This is the forum archive of Homey. For more information about Homey, visit the Official Homey website.
The Homey Community has been moved to https://community.athom.com.
This forum is now read-only for archive purposes.
The Homey Community has been moved to https://community.athom.com.
This forum is now read-only for archive purposes.
Comments
@MarcoF For me playing with the software didn't lead to something really usefull, so I decided to play in a different way.
COOL!!! What are you going to do?
Think I'll paint it and see if I can get some good pictures, yesterday I made some with my Phone but they're not so good.
Perhaps do some IR tests, I saw the hole in front of the IR receiver was a bit obstructed by the case, will see if I can modify it and see how it performs without the light guide ring. I also noticed that the IR emitters are not that well alligned with the holes, will see if I can improve that too.
And there's also something that's named console... no headers on there yet, but who knows
console always +1
I'm very, as mentioned/said very many times, curious about the IR thingie!
The MM demo device and my own device are both showing the IR leds a not properly aligned to the IR-holes and i'm still convinced the (to small) holes are a big part of the problem.
IR reception is also very strange and will test this the upcoming days.
Couldn't control yourself any longer?
Yeah, I suspect the same for the IR emitters.
Let me know how you test the reception, maybe I can perform the same test fully assembled and disassembled.
My "plan"/idea for receiving is;
Configure some "scenes" in my Harmony One and see if Homey recognizes these signals.
My "plan"/idea for receiving is;
We have this Marmitek IR transmitter and its reacts on "almost all" receiving IR signals by blinking a small red LED. So I want to setup one flow with multiple (manually and DB selected) IR commands. Then i want to test if the Marmitek reacts on the signals and see if distance and/or the orientation of Homey to the Marmitek makes any difference.
Ok, that I can test too, we also have a Marmitek.
And what about receiving, If I'm correct you have a Sony Android TV right, we may even have the same remote.
Our Sony came with the RMT-TX100D remote.
No need for Marmitek/Harmony/flows...
Just created this flow like this;
The On flow reacts on "Channel 1, Button 1, On" and turns on the 4 HUE light
The Off flow reacts on "Channel 1, Button 1, Off" and turns off the 4 HUE light
Now i'm going to add a separate controlled Bloom to Hue again, see if it shows up to Homey and I can connect it to a different ELRO remote that we also use for other sockets in the house.
Until now i'm pleasantly surprised about the Zwave and 433 stability.
Past 30 minutes I deleted and re-add one and the same GreenWave PowerNode about 20 times for testing without any hick ups.
Just before the testing with the GreenWave node I moved 2 Z-wave device 4-5m away of Homey and everything still works.
"OK {almost everything that sounds like Homey}"
[edit]
Nevermind......
The thing mentioned in this thread about the IR blasters/receiver not matching up precisely with the openings in the serrated edge happens here as well, and I'm considering filing it down just a bit to open it up a bit more so the signals can get in/out better for IR.
The playing time give me a great look into Homey, Voice, Flow editor, programming, etc.
It also gave me the chance to look at the build quality of Homey, look how stable it is with my modules/sensors, try voice with our voices, playing with the app, experience the FW/App update regime, etc.
Our experience is that voice is not our thing. Voice is a OK medium/thinkgie for controlling domotica, but it also has big downside; if there more noise then voice become almost useless. With more people in the room, Roomba driving around, the stereo at a some what higher volume, it all makes Homey "deaf".
Unless our Homey hasn't suffered on crashes/RROD I see strange things in CPU/MEM loads, where MEM of certain apps raise ~40% in ~30min and GC kicks it down again. For these apps its a small MEM allocation (35-48mb), but I think that this for bigger apps can become a pain in the *** for Homey's free mem and performance.
For now I see 2 updates that starts at around 30mb each (60mb total) and after 40-50min. the are at 40-45mb each (80-85mb). This are small apps and it could be that apps which are using 60-80mb from start grow to 80-110mb. Install a few of these apps and there definitly will be a memory issue if app will grow and GC won't kickin in time.
The Flow editor works in basic pretty well. On the other side its very painful to see that a simple slider for the flow list/menu is, after several updates, still missing and its almost impossible to make >20 flows.
Programming works well, its pretty well documented. A big downside is that's it almost impossible to make/add/push/create very simple scenes/code/"powerScripts" to Homey which can make Homey way more powerful. I think this is again the "KISS" principal, but placing it at the settings page will hide it from the "normal" non-geek customer. Making/adding/creating such a option can replace tons of Flows and make it more easy to manage a bigger system.
Homey build quality is pretty good. The LED ring is some what rough. The IR-leds are a complet different story..... I reported this at Athom, got a (expected) politic answer on which I'm a bit disappointed. I'm not going into details on this issue and only say to you all; take a very(!) good(!) look(!) at the IR holes and all 6 IR leds.
The last month I bought, for testing, 2 KaKu remote, KaKu doorbell, 1 greenwave and used 1 spare Greenwave6p, fibaro wallplug, AEOTEC smartplug.
The KaKu doorbell is working great, when its not "connected" to Homey.
If I use the doorbell sender for activating flows, then I get a big mess..... flows not triggering and/or flows triggering 1,2,3,4+ times after 1 push.
The KaKu remotes are also not working really good with Homey and more or less behaving the same as the KaKu doorbell sender.
Z-wave is a big pain in the ***. Including of device is going OK and in most cases pretty well. But after some time, saveral hours/days, most device became unreachable.... at this moment all my zwave devices/modules are "dead" for homey.....
The Homey Android App is working pretty well. I didn't use it that much and basically because all my zwave device are dead. The time that i did use it, gave me a pretty good impression of the official and Beta release. In general the app works pretty well and is a good point for further development. To me the zone choice is not really intuitive, but could be something that I need to get used to.
FW updates are released very, very, very, very slow.
I can remember the First Badge boys/girls scream there love about the several updates a day, now it are at most 2 updates a month. The 2 updates a month are only for Experimental and "Beta/Stable" needs to do it with 1 update every 3-4 weeks. Also the updates are fixing mostly small issues and several big/most asked/annoying once are still open.
For now I decided to wait for the next stable (probably .33 or if the again skip a number .34) and/or BetterFlowEditor.
I hope for the best and hopes Athom will speedup development and finds a way to better manage the expectations
[edit]
Here the current state of the connected Z-wave devices;
Rebooting Homey and/or restarting Zwave chip is not helping. Ringing the doorbell start audio for 2+ times, sun set/rise is not working, some more advanced flows are not possible (because of the FlowEditor limitations and/or because it needs multiple flows to get is work and then i'm still missing a scroll bar), IR learning/sending is almost impossible, etc. etc.
Homey is "dead".....
We have a KaKu 102 remote next to our bed which switches a Bloom to soft red or bright white and switch a Elro 433 socket.
So this morning I wanted to switch to Elro and the Elro didn't respond.
So I tried to turn on the Bloom and that worked....
Then i took the original Elro remote and that worked without a oroblem.
So in the Bloom case the KaKu remote sends to Homey, Homey receives the 433 signal and Homey uses the Hue API to control the Bloom.
In the Elro case the KaKu remote sends a signal to Homey, Homey receives the 433 signal, but never sends a 433 signal to the Elro socket.
So in this case 433 receiving works and 433 sending is dead.
Systemlog; 51FF5F6983
We have this Marmitek IR transmitter transceiver with a small red led as indicator for receiving IR signals.
We always saw the red led blink very bright and I thought that was just the way it should work; receive IR == bright blink
But this evening I could get Homey switching my Onkyo receiver by IR and I got a bit frustrated. So I place Homey 20cm in front of the Marmitek and then i noticed the red led of the tranceiver was blinking very(!!!!) soft. So I took the official Onkyo remote, pushed a few buttons and the red light blinked very bright..... So that does mean the brightness of the blinking red led is corresponding to how strong the IR signal is??? Did some more testing with other remotes and different distances and indeed the brightness of the red led is a indicator for how strong the received IR signal is.
So I created a flow which send 66 the same IR signals and took Homey in the hand. Got a good sit on the couch, in a 4m away direct line of sight and started to hit the "test" flow button. While hitting the button, I pointed one of Homey IR-leds towards the transceiver and started to changed the horizontal angle of Homey. After some angle shifting I found the sweet spot;
Horizontal +/- 0,5-1cm(!).............
1,5cm above or below horizontal and the Marmitek isn't receiving a signal anymore
Also tried it with some bouncing, but that isn't working at all (and is working with the original/official onkyo remote).
So, the angel of the IR leds is awesomely small which is a awesome disappointment and confirmation.