We all knows Homey doesn’t allow to update devices firmware. So far I’ve been ok with that - “if it works, don’t touch it” was my motto 
But after recent information about Philips Hue vulnerability I realized that no firmware upgrade may be asking for trouble. On the other hand - the risk is stilo pretty low, and there’s no simple solution available.
What is your opinion about it? Do you pay attention to firmware upgrade possibility when you buy new Smart devices?
In the case of Philips I have the bridge and able to update. In case of Fibaro the problem is bigger. Bit to expensive to buy a HC2.
I don’t pay attention. But in the past year I had to firmware update some Fibaro and Aeotec devices due to known bugs.
Even if you pick up the relevant controller/hub for free or borrow it from someone, it is the inconvenience of the process which usually goes: exclude from Homey, include in the other controller, exclude from the other controller, include again into Homey then repair your broken flows relevant to that device(s). And lose all the insights related to those devices, if you care about such thing.
I guess lucky a requiring device firmware update is a rare occurrence.
I just added a borrowed fibaro hcl as second controller to the homey and this way you see a lot of devices twice after syncing in hcl due to the fact homey has it own drivers and z-wave implementation and fibaro hcl installs its own driverstuff, but is able to update the fibaro devices. Have to make sure that they are close to the hcl though and give it an hour to properly sync everything.
Just to clearify. This is NOT a homey limitation, but a hue/fibaro limitation. It requires a the hub, and there is nothing homey can do about that.
Indeed. So the correct phrase should have been: “We all know Homey is not allowed to update firmware from end devices because the manufacturers don’t supply their firmware files to other companies”.
Aeotec has all their devices firmware files on their website.
IKEA firmware files also aren’t difficult to come by.
Could you elaborate on that? Is it possible to update IKEA Tradfri firmware without the Ikea bridge?
Yes, but not with Homey. I used deCONZ.
Homey supports ota firmware update , that is the bare basic z-wave commandclass. However it needs firmware file and driver support. Latter is either not available or encrypted or not implemented. Theoraticly it should be possible to make homey update the device fw if conditions are met, abeit not with zigbee it’s z-wave only.
Please Homey implement an firmware update mechanism in the SDK to all apps providers can provide support for it, but especially Zigbee, Zwave and Thread those are much more difficult to update due to its communication network are separated, as well makes less sense one hub that needs others to simply update firmwares
Did you really ask your Homey that question? What was it’s response?
Nop, I am hopefully that they will read this.
The company is called Athom, Homey is the device name.
Please post in “Ideas & Feature requests”.
Or contact Athom support @ homey.app/support
They don’t. And if they did, they probably wouldn’t and if they would, in most cases they most likely couldn’t.
There are not many manufacturers that are willing to share their firmware to 3rd parties.
Hello everyone I email this and some other improvements that I foresee to be essencial to homey product, some of them are in the backlog others need more requests from the community to be prioritized, this is one of them that need more people ask for it.
The email was support@athom.com
I have a homeserver on which I run zigbee2mqtt, but a raspberry with a zigbee stick should be enough. It can update for example hue and ikea devices.
