This is a great discussion that explains a lot of the issue I have been through lately.
I feel I’m pretty much in the same situation as Patrik_Wall.
Before buying (3 weeks ago) I did some research and check that all my existing devices were compatible. Most of them had official apps and the community covered the rest. So all good. I was also in the impression that by being compatible with Homeypro they would run locally and:
- would be faster
- would run even when internet was down.
Sadly this is not the case for some of them (I have been simulating an internet outage to test my settings for the last few days). I still like the product in particular its large support for devices, protocols and the community. Being able to integrate all of my automation using one system is great. I now understand the limitation and the constraints here but I think Athom could be more upfront on that point given it is one of their key selling point,
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There should be a knowledge article describing a bit more what happen when internet is down and in particular what does not work anymore or might not work. This is not documented well enough and I should not have to spend hours testing my devices and trying to figure out if I’m doing something wrong. Why do I have to come to this discussion to find out that Tuya does not want people to run their devices locallly…
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In the App store it should be clearly noted which app or functionality in the app requires an internet connection to work. That way I would have known before buying that some of my devices would still need internet to work. This is clearly doable for all official apps.
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But for me the real issue, is not being able to access the homeypro locally from a Mac or PC. Having to rely on an android device is better than nothing but it is very limited. If you invest in a Homey pro for your automation then you want to have a big screen to design and troubleshoot your flows. If you can access your router then there is no reason why you can’t access a server hosted in the Homey using a static IP.
That said I’m not sure about sniffing packets from another device in order to replicate the action locally. If the manufacturer does not allow a device to be controlled locally then trying to reverse engineer its comms can not be supported officially. It might be OK for a community project but quite difficult. I’m sadly going to move my Tuya plugs to non-essential duties and replace them with something that can work locally.
