the last days I was experimenting with my new Homey Pro. Unfortunately tmnot everything worked, as many of my matter devices just went offline. Repairing or rebooting only helped temporarily. I blame maybe an unstable Thread network. So this weekend I want to start from scratch. I don‘t use any Zigbee devices as I purchased now my IKEA zigbee devices with ones with matter.
So I have a total of three Apple TVs that I will reset too and also an Alexa with Matter compability. What should I do first? Pair all devices first with HomeKit and then share new matter codes? Should I add then the devices in Homey App via Homey or iOS in the matter section? My goal is to have the most stable thread network. Als ich will add more matter over thread devices soon.
As much as I like Apple products (And I own a lot of them) I think homekit truly sucks for a number of reasons.
The most important one is that Homekit only supports Matter over Thread. I think that Matter and Thread are great initiatives to standardize the communication between IoT devices and hubs, but the reality is that there are still a lot of Zigbee, z-wave or 433Mhz devices. This limitation defeats the whole purpose of a smart hub. A smart hub should be able to connect to all devices in order to really be the central hub. What good is a central smart hub, if you need another hub in order to connect to some devices?
The automation features of Homekit are very, very limited. An isolated “smart” device, is actually just a dumb device with an extra UI in the form of an app. For me, the power of a smart home and a smart hub is the ability to automate processes across multiple devices making them really smart. Homekit fails miserably at this point. It is basically only good as a clumsy interface on top of your devices that you could otherwise also, and most probably better just operate by a physical switch, or even their own proprietary apps.
The user interface of Homekit is horrible and only accessible via Apple devices.
No proper support for dashboards or custom interfaces.
For these reasons, I would just advise to connect all devices directly to Homey, use Homey as your central Hub and to automate all of your processes, create dashboards and shortcuts that can be used on all of your devices including Android, Windows, and Apple. And if some people really like to use Homekit to control some devices, I would just expose the Homey to Homekit.
This is also how I configured my Homey that contains over 75 devices. A mix of Zigbee, Z-Wave, 433Mhz and Wifi devices. I never experienced any interference issues. The only issue I sometimes have is when I control multiple devices at once through the devices/lights interface of the Homey App. But that is just a limitation of Z-wave and Zigbee which you would also run into in different configurations.
Some protocols aren’t supported by Homey, like the HomeWizard Link 868mhz protocol. For firmware updates of my ZigBee devices, I have multiple hubs (Philips Hue bridge, ThirdReality Smart Hub, eWeLink CUBE).
It seems that most users want to connect everything to 1 hub, but in my opinion that’s not a great choice, because this also means you have a single point of failure in your smart home (if the hub is down, then everything is down).
By making Homey connect to devices via LAN/Cloud (and some directly via ZigBee), you’ll have fewer issues when Homey is down (automations/Flows will break, but I can still manually turn the lights on via the Hue mobile app so I’m not left in the dark)
I read that many people have problems with the matter over thread protocol in Homey. So isn’t it a fallback possibility to first pair every matter over thread device with HomeKit and then just expose it to Homey?
I don’t use Apple devices so I don’t know how this works with HomeKit, but the Matter devices are also unstable on Google Home (they go offline often or can’t be found in the first place).
This is absolutely true. This is also the reason I designed my smart home in such a way that the main functionality of each device continues to work even when Homey, or the internet is down. I consider my smart home as an extra layer on top of devices. It is never a good idea to rely on a smart home hub to be able to turn on/off the main lighting, control the heating/cooling, open and close main doors.
My smart dimmers are hardwired to the lights.
My smart thermostats are hardwired to the heaters.
My smart MVHR can work on its own.
My smart locks can be operated manually.
My smart washing machine and dishwasher can do their job just fine without internet connection.
etc..
With this in mind, i sometimes also just use a proprietary hub in order to build in robustness for vital processes. My smoke detectors for example, are linked together with it’s own hub and only connected to Homey via Matter over Thread. This is so that all smoke detectors trigger automatically when one detects smoke. Even when Homey is down.
My comment was about having multiple smart home hubs on which you try to automate integrations, and then hook these up to each other.
