Infrared is not dead! Your Homey proves It. Get your IR to the next level.
Infrared is the most widely used wireless protocol for home appliances on the planet, and probably the most overlooked one as well.
This app brings back the feature I missed the most after it was removed: triggering flows with your IR remote. Because it is so much easier than the alternatives. I turn on the TV, and Homey automatically switches the HiFi to the right input, dims the lights and closes the blinds. No reaching for the phone, no unlocking it, no finding the app or a widget, no starting a flow by hand, and no arguing with Siri, Alexa or any of the other ladies. I also programmed one of the spare buttons on my remote to trigger the full sleep flow. The best automation is the kind you trigger without even thinking about it.
You can install it from the beta appstore:
Features
- Learn mode: point a remote at Homey, press a button, and the signal is captured and verified. Press the same button again to confirm. Finetune it.
- Manual entry: Paste a code in Pronto Hex, HEX, Global Caché, Broadlink or the native Homey format.
- IR database: Global Caché keeps an online database with more than 285,000 codes. Look one up and enter it by hand.
- Single command or full remote: Add one button, or build a remote with several named, iconised commands such as power, volume, navigation and playback.
- Custom icons
- Quick on/off button: Map two commands to a single on/off toggle.
- Advanced view: inspect the pulse graph, carrier, hex value, bit length and pulse/gap timings of any captured signal.
- Toggle-bit handling for RC5 and RC6, so both variants of a keypress are recognised.
- Trigger flows: a learned infrared signal can start a Homey flow.
- Action flows: Send out recorded or manually entered codes
Hardware
You need a pre-2023 Homey to receive signals and to trigger flows with infrared. The 2023 and later models do not have IR receivers. However they do have IR transmitters so you can still add infrared signals manually and send them.
This means the “old” Homeys just went up in value if you care about IR. Long live the classics.
Practical tip: if IR reception matters to you, turn off the LED ring on your pre-2023 Homey. It can cause interference, and learning works noticeably better with the ring dark.
Supported Protocols and Carrier Frequencies
| Protocol | Carrier |
|---|---|
| NEC | 38 kHz |
| Sony SIRC | 40 kHz |
| Samsung | 38 kHz |
| JVC | 38 kHz |
| Panasonic | 37 kHz |
| RC5 | 36 kHz |
| RC6 (mode 0) | 36 kHz |
| RC6 (mode 6A) | 36 kHz |
| Generic (raw) | 38 kHz, up to 128 bits |
The app has been tested with RC5 and RC6 (Philips remotes). Homey turned out to be more responsive to infrared than my own devices also the signals sent out by homey are stronger than my remotes.
Non-supported protocols and limitations
The infrared world is more complex than it looks, so do not be surprised if a number of remotes will not work. Typical examples that are out of
scope:
- Sharp and Denon coding, which uses a very different timing structure.
- Mitsubishi, Toshiba and RCA code formats.
- Cisco and other 56/57 kHz systems. Carriers far outside roughly 30 to 45 kHz are not handled.
- Bang & Olufsen, which uses a 455 kHz carrier, and similar exotic hardware.
- Air conditioners that send one very long state frame (temperature, mode and fan speed all at once), such as Daikin, Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, Midea and Toshiba. Those frames are simply too long for Homey to handle.
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