Help with new Homey Pro 2023

Questions & Help
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1

Hi folks,

I’m hoping someone can help me, and that what I need is even possible.

Last year before the Homey Pro was out, I started dabbling in smart home items - mainly zigbee power strips and battery powered switches to control them.

I wanted the Homey Pro 2023, but it was still a few months away from being available.

However, I have a ton of Alexa devices and some of them have zigbee hubs in, so I tried to connect the plugs to them.

The issue was that the Alexa would just show my 4 plug (plus 2 USBs) power strips as a single device and you couldn’t control the plugs individually. The Alexa app would only let you turn the whole thing on and off.

The instructions with the plug strips said to download the Smart Life app, which I did, but the strip wouldn’t connect into the Smart Life app, or if they did, I still wasn’t able to individually control them (I don’t remember which).

So it seemed I needed a dedicated Zigbee hub to individually control the sockets. As the Homey Pro 2023 wasn’t available, I just bought the cheapest Zigbee hub that I could find, planning to buy the Homey when it came out.

The Zigbee hub saw the individual sockets fine and for 5 minutes I was happy…

It was short-lived though and soon the devices reactions become slow and at some point all the wireless switches stopped working. I plug various lamps into the plug strips around the house and when I press a switch to turn one on, it now turns on and immediately turns straight back off. Infuriating!

Anyway, I finally decided to purchase the Homey Pro 2023, thinking it would be the answer to my cheap hub problems. I’ve just set it up and went to connect the first strip, but as you can probably guess, the Homey just sees it as a single plug.

I then found a Tuya app, which offers the option of a 4 plug strip that looks exactly the same as mine, but when adding the strip it still says I don’t have an app for it and adds it as an unknown Zigbee device, which again can only be partially controlled.

Does anyone know what app I need to control my strips, or if it’s even possible to do so with the Homey Pro 2023?

I’ve attached a photo of the power strip box. It’s just a generic Chinese thing, as I couldn’t find any other Zigbee power strips here in the UK.

Thanks in advance!

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4

That means it isn’t supported by the TuYa app for Homey. Instructions on how to request support for it are posted in the first post of the app thread.

5

Thanks, I’ll have a look.

Obvious question though… If a cheap random Zigbee hub from ebay can just connect straight to these random plugs from Amazon and make them work straight away, why can’t this expensive “Pro” hub do the same?

With the cheap hub you put the plugs into setup mode and it just finds all the individual sockets… Job done.

No apps, no messing.

6

What you can try, install the test version of Tuya Zigbee, it has lots of new supported devices. All info is in here.
Also, by interviewing such a device using https://tools.developer.homey.app/tools/zigbee you can possibly ‘unlock’ additional functionality, like individual plug switching.

But, when the device isn’t supported at all, the only way is to equest support for it, like Robert mentioned alr.

Most probably they both “talk” Tuya perfectly, they all are Tuya devices.
Tuya don’t like other companies’ hubs controlling their devices, they’re using zigbee by their own rules. Homey obviously is not Tuya.

7

It’s not that: most TuYa devices use perfectly standard clusters. The issue is that Homey doesn’t deal with “standard clusters”, it deals with very specific device information that requires a full app update before a device can be recognized.