Hi,
I recently bought a new washing machine, a Beko. This machine offers remote control and monitoring over a bluetooth connection via the HomeWhiz app.
It would be great if I could connect my washing machine to my Homey, this way I can for example receive a notification when it is done. Unfortunately there is no app yet.
During my search online I found HomeWhiz integration for Home Assistant on github.
Is there any chance to convert this into a Homey app fairly easily? I have very poor coding skills.
It probably isn’t, otherwise all neat HA integrations were available as Homey app already
My ‘solution’ (best of both!): buy a (old) Rpi, or NUC / thin client (with Ble of course), install HA, add the devices you like, and connect them with Homey as they were native Homey devices, by means of the neat Home Assistant Community app.
My NAS has no Ble, this would require a dongle. But I have a Rpi of an old project, which is gathering dust, this can be used perfectly.
The HA community app does not support washing machines by the looks of it, however, perhaps a Compound device that was mentioned can be used.
As soon as I have time, I will try this out and report back.
Washing machines are just a grouped set of entities.
Just start with a “custom device” or “switch device” (for easy on/off). You don’t need compounds any more. Just add entities to your devices in Homey.
For questions about the HA app, please use the app thread and I’ll guide you.
It works, I can see 16 entities in Homey! I was amazed about how easy it was to get HA and the HA Community app working
The washing machine can handle one Ble connection at a time which now is used by HA. So I can still create and use custom washing programs via the HA UI and I can remotely monitor everything in Homey, pretty cool!
2 things that I need to look at are:
somehow making HA easier to use for my girlfriend as using the Homewhiz app is not possible anymore. I guess that I can create some dashboard in HA, not sure.
now I have 16 tiles in Homey, which is not a great presentation of information. I will delete the ones that I do not need and of what is left I will update the icons to make things easier to interpret.
Unless someone more experience in both systems has a better idea?
With ‘16 tiles’ you mwan 16 devies, one for every sensor?
Just use one device (on/off switch or what’s your primary control.
Then go to device settings/repair. select “add entity”. Then search the sensors and add them one by one.
Or if all sensors are part of the same HA device, go to device settings and check the sensor checkbox.
Start with this post and check both links inside. I hope this will guide you how to build your custom devices
I now followed your advice and added entities to one device. This works great for sensors and switches however some entities have a list of attributes like washing programs, temperatures or different spin RPMs. (in this case the entity name start with “select.”) I did not figure out how to add these in a way that I can choose from a list of attributes.
When I want to add such an entity, I can see the available attributes in the Add Entity screen. Is there a way to be able to select one of these attributes for each entity?
It’s not possible to show dynamic lists as picker in the GUI.
The only possible way is using flow actions where you can select a entity/capability of your device and use the autocomplete field to select a list value.
You can add select. entities to a device (without attribute selection). The flow card uses the list attribute for the autocomplete field.
You can consider using an adv. virtual device for this as in-between.
It has custom pickers, (you can request your own), and selectors, like modes for thermostats, A/C’s and the like.
I tried to add the select. entities but I was not sure how to change the Capability field as it by default choose to start the capability with measure_generic. When I remove this part (now it starts with select.), I could not find the entity in the Change Entity screen.
An Advanced Virtual Device will need many custom picker requests because it has quite a few “select.” entities with custom options.
However, I got things working, more ore less
Alternatively I made a flow that selects the options that I would like to have, this works great!
Some 1 second delays were needed between the different options to give the washing machine time to digest each change. Also the order of options is important as some options seem to change others.
Selecting a delayed start on the washing machine is not supported by HA so I also created a flow that reboots the Rpi which has HA running on it so I can quickly connect my phone to the washing machine and add the delay.
