I’ve been building a small Windows app for my own Homey Pro, and since the first alpha a lot of you have helped shape it. Thank you! This is HomeWindow.
What it does
A panel by the clock: click the tray icon (or press Ctrl + Alt + H) for your favourites, rooms, flows and moods, with the weather and who’s home. Your Homey favourites are taken over the first time you connect.
Tiles like the Homey app: each device shows its own icon from Homey, a quick-action button, a coloured state and the readings you pick. Dimmers, thermostats, blinds, speakers and locks all work. Four tile sizes, from extra small to large.
A taskbar widget: use, solar, grid, your home battery’s charge, your car while it charges, and the weather, always in view. You choose what it shows, where it sits (start of the taskbar or by the clock) and how large the text is. Power going back to the grid shows in green.
Energy: live and for today, this month and the last 14 days, with the biggest users. It follows Homey Energy: pick which meter is your grid connection and which solar devices count, so nothing is counted twice. Home batteries and EV chargers get their own cards.
A full main window: devices per room, flows per folder, moods, Logic variables, energy, batteries, notifications and system health (apps, memory, updates).
Touchscreen friendly: scroll every list with your finger.
PIN lock (optional): HomeWindow asks for a PIN at start-up, when Windows locks and after a while without use, so colleagues or guests on your laptop can’t control your home.
Alarm notifications: a Windows notification when a smoke detector, water sensor or doorbell goes off. Motion and doors can notify too, if you want.
Local and remote: straight to your Homey’s IP at home, and through Athom’s cloud by itself when you’re away. More than one Homey works too.
Light and dark mode, six backdrops, Dutch and English, silent auto-updates.
Screenshots (from the demo home, so the names are made up)
Settings → Homey → Sign in to Homey…. Your browser opens Homey’s own sign-in page; HomeWindow then finds your Homey and its IP address. HomeWindow never sees your password.
Prefer an API key from my.homey.app? That works too.
Good to know
It’s an alpha. It works well on my Homey, and I stress-tested it with a fake Homey with 1500 devices that drops out and sends garbage. But your home is different from mine, so expect rough edges.
The installer isn’t code-signed yet, so Windows SmartScreen will warn you: More info → Run anyway. Some virus scanners are cautious about new unsigned apps; Microsoft Defender’s false alarm has been reported. If a scanner blocks HomeWindow, please let me know which one. It’s built in the open by GitHub Actions from the code in the repo, and code signing is on its way.
Free and open source (GPL-3.0).
Nothing goes anywhere but your own Homey (and GitHub, to check for updates). Your login is stored encrypted with your Windows account.
It’s inspired by HomeBar for the Mac, but it’s a separate project, and not affiliated with Athom.
I’d really like to hear how it works with your setup, especially with devices and apps I don’t have. If something breaks: Settings → Updates → Open log, and post it in a GitHub issue or send me a pm.
Nice work,
As the Apps category and apps and [APP] is specific for Homey Apps,
I suggest to move this to Tutorials category (As there isn’t an other / better matching category for this imho )
I, however, have one minor Problem:
My Homey is a Homey Pro Early 2023, with a number of favourite devices defined, which show up on the start page of the web app. But they do not appear in HomeWindow.
Could that be a matter of localisation because favourite devices on my Homey are displayed under a section named “Lieblingsgeräte”?
There are unfortunately no log files.
I did have to disregard several warnings from my virus scanner, as the executable has a very small user group and it flags the executable with possible malicious identity protection behavior (IDP.Generic). But I assume those are false positives.
Thanks,
Nice app, good idea.
The installation routine is „talking“ to me in dutch though it should be in english as my machine is not running a dutch environment.
A wish: can you make the device tiles extra small too? Small is still quite bmy setup
Your connection setup allows for local and cloud.
When I test the local connection I get an error. Something like: No connection: Local: access to a socket was illegal because the access rights of the socket.
I have a working local user. Could that be the reason?
HomeWindow 0.4.2 is out, with thanks for all the feedback! If you already have HomeWindow, it updates itself. Otherwise download it from the latest release.
Here it is on my own taskbar right now, with the weather, the house’s use, solar and the grid:
@Andy_Henderson Collapse all and Expand all for the rooms are now also in the panel
by the clock, not only in the main window.
@4x4_Pete It wasn’t a language problem: HomeWindow kept its own list of favourites,so a fresh install started empty. HomeWindow now takes over your Homey favourites
(“Lieblingsgeräte”) the first time it connects. Settings → General → Import addsthem again later. Nothing is removed, and nothing is written back to Homey. For any
problems, the log is at %LOCALAPPDATA%\HomeWindow\HomeWindow.log.
@SunBeech Thank you, glad you like it! You’re right, it’s a false positive: theinstaller is new and not signed yet, so some scanners are cautious about it. I’ve
reported it, and code signing is in progress.
Dutch installer: that was a bug. On a Windows in a language the installer doesn’t have, such as German, it fell back to Dutch. It now falls back to English. The app itself follows Windows, or choose under Settings → General → Language.
Extra small tiles: done! Settings → Appearance → Tile size → Extra small, four tiles a row in the panel.
Local connection: the local user on your Homey isn’t the cause. That message (“an attempt was made to access a socket in a way forbidden by its access permissions”) means Windows blocked the connection before it ever reached your Homey. A firewall or security program does that. I ran into exactly this myself after installing 0.4.2: my virus scanner’s firewall had put the new HomeWindow.exe on its list of blocked applications. Allowing it there fixed it right away. So please look in your firewall or security suite for a blocked HomeWindow, set it to Allow, and restart HomeWindow (also quit it in the tray). A VPN or Tailscale doesn’t cause this message.
Until the local connection works, the cloud only works if you fill in the Homey ID (cloud) yourself. HomeWindow normally learns it from the first local connection. You can find the ID in the address of your Homey on my.homey.app.
Also new: an optional PIN lock (Settings → Security), so colleagues or guests on your laptop can’t control your home.
Hi, #1 - great work°! #2 is it a big issue to make the App working on Early2019 ?
I guess an externally created API-Key is not the solution?
Best regards
Bernhard
@Majordohmus Thank you, Bernhard! Good question, and it turned out to be doable: HomeWindow 0.4.3 is out, and you can now sign in with your Homey account instead of an API key. That should also work on a Homey Pro (Early 2019).
Download it from the latest release. If you already have HomeWindow, it updates itself.
Settings → Homey → Sign in to Homey…. Your browser opens Homey’s own sign-in page, and HomeWindow then fills in your Homey and its IP address. Click Save.
HomeWindow never sees your password; it only keeps an encrypted key to reconnect.
A few parts are not available this way, because Athom does not give those rights to other apps: the system page, updates, restarting apps, deleting notifications and the weather.
I could not test it on an Early 2019 myself, so I’d love to hear whether it works for you. If something goes wrong, the message under Test connection and the log (%LOCALAPPDATA%\HomeWindow\HomeWindow.log) help me most.
For everyone else: signing in with your Homey account is now the default when you add a Homey. A Homey you already added keeps its API key.
Thanks for the open/collapse all options - work well. Could use them on flows too.
I have Switchbot curtains. The app is showing “0% open” when they’re open and “100% open” when they’re closed. Could be the app should show “x% closed” instead, but it could also be that ‘position’ is not used consistently between manufacturers. Homey’s apps simply give the percentage which suggests the latter might be the case.
Great and handy app!! I did run into one issue: in the Energy tab, the energy meters are added together as grid consumption. For example, I have both the Anker Gen 2 smart meter and the Homey Energy dongle, but there is currently no option to display them separately or to show just one of them.
Thanks! You found a real bug: HomeWindow added up every grid meter it found, so two meters on the same supply counted twice.
HomeWindow 0.4.4 is out and fixes it: it now uses one meter as the grid (it picks one itself), and when you have more than one, the Energy page has a “Meter for the grid” choice.
So you can use the Homey Energy dongle and leave the Anker out, or the other way round.
Thanks for testing! Collapse all / Expand all are now on the Flows page too, in HomeWindow 0.4.4 (it updates itself).
For the Switchbot curtains: HomeWindow shows the position the way the Homey app gives it, where 0% is closed and 100% is open.
Does the Homey app itself show them as open or closed at the same moment? If the Homey app also shows them the other way around, I’ll add an option to invert the position per device.
The update regarding energy meters works perfectly—it’s also very convenient that you can select them yourself. I just have one small request: I’m running Homewindow on a Windows laptop with only a touchscreen. When I need to scroll down, I have to use the scrollbar on the right side. Is there a possibility to enable 2-finger multi-touch scrolling up and down? That would make it so much easier
Thanks Wouter, good to hear the meter choice works for you!
You’re right, HomeWindow didn’t respond to touch scrolling at all; only the scroll bar worked. Fixed in HomeWindow 0.4.5 (it updates itself): you can now scroll every page and list by simply dragging it with one or two fingers. Sliders still respond to a sideways drag as before. I don’t have a touchscreen myself, so I’d love to hear if it feels right.
The app is now working exactly as I want, with just one exception. The household energy consumption and solar energy production figures are much higher than those shown in the Homey Energy Dashboard.
The energy fed back into the grid is correct, though.
Love the app. Works very well. Two suggestions if I may
Option to re-arrange the display order of the favorite devices (custom order). I notice that it is currently chronologically ordered by selecting time.
Bigger fonts of the info displayed in the taskbar.
@Bulletcather Thanks! Most likely HomeWindow counted more than one solar device for the same panels (for example the inverter and a kWh meter on it) and added them together. That makes both solar and house use too high, while the grid return stays correct, which matches what you see.
HomeWindow 0.4.6 is out now. With two or more solar devices, the Energy page has Solar counts from, where you switch off the one that is counted twice. If that doesn’t fix it, could you tell me which solar devices you have in Homey?
@Hiep_Hoang Thanks for the suggestions! You can already change the order of your favourites: right-click a favourite → Earlier in favourites / Later in favourites.
Larger text for the taskbar strip is in HomeWindow 0.4.6, out now: Settings → Strip text → Large.
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