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My first expirence with homey
michelkamp
Member
As a advanced user of DomoticZ for 3 years i was ready to try something else. Something amazing...
So today i received my Homey, 2 weeks earlier then expected ! so party time ! Hmm not really a big one , sorry. Let me tell my first meeting with homey:
1) ok the Homey arrived earlier.
2) opened the box ... where's the quick start guide ??? what to do now .... ?
3) Ok as every geek , who reads the manual any way so power it on , and .... silence ....
4) After 2 minutes , hey its speaks .... Okay go to the website ...
5) i followed the setup steps have to say a nice way fresh of doing ! (compliment)
6) next to update the firmware to 1.5.8 , took about 10 minutes to complete
8) so now i am ready to add a zwave device , for a simple test i want to add a NEO Coolcam power plug
9) so added the NEO coolcam app and included the device.....
10) first attempt it detects the device but then is report the device is to far away ??? if 1 meter is already to far , o god...
11) Second attempt i press add and boom i get the message ' something was wrong ' ...
12) So i had to delete the device first using the zwave setting - > remove device ... strange because it wasn't visible in the device overview... So it looks like the device add process is not thread / transaction safe ...
13) 3'd try , moved homey 10 cm and bingo it discovered the device.
14) Now i press using the device menu on and off. if reacts ... lets try again on ... off ... on ... hmm nothing ...
15) try'd 10 times , nothing ... lets reboot the device.
16) okay now it looks like reacting okay...
17) now i setup a flow. first lets see if homey can say a message when i turn the neo coolcam plug on. i created the simple flow , but nothing happens ...
18) try'd and try'd .... no luck .. So deleted the zwave device again and added it again ... and yes bingo now it works
pfff hope this is going to be the all over experience ....
19) So lets see if homey can listen to me . . lets setup a work flow that when i say OK homey sleep it turns off the cool cam plug.
20) pfff this really doesn't work ... sometimes it reacts to OK homey but 9 of the 10 times it doesn't do anything... So that part for sure doesn't work.... Maybe a tip for @Homey sometimes it's better to remove features than put a 10% working in...
21) to trouble shoot the issues i missed a log , so i went to the store and found the Home logger app... Cool .. this looks like working ... but i miss the internal flow monitoring .... i can see a flow is executed / updated but i can't see the internals of the flow ... hope this will implemented soon. (a really missing developer feature , we have to debug...)
21) next step i looked at the developers tool page , cool , lets hope more to come.
So i really have be honest, my frist experience for the Homey with a 300 Euro tag isn't what i expected at all....
Let's hope it's firmware related or it's a learning curve for me ...
What are your experiences with Homey ??
Comments
But indeed, for me Zigbee is working great and stable.
There is an issue for this on Github that has a lot of info and possibly some solutions.
What channel is your wifi on? Wifi might disturb the zigbee-network:
https://support.metageek.com/hc/en-us/articles/203845040-ZigBee-and-WiFi-Coexistence
I love the posibilitys to use all types of domotica standards and userinterface to create flows.
I hate the unreliability. It looks like everyday Homey is acting difference without changing anything.
After every updat there are improvements, but also every time missing some functionality been there before.
I can also imagine that Athom will be driven crazy about this.
I also see a lot of effort from Athom to improve.
So I'll still stick to Homey until now.
So Yeah, always room for improvement, but stick to it, it's a super fun device.
@canedje Yes i agree , I have now just migrated the living room to homey as a try out. If it works stable i will continue to migrate others. But for now i am a title disappointed on the stability (and some other things) so i will stay a bit longer on my DomoticZ platform.
@sossienl ; ?? what relationship ($?) do you have with Athom since you may not be honest on a public community forum ? ;-)
I a other blog i was complaining about not having a complex schedule trigger. And got reactions from @lubbertkramer , @jjtbsomhorstbvdbos . So since i am still in a learning curve and wanted to use only the standard flow cards (without homeyscript) i figured out the scenario below to have only 1 flow to let my lights schedule on [ON] 07:00~08:00 and [ON] 18:00~23:00 , just for me to learn the possibilities.
Step 1:
First i create several alarms based on mu schedule plan above
Step 2:
I create the flow below (the speech is just for debug). If the Alarm goes of it checks the name tag "kamer Lampen" and then it checks what it should do "Aan" . If it contains "Aan" it will trigger a flow "Huiskamer Lampen aan". BUT you could also just use the Device card to trigger the lights and so eliminating the 2 extra flows.
Optimize step:
as mentioned above i have created 2 extra flow , this just to centralize all my access to my lamp devices and making it reusable for other future flows.
Turn device zone on:
and Turn device zone off:
Ok i have to figure out how to make it smarter using the sun rise and go under that's a backlog for me.
Any suggestions are welcome.
michel
Just make a flow with ''datum tijd''.
And your else card in the first flow will always activate when you alarm clock go's off.
What I did:
Create flows like the last one.
I created the flows:
Sfeer verlichting (normal lights dimmed)
Verlichting uit (everything off command even if there no lights on)
100% verlichting (use full for cleaning etc).
Then I created the trigger flows like:
If sunset is starterd and somen one is home ask if lights have to turn on.
if yes activate flow sfeer verlichting.