A story about "When Homey Pro breaks down and getting support"

Off-Topic
,
1

One morning decided to install the latest Homey Pro 2023 firmware update (1.3.1). Took the Homey app on my mobile and chose to update the Homey.

Everything seemed to go fine and the device rebooted and came up an running. However I noticed that nope, it’s still running previous 10.2.1 version. So I told Homey to update itself again.

Seemed that the update process is running again, however this time after reboot, I got the red circle of death. Meaning the the device didn’t reboot properly.

Pulled the plug for a few minutes to see if the power reset would help. Nope.
Used the Homey USB Tool to install current firmware. Nope, didn’t help.
Factory reset and install current firmware, no help.

Wow, now I have a dead Homey and no automation. So then open a support request to Athom, and described what happened. Within an hour I got the responses, that the have issued and RMA and that I should send my Homey Pro to service as there is nothing that could be done remotely anymore.

Packed my Homey and sent it on the same day. Now realising how slow Finnish Postal service really is. Took a week to arrive at Athom’s service center. Once arrived, they had investigated it promptly and arrived at conclusion that the device is indeed dead and nothing can be done about. As it under warranty they have now mailed me a replacement device.

At first seemed that we can live with that. But after a while, you realise that how all the missing automations are affecting the normal daily routines. Lights are not turning on by motion in the room. Button+ is not updating information on their displays. Charging the car is not collecting statistics. And many more.

Quick fix was to initialise some automation on Philips Hue hubs, take my Homey pro 2019 into production with some quick flows to compensate for missing lighting related automation. And this has helped us for the first week. Now to wait for a second week for postal services to carry the replacement back.

Story continues… Let’s see how restoring a backup will work, I really hope they work.

Thank you to Athom Support for your quick responses!

8 Likes
2

Story continuous

Last week the Finnish post office finally delivered the replacement after been on the road for a week.

Installed the replacement and restored straight from the backup of the broken one that was the last one made before the failed update tries. Restoration was smooth and almost everything came online as they should, however a few things:

  1. For some reason OpenWeather app didn’t install. No problem, just install it from the store.
  2. One app installed from cli, this is obvious, so installed it from there

All good, or not. Realized that some of the lighting routines weren’t working as expected. Turned out that Phillips Hue over Matter didn’t recover quite that well, half of the lights responds with “Device class instance not found: light” and some motion sensors weren’t updating their status.

Moved all lighting routines back the the native Philips Hue app’s control instead of Matter.

Now all is working as they were before the the update attempt and it was safe to remove the old Homey Pro 2023 from my account.

3

One more thing came up as a developer. For some reason there was a ghost in the machine and the old replaced Homey Pro 2023 still was hanging around as in some tools the Homey/Cloud ID of that was still linked to the account and was reflecting everything from the replacement.

That in turn prevented anything from being installed from the cli as a developer to test and debug apps.

Turns out that while restoring from backup of a previous Homey Pro 2023 while that instance is still registered on my account, those IDs someway got mixed up. To recover:

  1. Factory reset the replacement one more time
  2. Add it to the account as a clean system and didn’t restore from backup.
  3. Check all the tools and apps that the ID is matching
  4. Factory reset
  5. Restore from backup

And presto now all is good.

Nothing is lost, everything is running properly, even though some Philips Hue lighting had to be updated in the flows as I switched from Matter back to Philips Hue native app.

Thank you to Athom’s Support for quick response times when something is horrible wrong. Unfortunately the postal services brings long delivery delays.