Santa Claus brought me a new toy. I’m sending his forgotten rod to Enschede so that everyone gets what they deserve.
After the recent events about the deCONZ app and Phillipe, it was time for me to break new ground. However, I do not want to go into detail about the incidents, as it only affects me as a user. But the community has lost one of the best developers!
But the point of view of Athom ultimately led to the fact that I will no longer use Homey’s Zigbee in the future. I find it extremely worrying that Athom has almost stopped developing many apps and wants to transfer this part completely to the manufacturers of the devices. If you don’t develop an app yourself, its components have no place in Homey.
There is now an acute risk that I will move to Zwave in the medium term, which will make my ball superfluous.
The subject of the bridge stillbirth could also cause Athom to go awry. The result was relatively sobering and there will be no collaboration with the pro.
Furthermore, the lack of communication from Athom is a problem for me. It starts with the update information and ends with a missing statement on thread and matter. About the below-average Zigbee performance and number of devices, I don’t even comment.
Since under these circumstances I am no longer ready to invest in a Homey Pro 3, which is probably already planned, I bought a Beast for the budget allocated for it.
The Intel NUC 11 Extreme Kit - Beast Canyon is a small computer with brute performance. The Core i9 processor, 64 GB RAM and a 500 GB SSD should have enough power reserves to be equipped for all tasks in the future.
Admittedly, the tasks assigned at the moment don’t even allow the processor to reach room temperature, but I still have a lot in the pipeline.
His tasks so far are:
- Home Assistant (virtual machine)
● ConBee 2 stick
● Wiser Enocean Stick
● RF-Link 433 MHz stick
● Aeotec Z-Stick Gen.5 - PiHole (virtual machine)
- ioBroker (virtual machine)
- Node Red (virtual machine)
- Home server
- Streaming server (Plex)
- NAS server
- MQTT server
The new focal point for Zigbee is the Home Assistant, which I already use for my dashboards. Nuki, Switchbot, Hue Bridge, Tuya, Harmony Hub and Netatmo have joined in the course of the setup and are already or will be relocated shortly.
In total there are now over 100 devices on HA and at least for the moment still had to communicate with Homeys Zwave. The first task was to send the devices back to Homey via MQTT, scenes and scripts so that my machinery would keep running. That was hard work, but I see a light on the tunnel.
Now it is time to create the first automations in HA and delete the corresponding flows in Homey. With a total of 200 flows with the participation of the devices mentioned above, I’m busy for a while.
It will probably be a while before I decide to start the same procedure with Zwave.
One of the reasons for the delay will be that the new Zwave 800 series chips have come onto the market and promise enormous battery savings and range. I will wait there until an 800 stick is available.
As of today, I have around 200 Zwave devices and around 400 flows with Zwave to move.
When I start moving, the “point of no return” is reached and Homey’s end is decided.
That’s how long Athom has to convince me that Homey will remain an alternative in the future. Unfortunately, the fuse has become shorter. My Standard Homey will go offline within the next few days and has already been sold. The beast will take over its tasks in the future.
