I’ve been working with home assistant for a while. Got it installed through a VM on my synology NAS. I was interested in using a homey for the sole reason of the advanced flows. Something i can’t get done through a node-red integration in my HASS since i lack the knowledge, time and motivation to learn this.
I saw the advanced flow from homey that looked simplified compared to node-red so i borrowed a homey bridge from a friend.
Now i’ve set it up and wanted to add my home assistant as a device. I’ve got to input the ip address of my hass. But when i do this and press connect it waits a bit and then gives me a timeout popup:
Error: SendMessageToApp(io.home-assistant)Timeout after 15000ms
Then i tried my reverse proxy address. To let this work i needed to delete the port that is auto filled in the address field. I then get to the login page but after logging in i get another error:
New devices found
Select the devices you’d like to add
Missing port
Now i know my app for my AC’s isn’t available through homey (it’s FGlair). So it seems i need my home assistant integration working with homey to get to these AC devices.
Does anyone have an idea, tip or solution to get me started with this integration?
Edit:
Is there a homey discord server that i can join to interact with other users?
I can interact here. But imho discord (or any other chat) works better for me.
About the connection. My instance of HA is not cloud based because it runs on my server. Made a reverse proxy that i entered as external address in my HA app so i don’t need to subscribe for outside access.
That brings me to the connecting part. My reverse proxy looks like xxxx.username.synology.me. So if i use this and left the port number unchanged (so it is 8123) i cant connect. But when i delete the port number it gets me to the HA login page. After logging in i get the error i showed in my op.
Thnx to @Mike1233 for providing me with this topic. I found out that my synology ddns and reverse proxy needed a port forward for homey to connect. Now i added my devices.
Unfortunately all these added devices are ‘unavailable’ when i click them. Also i don’t see the AC’s i added in HA in the list of available devices. So these are two issues that i got to sort out before even buying a Homey (sub) myself since i want to control my climate with it. But that’s stuff for another topic i guess
So without Homey you also get errors when trying to access Home Assistant from your outside address? If that’s the case, you need to look elsewhere because the issue isn’t with Homey.
The app page states “Support for Home Assistant devices with Light, Sensor, Binary sensor, Cover and Media player entities”.
My remote access to home assistant works fine. Connecting to it through homey works too now.
Well, i had lights and covers added as devices. But they, as like everything else, gave the message “device unavailable” after adding them.
So if i’m right the fglair airco’s should be working with the homey pro? Thing is, i want to check some stuff before buying myself a €400,- piece of hardware. Because my only reason to buy it is because of the advanced flows. Something i can do in node-red in HA but seemed to hard for me to learn the json formatting and all the rules with that.
As said above and other thread, all devices i added through the HA give the error “device unavailable”. Some devices should work with this HA integration for the normal homey bridge. But they don’t.
So i want to see this functioning for the devices that are supported with the HA integration into homey before i would buy the pro.
I would love to hear some suggestions or ideas on how to get some devices like lights to work through the integration of HA in Homey.
That would be strange. Since setting it up it makes a proper connection. I need to login to HA and the devices that are hosted in my HA are getting listed in Homey to add.
Maybe someone else has a solution or idea for this. Because i too wouldn’t know what could cause this to happen.
I think the Home Assistant app requires being able to set up a websocket connection to your Home Assistant instance, and reverse proxies typically don’t support this out-of-the-box. So check if perhaps you need to explicitly enable support for it.
I developer of the HA Community app. I can give you some insights.
But the Athom app you are using is not open source. I know some technical basics about the HA connection but can’t check the app code.
Difference:
Athom app (official):
useable for HomeyPro anc Cloud
imports HA devices with their entities
simplified, only common entities are supported
no possibilities to adjust devices or entities
connect only via port forwarding (running in the Athom cloud)
Community app:
only for HomeyPro
running on Homey, so local connection
imports HA entities based on domain
support most (nearly all) standard HA domains
customizeabl devices
Both are connecting to HA via Websocket.
Athom app uses oAuth, Community app the HA longlived tokens.
Connection is bidirectional via Websocket (instant updates from HA).
As far as I know, the Athom app also uses Websocket to read the device list. So I wonder why you get a device list, but no device content. But without code we can’t find the reason
But… When you are testing the Athom app on HomeyCloud you will never see all possibilities you will get with a HomeyPro.
We can only help you out with additional information. If you want to see details about the Community app, yo can taka a look at these pages. You can also ask other users in the HA community thread.
Thank you for this information! I think my issue might have to do with the fact that i need port forwarding enabled + that i’m using the synology ddns and reverse proxy to connect to the HA instance on my server.
Just added some HA devices again in Homey. The HA log doesn’t show anything regarding this action. I also can’t seem to find any log option in the Homey web app.
Didn’t notice that you are the devveloper of the community app. Now that i know this i can ask you this: does it make a difference if a device in HA is added through the integrations / devices in HA or through HACS? Because the fglair integration is added through HACS.
No, it doesn’t make a difference.
The (or both) Homey app(s) is connected to HA via Websocket.
if an entity changes in HA, then HA sends an update via Websocket to Homey and the Homey debice gets updated.
The other way around, if a Homey device changes (switch presses), the app sends a service call via Websocket to HA.
If you can add the devices, the Websocket connection is ok. Perhaps the proxy disconnects after a time. That would explain the error message. The reverse proxy must allow a constant connection without timeout/disconnects.
If you have a (semi-)fixed external IP address, instead of using the Synology DDNS service try using a direct connection to your IP address instead. Perhaps the Synology DDNS service is causing issues.
Thnx for all the info! @robertklep i’ve got a fixed ip adress. It took me a while to get this done by my isp but after 1,5 month they finally fixed that.
Thnx for all the info RonnyW. Given the information i assume a homey pro can connect through the lan network to my HA instance wich could make a difference?
This morning i noticed 2 of the 4 added devices from HA were lighting up in the homey app. One of them was my google home. That one gave an error when pressed upon. The other was a light source that i could turn on / off in homey. But the other 2 devices remaind “unavailable”.
Now i deleted everything again this morning and added some new devices through home assistance again. Now using my external ip adress and the port set within the port forwarding. Again 4 devices since the bridge is limited. They all were shown again as “unavailable”. But now, a few hours later, two of them light up. One is a light i can switch, the other a cover for my windows. They do seem to work. The other two (light nd thermostat) stayed “unavailable”.
Thank you for letting me know! I’m convinced a pro and the community app will do the trick.
Just one more thing to be sure. Im still a little bit reluctant to buying a Homey pro. The only reason i want one is because of the advanced flow being a lot more simplified compared to using the node-red extension in Home Assistant. I am reaching my limits in terms of knowledge (and time / motivation to learn all that) when it comes to using Node-Red and the JSON formatting that comes with it.
And €400,- is a lot of money when i only want to use one function from this device. (oke, i get it. support for matter, zigbee, z-wave and what not is also a plus but that wouldn’t be my main reason to buy a homey pro).
So my last question will be if anybody knows if there’s some sort of integration in home Assistant to get the simplified homey flows? Or another integration that looks like this other then node-red?
(I haven’t heard of / seen a node-red like flow application yet)
As I think advanced flow seems inspired by node-red, I have a struggle to create the most simple flows in node-red I admit I don’t invest much time to learn it as well.
When budget is a big item:
You can consider buying a used Pro 2019 (the one with dual-core CPU + 1GB RAM) with adv. flow license, or buy the license as add on.
I got a 2 yo one for €100 a little while ago.
I admit I don’t invest much time to learn it as well.