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.
Homey: to buy or not to buy - that is the question
Matthias
Member
First of all, hello, I am new to this forum.
I am planning on making my home smarter and have been looking out for clever ways to do so.
Homey is intriguing me for quite a few months, now and I have been passively following it's development. The voice controlled platform makes so much sense for home automation and the multi-protocol/multi-wavelength approach seems very intelligent.
Since there are very few reviews out there and even less recent ones, I thought I'd ask those who use the wonder globe for their opinion.
Now, I do realise that it is a bit unfair to ask this question on the official athom forum, but with the few users out there, and very few posting in English, I consider it a risk worth taking.
So my question:
Would you buy homey again?
Why am I hesitating to just by my very own homey?
I can read about many problems, which defy the original idea of the device:
- voice control seems to work well only for a fraction of people and even less for the non-dutch. Some proposed to use the phone app or an echo dot or google home...
Why not use one of these devices and a raspberry than to start with?
- old transmitting technologies like IR or 433 seem to be very unreliable.
- other technologies have not even been started to be made usable, like ZigBee or EnOcean.
- Athom has launched shop selling and judging from their latest interview videos, moved to a smaller location --> both of which make me think they are running out of money and might actually close soon, leaving all users with an everlasting alpha or beta version of what homey could be...
- Since things seem buggy, or not working at times, people seem to have difficulties explaining to their significant other why homey is not just an annoying toy. This might be quite an issue for me. ...shouldn't it be so easy that our moms can use it?
Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
I am planning on making my home smarter and have been looking out for clever ways to do so.
Homey is intriguing me for quite a few months, now and I have been passively following it's development. The voice controlled platform makes so much sense for home automation and the multi-protocol/multi-wavelength approach seems very intelligent.
Since there are very few reviews out there and even less recent ones, I thought I'd ask those who use the wonder globe for their opinion.
Now, I do realise that it is a bit unfair to ask this question on the official athom forum, but with the few users out there, and very few posting in English, I consider it a risk worth taking.
So my question:
Would you buy homey again?
Why am I hesitating to just by my very own homey?
I can read about many problems, which defy the original idea of the device:
- voice control seems to work well only for a fraction of people and even less for the non-dutch. Some proposed to use the phone app or an echo dot or google home...
Why not use one of these devices and a raspberry than to start with?
- old transmitting technologies like IR or 433 seem to be very unreliable.
- other technologies have not even been started to be made usable, like ZigBee or EnOcean.
- Athom has launched shop selling and judging from their latest interview videos, moved to a smaller location --> both of which make me think they are running out of money and might actually close soon, leaving all users with an everlasting alpha or beta version of what homey could be...
- Since things seem buggy, or not working at times, people seem to have difficulties explaining to their significant other why homey is not just an annoying toy. This might be quite an issue for me. ...shouldn't it be so easy that our moms can use it?
Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
Comments
i cant tell you to buy or not, a week ago i was on the point of sending it back for a cash return but the guys over here, told me to be patience that things will work out out and that media support comes very quickly.
the flows work great i use kaku 433 hrtz works fine for me i.r not so great bad and short signal only in straight line thats a miner for homey.
the community is very surportive that is very nice
but homey needs work and the 3rd party apps need to keep up with the updates to have a good user experiance
- The voice does not work as great as you might hope for. I rarely use it.
- Infrared does not work as great as you might hope for. I still didn't get it to work yet, which might be because of the devices I own and the angle at which Homey is placed.
- There is still a lot of work to do on a lot of areas.
However, the positive things:
- There are a lot of great apps, made by Athom AND by fanatic developers
- Every update Athom releases seems to be a really good step forward
- Most of the devices I have in my home are already controllable, which might be true for you as well.
- If you have some javascript skills, you might be able to create your own apps or improve existing apps.
- Once the media part of Homey is done, I think a whole new world opens!
It is getting better and community and developers are great.
Did I get it right ? Because that was my feeling as well...but is it enough?
If you look at Vera. The only thing the 'company' develops is the hardware (and OS) all the rest is done by the community. And they are still up-and-running. The potential Homey has (IMO) is huge, and the community is making it even better with the power of building apps.
I would buy Homey again. It works with all my existing KlikAanKlikUit stuff, infrared stuff and two z-wave devices (which are generic switches). Voice also works nice, but then again there are users who hate it.
If flows work well and z-wave is stable, homey is rather on par with competitors, I guess.
Do any of you use in-wall switches/dimmers and if yes, which technology and which brand?
And how is the voice output?
I guess you can make interesting flows with that...
Right now I'm using 9 kaku modules, 4 somfy screens, 3 rgbw g010 bulbs, Honeywell evohome system with 6 zones, 2 kodi devices, tv, receiver, rune audio device, zwave multisensor. All those devices are working very well.
It's simple to create flow and add devices. You don't have to create code.
I should buy homey again. The insight module gives a lot of information to tune the heating system and electricity consumption.
Next to that I get a lot information about mine living schedule, to tune the automation.
My wife and daughter are talking to homey instead to get the remote control. In most of the time you have to repeat your voice command. But we are happy about that.
To buy or not to bug depends on your expectations. I have the homey from the pre-order and paid 299 for it. I have spend a lot of time in it, testing it, testing it, trying out and giving feedback to Athom.
Last week was a sad week for me, i decided to sent the Homey back and i got after 1,5 years, my money back.
I would buy it again, but not at this stage. It is not consumer ready. I, on the other hand, have allready lots of experience with home automation. I have eg a homewizard at home.
I wanted something else, nicer, better software, more capabilities and decided to buy the homey in a early stage. The possibilities are much wider than the homewizard....
But at this stage, they are certainly not, certainly when i compare it with the homewizard, which for me is the minimum and it should win from it, this is why:
-The (ios) App is still not good enough, very basic, no nice overview: eg temperature and motion and door sensors are not shown in a separate small overview. No favorites, buttons are to big etc etc.
-The app does not support adding or changing devices as homewizard does, so you have to open your laptop all the time.
-The 433 range receiving is very poor (sending is fine!). When there is movement on the first floor homey does not receive the signal. Homewizard does. So for that reason i used both Homey and Homewizard
-The voice recognition in the ios app, is very good!!
-The voice recognition of the homey itself is still very poor. In the same circumstances, you get different results. Many false positives. The voice is a bit better since 1.02, but still not good enough. So you don't use the voice that much, or you have to speak very loud and not natural. So, "ok homey... eten" works, but when at the dinner table 5 meters away, i have to say it more than once. It it nice in the beginning, but after a while it is annoying.
-Confirmation in a flow did not work 100% of my tries. I know some other people got it to work, though.
-IR works quit good at my place. Homey did turn on my tv and paused the journaal (dutch program). That worked almost always. I made a flow who detected if tv was on, and if so, it did not do anything. When the tv was of, it turned on and after vew seconds it paused it.
-The IR range is not that good, so i placed homey next to the tv. Also some commands seem not to work.
-The flow editor works, but it is not very handy. Drag and drop is not handy with a big list. There is no ELSE. They should use something as "blockly" (look it up) but for now we have to deal with the current one.
-Zwave range is poor.
-Stability is not good enough. At my place i could sent the temperature of my zwave radiator valves. But after the re-write of the zwave classes, it does not work anymore. Yes it works, when i put homey next to it. But when i do that it can not control my IR :-)
-Hue works most of the time.
-Sonos works a bit since 1.0.2. But not as they promises in the start of their homey project: "hey homey play some music from Bach"
Alltogether you can say it can do a lot, but it is still not ready enough.
Most frustrating of it all is the very poor communication of Athom. They did that from the start, and have not been able to change that good enough. So when you have a problem, get used to waiting very long time before someone answers.
Don't expect them to read the forum that good. Sometime they do, but most of the time it is silence.
For me that was the biggest reason to sent it back. Together with the moment they thought it is stable, it was not.
To many things are not stable enough.
I will buy it again in about 6 months, if the complaints are less than now.
Also you will read different reactions on this forum, some people can speak well, some nothing, some have no zwave problems, some have. Also that gives you an idea of how stable it is. Of course their are many different situations, but some things must be more or less the same. Maybe their are hardware problems who can explain that, but homey always says that is not the case. Eg my not working "confirmation" is strange.
Should you buy it? Well, if you like to experiment, and can wait very good, if you don't bother if things break once in a while. If the current possibilities are allready good enough for you.
And if you believe that they can fix the speech recognition, or you do not need it, then you should buy it.
Ps
I am not a homewizard (hw) fan or something like that. I couldn't wait for a better product to follow up hw, and hoped homey would be the one. But at this stage the homewizard is a better and more stable solution, although it cannot speak zwave or IR.
If Homey has the financial capabilities to build for another year or so, without getting bankrupt, i am sure they are the better choice!! And then i will buy it again.
If you're expecting a device that, as is, will work perfectly for all the different situations that you want to use it for, then Homey is not (yet) that device for you.
But if you see it as an investment in the future, where some things will work right away, and some don't work yet and it may take some time before those get fixed/added (and that's okay with you and your family members), in other words, a device that grows more and more useful with time, then Homey is a really good investment.
Me, I would buy it again without hesitation.
The answer will differ from person to person due to different reasons.
I for one would answer it with a sounding YES.
Here is why:
I do not have a lot of spare time or energy to play around with things like a raspberry pi and domoticz, but playing around with technology is something I really like. Homey provides a powerful and ready to use platform to play with. It is the perfect low entry point for me.
The fact that it's not a perfect platform is part of the fun. Since the initial release, Homey has made tremendous improvements. Every major upgrade feels like Christmas. It is fun to discuss new and better ways to configure Homey with the community and I like to follow the progress Homey is making. Homey is a cutting edge product and that makes it a unique experience.
It is easy, fun and rewarding to play around with Homey and that's the main reason why I love it.
At this moment it works for my needs/current devices. Some stuff could be better but I'm patient.
Over time I'll add some devices. But I'm trying to pace myself not to spend too much on gadgets and such in a short period of time.
As others said before, it depends what you want and expect.
I am thinking about Zipato or Homee.
What does homey do better? What is less well done?
Homey: http://domotica-blog.nl/post/review-homey-by-athom
One small addition, the community could be so much better if Athom would spend a bit more time discussing things openly. For example I need to decide to replace 433 equipment with zwave because of the truly horrible reception range. Athom told us that they know about it and that it can be fixed. But left it at that. Also a lot of promises (like to show how voice rec works for them in a video) were made and never kept. Deadlines seemed optional but were never apologized for. It makes it a bit hard to take them serious. I love my Homey with all it's problems, but it could be so much better.
If they would start by taking these ridiculous videos offline showing stuff that clearly worked 2 years ago but now are simply impossible, but when that seems to be too much effort.
It's frustrating.
ik krijg een dejavu van ooit een nederlandse afdeling van AC RYAN prachtig product maar men luisterde niet naar de gemiddelde gebruiker, firmware ondersteuning tbv hardware werd op laag pitje geplaatst . Google zelf maar naar het resultaat wat dit heeft opgeleverd .
Ik was een positieveiling ben ook beslist niet dom voor er comments komen over heb je ptp gedaan ? heb je alle mogelijke interferentie objecten in je huis uitgesloten , heb je je somfy motoren gereset JA allemaal gedaan
ATHOM LUISTER NU EENS ..... ga terug naar de basis en dat is emiel's visie keep it simpel luister naar de gewone gebruikers je ma zit ook niet op github om issues te melden (toeval of niet veel 868 433 en infrarood klachten)
They have already stated that they are working on "improved 433 MHz reception", "improved infrared support" and "V2 of our speech API", but I don't expect those anytime soon.
As I said before, Homey is an investment in the future. If you expect everything to work well right now, you will most likely be disappointed. But they have already come a long way since the start of this project, and we can see improvements every month (even if they're not always the improvements that some people are waiting for).
This is definitely a project that requires a lot of patience...
One thing I will agree on: communication is definitely not Athom's strength and could be a lot better (and I don't mean on github!) Which is also why I regret that @Emile believes giving us a status update once a week is too much.
The choices you have are either very geeky (Domoticz, self-assembled RPi interface), which are impossible to use for the vast majority of the people.
The other side of the spectrum is the very user-friendly devices (Google Home, Alexa, etc). These work straight out-of-the-box, have good speech recognition, immense support base and consumer amounts. However, IMO, these devices are incredibly lackluster when it comes down to capabilities. I seriously read a reddit post in which someone got Google Home to change channels of their television set by speech. That is the absolute limit of what these devices can do.
I always have seen Homey as a midpoint between these two ends of the spectrum. Homey is consumer-friendly enough that many people can work with it (heck, my girlfriend can make her own flows with Homey). On the other hand, I have not yet found a device which I wanted to have and which could not be supported by Homey.
In my home, domotica will stay with Homey due to the sheer capabilities of the system. For perfect domotica, either Homey has to improve stability, or Google Home/Alexa has to improve capabilities by a ton. I do not see the latter happening in the coming two years.
In the end, yes, I would buy Homey again. I love playing around with it. I love the capabilities it offers. I love that my LIFX lights go on in the hallway when movement is detected (with a dimmed intensity if it's night). I love that I can shout to my Homey that it's christmas time to light up my tree. There is no other system in the world that I can do that with at the moment.
Will try this soon LOL
She has little interest in home automation and "tolerates" it as my hobby. When she wanted homey to react to a voice command, she opened the UI and without ever seeing it before clicked a flow together in under 60 seconds. I was honestly impressed at the ease of use of Homey.
edit: and my girlfriend's technical skills of course!
Generally, the concept is great, I am working on adding staff and use cases. Voice controlling is a desaster but hopefully will be now finally working for non-dutch people with Alexa integration.
Hope Homey and developers will continue to add apps to the app store and improve their Service replies which is a desaster. Basic functionality like playing music from Spotify on the speaker itself is still missing and doesn´t work, it still requires Sonos speakers...
Finally, I would probably say to 60% I´d buy it again as Raspberry Pi with Openhab is just nice, if you know exactly how to program and you have plenty of time for frustrating experiences. If you do not know programming, buy Homey and it will typically work with supported devices quite nicely.