out there is really worth spending time on setting up, as the benefit will nowhere near match the effort. In hindsight, I would not have looked into it at all, but here I am I guess. I will say that HomeKit is currently the best option, and staying within actual HomeKit compatible devices would be the only thing I would recommend to anyone really. HomeBridge does work well too, even though it is a hassle to work with. Home Assistant seems to currently be at least sort of stable if I keep just the basics in there(stuff I cannot get to HomeKit otherwise) and have it forward that to HomeKit.

When all that is said, Homey was still the best of all the products that “compete” with Home Assistant. I guess I had too high expectations for it. It is easy to get expectations too high, when it is so easy to find examples of how much Home Assistant can actually do, and you do not stop to think about whether the hassle is worth it, and how long it will take till that great implementation you have created is broken. For almost anyone I would say go for Homey if it was between that and HA.

9

I am still haven’t tried it, so much thing I need to do, but I think a lot is possible with Homey:
https://tools.developer.homey.app/