I’ve got an apartment on several levels, with Homey in the second level from the first, the living room.
I’ve got a Hue A19/White bulbs all over the place.
Issue
I notice about 2 seconds delay upon pressing a Hue dimmer-remote until the light reacts.
A flow works about 70% of the time, reacting to the motion sensor in the room. Until it doesn’t. It just stops reacting to the remote and motion sensor.
Needless to say my family hates Homey a bit, and smart house means stupid house to them.
They just want the lights to work, event if they need to flip the switch. And I have to agree with that stability can be much higher.
My best guess it’s the Zigbee connectivity. Perhaps the walls are too thick/weaponised to let the signal through.
I notice that most devices insist on talking to Homey directly instead hopping via the mesh.
Question: how can I improve on Homey stability? Can someone recommend a zigbee amplifier to force meshing and boost the signal?
I’ve got an impression from this forum homey’s Zigbee radios are very weak.
I have / had the same problems in my house. My solution: Move as much as posible away from directly connect to homey, for instance I moved my ikea bulbs to a hue bridge, which makes the route from my aqara switch to the buld longer, now it is: Switch -> homey -> hue bridge -> bulb. But the bulb responses a lot faster!
So my view of the homey is a bit different than it was when i bought it. I think the homey is very powerful in connecting smart environments to each other in stead of connect everything directly to the homey.
Be careful. By saying this you could trigger some people that hate others pointing out things to others while they are not officially allowed to do that. Very strange, why would they have a problem with that? Very common nowadays it seems alas. Tolerance and acceptance is far away… And then try to hide this by flagging it. Very childish…
There’s a Zigbee rewrite coming. They say It won’t be long anymore now. You could wait for it.
There are some possibilities for expanding Zigbee coverage of Homey itself too. Like improving Homey with the antenna mod: Homey antenna mod
Waiting for the antenna’s now (AliExpress), but experiences of others in that thread sound very promising!
Try another channel for your wifi network too, as Zigbee uses the same frequency as wifi.
There’s a lot to be found in the community here. Simply use the search option (it works great) for a lot more information on this topic!
No criticism implied, so hopefully no knifes considered too…
I know, it has been promised for sooooo long now. But more than one member here says that it won’t take long anymore now, ànd they say they got it from a reliable source.
You refer to a post from almost 2 years ago. Things might have changed…
The overal consensus is to install the IKEA signal repeater. In the manual it’s stated that the repeater should be paired with another ikea remote.
Has someone managed to reliably route non ikea devices, eg hue?
Another advice is to use a mains powered hue bulb. One of mine Hue lights is indeed routing 5 other devices. But yesterday the bloody bulb has fallen out of the network for no reason, taking other devices offline for a while! How can I make this more stable?
You d not need any other Ikea device if you just wanna improve Zigbee signal with the repeater.
Just add it to Homey and you’re all set…
Improved my Zigbee signal significantly here!
What’s more concerning is that devices become unavailable: they stop reacting to sensors and when switching them from the homey app it displays the red bar ‘device is unreachable’.
Not quite sure if your setup contains a Hue Bridge. If not, purchase one.
We live in a ‘eengezinswoning (tussenwoning)’ with a ground floor, 1st and 2nd level. Homey is on the 1st floor (living room) and so is the Hue Bridge.
We use 21 Hue devices (white bulbs, ceiling spots, runner spots, color bulbs, light strip and bloom) spread over every floor, every corner of the house.
We have 4 Hue remotes which works good. We have several aqara buttons and Neo Coolcam sensors which interact with the lights. 0 problems
0 problems, everything works seamlessly since the beginning (january 2019 when i purchased my Homey)
Hi.
Yes I’ve got Hue bridge and the reason I wanted to connect hue devices directly to Home is the delay I experience between the Homey and bridge devices.
Aqara sensor — Homey— bridge — Hue light,
results in a delay of up to two seconds. Which is rather long and it makes you wonder if it’s broken every time.
I shall shall take your advice and reconnect hue devices via the Bridge. If it makes it more stably I’ll happily reconfigure.
This got me thinking, if there’s another smart home system that is using Zigbee and can integrate Hue bridge and is seriously stable I’d consider migrating to it. Most of my devices are Zigbee, eg Aqara, I’m happy with hue quality, zwave devices are eating through batteries too fast anyway. I’d miss Homey integration with Sonos and Ikea but I’d trade it for stability any time. The fact that now 3 of my Hue dimmers have stopped working via Homey it’s just not acceptable; the apps are not good enough for serious use.
If someone has experience eg with Aqara hub or another open system that allows integrations please let me know.
I wonder if that issue will be solved by taking the bridge out of the equation. Receiving data from the Hue bridge can take a while (up to 5 seconds I believe) because of the way the Hue API is implemented, but sending data to the bridge should be almost instantaneous.
If you want to get to the bottom of the issue, you should try and find out where in that chain of devices the delay happens. It might be that your Homey is too busy, for instance.
That is what I had been trying to achieve, @robertklep.
However, I’ve discovered that Hue dimmers won’t work with direct connection to Homey. I’ve got 3 of them that cannot trigger a flow anymore, although Homey indicates them as properly connected.
Perhaps it’s a bug in the Hue app, but nonetheless it leaves connecting Hue lights and dimmers via the Bridge as the only option, with a delay from Aqara sensor.
How long does it take for a flow that is triggered by the Aqara sensor to run? You can easily check this by adding a notification to the action cards. That way, you can find out if it’s the Aqara-sensor part of the flow that is slow.
Likewise, you can create a flow for changing the Hue lights that you can test/trigger manually. That way, you can find out if the Hue part of the flow is slow.
1. Hue lights connected to the Hue bridge. Sensor - Homey - Bridge - Hue Light - Hue dimmer
a. Aqara sensor (connected to homey, naturally) triggers the flow with a delay, about 500 to 1500 ms. I’ve installed 2 motion sensors in the long bathroom, by the time I walk the first meter from the door the light triggers. Sometimes it triggers earlier, sometimes after 2 meters, which is a bit late, and I have to take care not to bump into things : )
b. the Hue dimmers connected to the Hue bridge trigger without the delay
This setup is kind of acceptable.
c. However, removing Hue lights from the homey Zigbee network means losing valuable routers, the Hue lights are actually being used at the moment as routers for other devices.
.
2. Hue lights connected to Homey directly Sensor - Hue Lights - Homey - Hue Bridge – Hue dimmer
a. Aqara sensor triggers almost without a delay. Hard to say how much but if I am idle too long in the loo, I just need to flinch a shoulder and the light come back right away : ), ie under 300 ms I guess.
b. Hue Dimmers simply do not work with Homey directly any longer, therefore the only way is to connect them to the Hue bridge.
Triggering the flow from a Hue Dimmer via Bridge takes about 2-3 seconds, which is a very noticeable lag. You are not sure if the flow has broken again or it’s just a ‘normal’ delay.
This is not really practical.
To remedy 1.c. I could install another device as a router. People recommend Ikea Signal repeater, however, I read as well that Aqara sensors won’t work via Ikea routers!
This is where Homey is letting us down, because their claim of integrating different devices doesn’t not hold, if you can’t even route devices via a dedicated repeater because they are incompatible within the same Zigbee network. Since we can’t influence how devices are routed in Zigbee, the only option is not to use conflicting devices that limits my options severely.
So if I understand correctly, the Aqara sensors work (much) better when you have more router devices (the Hue bulbs) in Homey’s Zigbee network. It sounds like those sensors are on the edge of your network, or there’s a lot of interference (for instance from WiFi), which gets mitigated by adding more router devices to your mesh.
As for triggering flows based on devices connected to the Hue bridge: that’s a known downside of using the Hue bridge, and is caused by the Hue app having to use polling to check the state of the bridge. I believe the default poll interval is 5 seconds, so worst-case it will take up to that time before Homey can react on a state change for bridge-connected devices. There’s not way around that.
This is where Homey is letting us down, because their claim of integrating different devices doesn’t not hold, if you can’t even route devices via a dedicated repeater because they are incompatible within the same Zigbee network.
I have plenty of Aqara devices that are being routed through IKEA devices just fine (not on Homey, though), so why that particular combination doesn’t work (well) on Homey, I don’t know. The controller (Homey) isn’t responsible for building or maintaining a Zigbee mesh. I would suggest buying a single IKEA repeater and see if it works in your situation.
