Hello, I just received a newsletter from Athom providing one article about motion sensors: Find the Best Motion Sensors for Your Smart Home in 2021 | Best Buy Guide
Here they write about several motion sensors, that were tested and say “…you have nothing to worry about with Homey Bridge and Homey Pro, both of which…”.
One of the motion sensors in the list Athom tested is the Philips Hue Motion Sensor . Unfortunately in my Homey Bridge I can’t connect to that sensor, which is already connected to my Hue Bride (which also is connected to Homey Bridge).
Does someone have an idea how to connect that motion sensor to be available for flows then?
That doesn’t build a lot of confidence when there are false information out for sales reasons. Or does one end of the company just doesn’t know what the other is doing? Strange…
Just received the following anser from Athom support:
Thank you for contacting Athom support.
Sadly it is not possible to add your Hue motion sensor due to the Homey bridge due to the limitations of the sensor.
I do agree that this is something that is not explained very well in the article you have send me and requested our marketing team to make a mention of this.
This all sounds pretty disappointing. I honestly don’t think the sensor has limitations either. Because in Homey Pro the sensor also works…
That sounds like a load of @#&)€=#. This is Athom’s choice to link to the Hue bridge and not have an app to link it straight to the Homey bridge. And even with the Hue bridge, it is all about server load, not sensor limitations. Their current Hue implementation requires polling to get sensor data, which asks lot of data to be transferred. I even think they could write a better implementation if they wanted to.
I thought, by paying $ 3 extra every month for the using of their server they can provide me an adequate performance to deal with those continous sensor data…
So I guess the only optoin is to get rid of the Bridge and use Homey Pro!?
Just randomly dropping some feedback here on the way I resoled the issue of not being able to hook up the Philips hue motion sensors to Homey bridge directly:
In the hue ecosystem, set up your sensors as you like and have then trigger a hue light in the same virtual ‘room’. You can then use this light as a relay, since Homey bridge can detect the state change of this light. This state change can then be used as a trigger for any flow. Keep in mind that this relay light needs to be dedicated to the purpose of relaying the state of the motion detectors, so you can not switch it on or off by any other means or it will trigger the flow that the sensor was supposed to trigger. You get the idea…
Hello Colin,
I never resolved that problem and after also having other issues that never really worked I decided to sell my Homey systems (also my Pro) and switched to Home Assistant (using this for 10 months now happily).
Regards
Sebastian
I have a few Philips motion sensors, connected to the Hue bridge.
But since I can’t use them with Homey bridge, i have switched in some rooms to these cheap Aqara motion sensors, up until now, they work pretty good
I was able to make it work fairly reliably for a while, using a relay light as an in-between… right until I was able to score a second hand 2019 Pro. Now I am happy as a clam to be able to instantaneously see what those sensors are doing and having all the functionalities one would expect. I binned the Bridge, as I couldn’t possibly imagine any real practical use for it considering what I originally had in mind for it.
I just ordered a Homey Bridge, but reading this I’ll probably just send it back. Controlling the motion sensors from Hue was the main use for me. Really dissapointed to read this.
I just don’t know how a sensor in the HUE motion sensors kan be an issue, it’s the electronics inside that reads the sensors values and then report to the the Hue bridge, so, how hard can it be to get the Hue bridge sensor values to the Homey, Homey is already connected to Hue bridge as it has all the hue lightbulbs.
Well, this is most probably because they generate too much traffic, and traffic = $$$ in datacenters. From what I know most other sensors send changes by themselves, but Hue sensors are polled every x secs to see if there’s any news.
Apple home is (probably) using a single local connection.
Homey (cloud) is a cloud connection with multiple Homey’s on 1 server (little bit of a speculation, nothing was confirmed, just what was noticed by people).
So that’s kind of comparing apples to oranges (convenient isn’t it).
but also Homey still uses a (old) way to see what the bridge has, by polling the bridge for the last state of each individual sensor and lamp, a sensor you don’t want a poll rate that is 10 seconds or so, as that is way too slow, and anything lower is way too expensive (bandwidth wise) for a database system like Homey (cloud).
I don’t think apple uses polling for the sensors.
People already complain with a Homey Pro that the connection with the bridge is causing high traffic numbers in their router, let alone if multiple people do that on a single server.
