i create a seperate IoT Network where only all Smart Home Devices are working…further i bring devices into this network, after that learn the thread devices directly on too homey, the apple devices like Apple TV and Home Pods i add into this Network as well but the connection into Homey i did over the Homey App from developer Bas Milius, with this setup i prevent that the own apple thread is not in connection with the homey thread…
Well regarding the settings in UNFI i changed & tested sooooooo much, one of the last changes i did was to create the separate IoT Network und activate the option "IoT-Optimization"
This Option activate a package which break the network to the basic, channel lock, only 2,4Ghz and DTIM-Interval-Lock…but keep in mind UNFI have so mutch settings it could be i had in the past already a other goal which helps to solve the problem…
Thanks for the detailed write-up of your troubleshooting. Your observation that two border routers can behave as if they’re both in control, and that the network heals itself once one is unplugged, is interesting, and I can see that Hsd1965 and Rammstein have arrived at the same conclusion: isolate Homey as the only TBR and remove old Matter bindings from the Keychain.
For my own part, TBR isolation happened over time. My Apple TV has been intentionally kept off the IoT network, so Homey was the only TBR. It worked fine in the beginning, but as I added more Matter devices, it became increasingly unstable. The single radio simply couldn’t carry both Zigbee and Thread as the load grew.
Today I run 48 Zigbee devices (23 routers, 25 endpoints) and 26 Matter/Thread devices (9 Thread routers, 17 sleepy end devices). That’s part of the explanation for why the HP23’s shared radio eventually couldn’t keep up.
What I’ve come to realise since is that one of the most important things for a stable Matter/Thread network is having enough routers, and ideally close to the hub. That cost me a trip to IKEA, and their firmware updates have stabilised things a lot. Unfortunately that wasn’t something I had the option to do on the HP23. Today, the Matter/Thread stack is actually the stable part of my setup.
A few technical lessons from the journey, in case they’re useful to others:
VLANs are a big issue for Matter/Thread. Everything needs to live on the same network, no segmentation. Just stay away from it. It cost me a fair amount of troubleshooting to learn that.
IPv6 needs to be in place. Matter/Thread leans heavily on IPv6, and if it isn’t configured correctly on the network, you get strange and hard-to-debug problems.
Matter/OTBR lives best directly on HAOS. I run OTBR and Matter Server as add-ons directly on HA. The HP23 is also an “all in one” setup in that sense. The point is that it makes sense to keep the Matter stack together with the controller. It’s worth looking at beta firmware when you can see it stabilising. I’m still running the beta version of Matter Server myself, because that’s where the rapid improvements are happening.
Zigbee2MQTT can’t live on the MR3 in my case. It runs in Docker on a separate host, and that works fine.
A dedicated radio makes the difference. My SLZB-MR3 has two separate chips (Thread and Zigbee), so they don’t compete for radio time. That’s exactly the separation I missed on the HP23.
Log analysis is gold. I pull all the logs out of Home Assistant and store them somewhere separate, so I can have Claude analyse them when I run into issues. I always hold it up against what I did last time, which firmware versions I’m on now, and whether there’s anything new that could improve or stabilise the setup. Smart home counts as critical infrastructure in our home, so I don’t have to listen to my wife about it
What could really lift things would be if Homey Self Hosted Server could live as pure software and pair with hardware like the SMHUB from SMLIGHT. Athom has a web platform that’s far ahead of HA, and that’s their real strength. But they’ll probably still mostly be known as a hardware vendor, unfortunately.
I hope some of this is useful, and you’re welcome to reach out if I can contribute more.
In my setup, I use only Matter devices now — most of them over Thread, and some over Wi-Fi. Some time ago, I decided to get rid of all my remaining Zigbee devices and replace everything with Matter. All my lights are handled by Philips Hue, and I use the Hue app to bring them into Homey when needed.
I agree with you that SHS could be a great opportunity for Homey. In the future, it may become harder and harder for Homey to sell dedicated hardware that is, in some ways, quite limited and cannot really be adapted to different users’ needs. Power users often have very different requirements compared to people who just want to control a handful of devices.
The price of a Homey Pro is also quite high. For roughly the same money, you can get a powerful N100 mini PC with 16 GB of RAM, a 256 GB SSD, and two good antennas.
But I am not sure whether Homey will take this in the right direction. Maybe SHS is mainly a side product of the LG integration. LG will probably use SHS in future TVs and other devices to provide home automation features.
In my opinion, the right approach would be something closer to Home Assistant: connect a compatible antenna, choose whether it should be used for Zigbee or Thread, and let the system automatically flash the correct firmware. Ideally, Homey should also allow parallel use of multiple antennas for Zigbee, Thread, Z-Wave and Bluetooth.
Personally, I would happily buy a license, install SHS on an N100 mini PC with 16 GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD, connect a Thread antenna, and that would be all I need.
Before anything else, did your app finally get approved after all that waiting? I’d love to hear if Athom finally came back to you.
On the SHS direction, I honestly don’t have much hope that LG/Athom will bring a fresh breath of air to the platform anytime soon. Looking at the pace so far, it doesn’t seem like it’ll happen quickly. And as long as Homey doesn’t open up SHS for broader hardware compatibility, I think they’ll end up burning themselves. The technology is there, the community is here, and the people who’d actually pay for a software license are sitting around waiting.
For my own part, I’d happily buy a software-only license for Homey if I knew they offered support for other compatible hardware. I also strongly prefer my coordinators and gateways (Homey, Hue Bridge and the like) to be wired rather than running over Wi-Fi. My old Homey Pro was actually wired through a PoE injector from Airtame :). My physical machine that runs my smart home doesn’t sit in the same building where I live, which means the repeater role of a Homey Pro wouldn’t work for me anyway. If they allowed controlled third-party hardware, that whole problem disappears, and they’d unlock a real market of power users like us.
To be fair, I should also share that my own setup isn’t perfect either. I’ve actually run into stability issues on the Zigbee side of my SLZB-MR3 (the CC2674P10 coordinator chip occasionally freezes and needs a power cycle). But my Matter/Thread network has been very solid. The new IKEA Matter devices are cheap, yes, and they work well. Not perfect, but well.
About your setup: since you’ve moved everything to Matter and dropped Zigbee entirely, you don’t have my exact problem with two protocols competing on the same radio. So in theory it should run more smoothly. One question though, are you using the official Philips Hue app (Hue native, with a physical Hue Bridge) or the bridge-less Johan Bendz community app? If you’re running Hue native with a physical Hue Bridge behind it, that could still introduce some indirection that affects stability, even if the radio side is clean.
Two more things I’d be curious about:
Is your Homey on Ethernet or Wi-Fi?
Do you have IPv6 enabled on your router?
Both of those have been points where my own Matter/Thread experience changed quite a bit, and they’re easy to overlook.
Thanks, glad if any of it was useful. Your own write-up has been a strong contribution to this thread too, the level of detail in your troubleshooting and your UniFi setup is exactly the kind of sharing that helps others figure out their own setups.
I run a UniFi setup myself with five internal VLANs (IoT being one of them), though with a pfSense firewall in front of it. So I recognise a lot of what you’ve described from your own network choices.
You’re more than welcome to reach out if there’s anything I can help with. I’d be happy to share more on the setup side, log analysis, or anything else from the journey I’ve been on. Always good to have someone to bounce ideas off when troubleshooting smart home stuff.
Great to hear your app finally got through. To me it sounds like activity in this thread, where you’re involved, is what gets Athom moving. And I notice version 1.2.1 went through even faster the day after
Your setup looks cleaner than mine on paper. One quick question though, do you see the same instability when the Hue Pro Bridge talks directly to the bulbs, with Homey out of the loop? That would help narrow down whether the issue sits with the Hue Pro Bridge itself, the Homey Pro, or the connection between them.
Fair point, thanks for the correction. That makes sense, and it
puts the 1.2.1 timing in a different light.
The slow handling of 1.2.0 still stands out though, weeks of
silence on the initial review, then resolved suddenly. But you’re
right that the follow-up version going through fast isn’t really
the data point I implied it was.
After about six weeks, I can say that the Homey’s power supply was obviously the real problem!
Since replacing it with a mobile phone charger, there haven’t been any outages or other strange issues.
The original adapter is rated for 2 A, but it seems to have been supplying insufficient power at times.
I replaced it with a standard mobile phone adapter—as recommended by support—which had a 3 A rating.
My setup had been stable for several weeks, but since the latest update things have become worse again.
My Homey is now losing devices — not only Matter devices, but also Hue devices and WIFI devices that use their own apps. At times, Homey becomes unresponsive as well. Even my virtual button, which runs a flow to restart Homey, now throws the error: “Homey running less than 10 minutes.”
I have now ordered the Thread antenna for Home Assistant. Homey has unfortunately not been reliable enough for me lately. Every update feels like a guessing game: will Homey work better, worse, or will nothing change?
I am not saying that I am moving to Home Assistant now, but I want to be prepared. And honestly, that is not a good sign.
Putting HA on my Asus NUC for the first time and will be moving my Thread network over to HA, then bridging to Homey with HomeyLink
I just don’t trust the Thread antenna on Homey Pro anymore. Performance is woeful.
I’m also flabbergasted that Athom still has not provided a way easy way to set up and use third party TBRs with Homey SHS. It’s an open goal for christ sake!
I have HA on an N100 Mini PC but it is an old build . When I do the switch over I will start from zero. The risk I see is that once HA works very well, I will also move over automation and give up on Homey completely over the time. Automation is more complex and less visually appealing, but it is also more powerful. I will always support my apps, at least as long as my Homey doesn’t break. Buying a new one with the same hardware and problems is unrealistic. But as said, I still have some hope for Homey even though that flame is a very small one and that might be more wishful thinking.
Check out C.A.F.E on HA. It is a visual flow editor for HA just as good as Homey‘s. - Once you have seen this, i would be very interested to hear, what makes you stay with Homey.
For me it is ultimatively just my lazyness and some faint hope Athom will clean up all the mess…
I have an easy way to create automations. I exported all my from Homey and convertet everything to automations with Claude. I even have some skills to helps me check how my yaml files working.
If you have some AI you could also connect directly from MCP server.
Strange.
