Goodbye Homey. Hello Fibaro Home Center 2

Then I missed that implementation since I removed the app when Homey updated to v2 hoping that if I remove some apps Homey would run a little better. But I am glad to see that basic commands have been implemented directly into the app so that there is no need for IFTTT to do the work :wink:

Err. Fibaro opened up HC2 a couple of years back to allow users to code plugins and then backtracked and disabled the feature ‘temporarily’. To date they have still not reinstated this feature, and likely never will. Not being able to do this is a major ‘power’ user restriction on Fibaro, whilst on Homey it’s really good.

K

Strange, since the Lua documentation is still online:

And Lua support is still mentioned in the specifications, too: https://www.fibaro.com/en/products/home-center-2/specifications/

i think, lua for scenes is still supported, but you cant code own plugins anymore

btw: hc2 was my first smarthome system… after that i try homee then openhub and now i’m happy with homey

Ah right. We were talking about scenes, so that’s still supported.

Correct. LUA scenes can still be created. I must also say that LUA is somewhat overwhelming at first, but I think I am starting to prefer it over the homey “flows”.

Since everyone here is familiar with Homey and how the flows work I will give an example to show the “effort” necessary to do the same task between the ecosystems:

I have 2 dimmer switches in my kitchen. 1 controls the LED spots, the other the LED lights hanging above the counter. I also have 2 motion sensors in the room.

I want to have the system get the average LUX in the room, and then depending on the time of day (a variable saved in the system similiar to “state control”) and depending if someone is at home I want the lights to be set at a specific level. (100% in the morning, 80% during the day, 60% in the evening, and at after 22:00 I want just the led lights above the counter to turn on at 20%).

With LUA it is ONE MASSIVE script! But now just think about how many flows I would have to generate in Homey to get the same result. Then on top of that, I dread the thought of having to create all these flows on a cell phone. :smiley: :smiley: :smiley:

Well, I have to admit I am also not using Homey anymore. (so yes, moved to a different platform)

In a nutshell, there was no fun in it anymore. I had to spend more energy to keep it alive, with apps crashing, reboots neseccary to keep the memory from flooding, random stops of apps, then the fun is just out of it fast.

And no, no experimental, no large numers of apps, few flows and nothing out of the ordinairy.

I have homey over three years now. And in those years I thought: what can I do to help? So I filed a number of issues. And even when I had email conversations with Athom including Emile about those issues, and I could pinpoint exactly when those issues occured, the answer was always somewhat avoiding ‘just wait for the next update’. The update came, I reported back that the issues were still there, but those issues where just closed. It was never fixed. I then started using workarounds to get what I wanted out of home automation and that meant that was using homey less and less to the point that well, maybe it is better to use something else all together.
Anyway, Athom may do what it wishes, and I -and any customer- can decide for themself if the offer Athom is providing is good enough.
I don’t have any hard feelings or anything. I don’t mind the €300. My nephew showed some interest, maybe give it to him to tinker with it. Maybe even I will return in the far future when things have changed for the better, who knows.

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Same here for Home Assistant automations: there’s a steeper learning curve, but I’m getting things done much faster than with Homey now. Also, automations that take several flows in Homey can be done in one automation on HA. And if you’re a power user, you can use Node-RED or AppDaemon.

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Just wondering, which 10 inch POE Tablet are you using?

This one:

POE Tablet

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I understand your decision to move to HC2, for now I stick with Homey for a while. There are issues with Flows for sure! For example I start a flow when I go to bed so all lights turn off and the doors get locked. This does not work flawless at all, it is really ridiculous to add multiple seconds for each device that need to turn off to get it working a slightly better. I come from Domoticz and that worked flawless.

I liked the idea of Homey so I switched to Homey but I sometime regret it because of all the issues. I also did the antenna mod for Z-Wave and that improved the overall z-wave network but did not change anything about the flow behavior. I think there are serious errors in the flow mechanism (perhaps in conjunction with z-wave?).

I hope you enjoy your HC2 without any issues. I also hope Athom will concentrate on the core things of Homey before adding new features.

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Read this whole thread and had several Domotica controllers and the conclusion I make.
Every brand has its flaws so does homey. But if you have moved to another solution what is the point in complaining here about how bad athom is??
Either you deal with the flaws and send athom support requests or you go with another(at this point likely better) brand.

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Because only when people complain can an improvement be made. It has been obvious that many feel the same way I do which in general is “get everything that is currently supported running right before you go adding more and more features that may not run correctly”

I never said homey was bad. I said homey was buggy! That is why I have put it to the side and am thinking about using it in a home would only need homey to control lights and sockets and maybe some minor things via ifttt if necessary.

IF (and that is a pretty big IF) Athom gets everything running smoothly then Homey could be one hell of a system. Their goal was to make a device that bundles EVERYTHING which is a tall order in itself. My personal opinion is that they have not met this goal as of today. Just to get the Zwave network up and running you apparently have to mod the device which is a no-go in my book (because if you have to start pimping and modding then they could have made software for the raspberry pi with a zwave stick) and zwave is a major component. This is just a little extra add on where nobody really cares if it runs smooth or not. Zwave is the core of our house automation! If that core doesn’t work flawlessly and you have to resort to tricks and workarounds and plan b’s to get it running then I really do feel sorry for all the married men whose wives with a low tolerance threshold.

To put this into perspective: Mercedes sells the S-Class as its flagship vehicle with all the bells and whistles and every toy imaginable. (yes, I know the price is way different but I am getting at a different point). Now lets just say the engine and transmission run perfectly without a flaw, but let’s just add the flaws that I was experiencing. Let’s say the lights don’t come on automatically and you have to turn them manually. Then let’s say the air conditioner is sending out nice cold air to the front and rear passengers, but you are getting blasted with air almost as hot as the surface of the sun. (This would replicate some of my thermostats not getting the command to turn on or off properly). Then lets say all the systems (radio, climate control, lights, locking and unlocking the car, setting up your personal preferences) can only be operated on the steering wheel by a single button. (Lack of web interface, tablet app, etc). Yes, you might have a car that can give you a nice hot stone massage while driving itself down the highway. But the question would be: would you REALLY trust it with all the bugs?

Now to put the final piece into place: Imagine the engineers at McMerc could solve all the problems you are having by going through everything and bringing out a nice big update. But instead of really fixing the problems they keep adding extra features. Lets say they add a function to the climate control that simulates a sauna, or add another app that orders you a pizza in case you are stuck in a traffic jam. Question is: would the pizza arrive our would the sat nav be buggy as well and give the pizza store the gps coordinates of Baghdad, Iraq? :smiley:

Just food for thought…

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I had some of the same problems. I didn’t have that many apps installed, so they really didn’t crash. But I did notice the memory was getting to its limits and I had a pretty big swap file going.

I really did have a chuckle with your “wait for the next update” :smiley:! Same thing here since my light automation wasn’t running smooth with the homey 1.* versions. After the update to 2.* everything just got worse. That was when the dimmers started acting strange, and I also noticed that when a flow was triggered to turn on the light that it took REAL long for the process to actually complete and turn on the lights.

I am only somewhat disappointed since my expectations of Homey where that it was suppose to do what is advertised. I didn’t want to connect 230947234 apps and services to it and all I wanted it to do was control my lights and turn them off automatically (since my wife knows how to turn ON the lights, but somehow never learned how to turn them back OFF). I had a couple of little flows programmed to turn of everything once Tado went into “away” mode, or turn on the coffee machine when we let the dogs out in the morning.

The device itself was too expensive to just throw away or sell on ebay, so I will keep it around and try again in a couple of months and see if things have improved. Right now my house is running with the Home Center and I have to admit that I am having none of the issues that I was having with Homey, so at the moment all is well here :slight_smile:

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It’s not all bad, you also know it is not all working as expected. You buy into a new ecosystem and you stick with it. Yes it has flaws but you paid good money for it and make the best of it. But sometimes you reach the limit of acceptance and you have to do something. If it is not for yourself it is for your other roommates or wife. Complaining is not the right word, it is more you feel the potential but it fails to come. You still hope, after you made the switch, you can switch back to Homey with it flaws but something where you can live with. It now feels like a work in progress instead of a polished product. I still love my Homey but I almost feel the need to switch to something else if change is not coming soon.

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Really starting to get suspicious of your intentions here @BadUncleJessy

  1. You complain about a Fibaro Issue - which was solved months ago.
  2. You complain about not being able to do a coffee machine flow - which has been available for months.
  3. You complain about having to do flows on your mobile - but you have been able to use any device for months.
  4. You are blaming Homey for google Homey not understanding you, Homey is just doing what it is told by GH.
  5. Your Google ‘unresponsive’ devices are due to Homey not finishing all the commands you send it before Google Home times out. They will still do the action you request. Admittedly somewhat annoying.(Fixable with Alexa by using Alexa groups)
  6. You complain about the lack of a dashboard - which has been available for months (April).

You wrote your good bye a week ago, and I am happy to hear you are happy with your HC solution. However your post is full of out dated misinformation.

This is a community forum and any member of the community as such please feel free to inform member of the community (present or future), however i’m unsure if misinformation has a place here.

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Maybe he meant too little too late, which I can understand. Granted, he didn’t state that. He stated outdated arguments. And behaviour predicts behaviour, having said that we might always (=for the foreseeable time being) expect slower time-to-market from Athom than we want for features/fixes/stability.

However, some uplifting news then: I’ve switched recently from Very Lite, and HomeCenter 2 to Homey first-batch. I am happy so far. Homey runs better and more stable than Vera Lite. Homey runs less reliably then Home Center 2, though is more flexibele also support 433MHz Somfy and such. I’m running 130+ Hue Lights on 3 hubs and 50+ Zwave devices and 10 somfy devices. It runs fast and reliably. Some Zwave devices don’t reach Homey reliably, so in a while I’m going to swithc to Homey Pro with all the best antenna hacks/mods/upgrades available. So far, I don’t regret it.

The reasons I’m switching from Vera and HC2 to Homey, is that I can get things done in less time than HC2 and Vera take me. Creating usefull flows is much more intuitive and requires a much smaller learning curve. So it saves me time, not having to mess around with Lua and such. I’ve got a very busy schedule, and even though domotica is a hobby of mine, I want to save as much time as possible.

My intentions? Well those are the same as every night Pinky! I want to take over the world! But that’s a totally different topic…

  1. Maybe ONE Fibaro issue is solved. But as I mentioned, my dimmers don’t work properly in flows and something isn’t running right.

  2. Aaaaahh…the coffee machine. Yes, excellent! It works now! I already mentioned that I had removed the app completely at the beginning of the year since that function was not available. But now let’s dig deeper: I bought my homey in 2017 and the Home Connect app was available back then. I noticed this feature was missing, made multiple requests and nothing ever happened. So I got rid of it since my Homey was running at its limit it seemed. So now between mid 2017 and “a couple of months ago” is quite some time don’t you think?

  3. Yes, I am complaining because I keep fine tuning my house. Having to do everything on a mobile app is just not really an efficient way of sorting out this task. Yes, if you want to do something fast on the fly then excellent! But if you really want to go through everything, optimize your flows, etc then this is a hassle. Once again, it’s my PERSONAL OPINION.

  4. I am not really going to support that one. I have the fibaro connected to GH as well and have no error messages when I give it the same command. Logic dictates in this case that the problem is with homey.

  5. Once again, with the HC2 the command works flawlessly. And no, I am not going to go out and buy Alexa just for this single task since I am already in the GH ecosystem

  6. There are light years between the two dashboards. I can take some pictures for comparison.

So once again, no…the information is not outdated nor is it fake information. Even if a couple of my “complaints” have been resolved, there are still numerous valid complaints left open.

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Do me a favor and report if your upgrade to homey pro solves your issues! It would really interest me to see if my zwave problems would be solved just by switching homeys.

Deciding on an ecosystem is like deciding which football team to support. Everyone has their favorite for their reason and arguments will be unavoidable. But yes, you got my point to some extent. I just feel like homey has never left the Beta phase and we are all beta testers. (Which might even be the case since they just came out with the homey pro)

The zwave range issue has been there since day 1 and no real fix has been offered. I could understand everyone calling me an idiot if homey were in my basement and my only zwave device was in the attic where there are 3 steel reinforced concrete floors in between, but the first devices are literally 1 meter away and that is not acceptable. :slight_smile:

Did not know there was a dashboard for android from athom, where can i find this?