I realise we do not have a good tablet UI for the Homey app and also the phone app is not customisable.
This doesn’t bode well for installers or some users who want a Centralised Tablet for Home Control of products and automation,
The Home Remote app and designer tool http://thehomeremote.com/ allows users/integrators to create a customisable UI for tablets and phones. I have used this for Zipato.
I would like to gauge the communities interest in having them add support for Homey Hubs? As this will cost me a lot of money.
I would pay for support for a local mode only to begin with as i mainly want a wall mount tablet friendly version that we can install in clients homes. Then add a remote connection option later.
It supports many controllers and products, but is not very user friendly for designers as it is very complex, great for developers though, and support is top notch.
As I haven’t used the new Homey app with V2.0 yet, I was wondering what your experience is with it on Tablets, and whether this is something we should pursue on behalf on the community or just for ourselves for our own custom UI’s.
Your feedback is appreciated.
Be aware that the Web API is not (yet) stable, and there is, as of yet, no generic authentication management available. The API endpoints are also undocumented, there’s only a Node.js module available to interact with the API.
Strangely enough I tried Home Remote just this last week. I am very impressed so far. It isn’t the easiest app to get into but it seems very powerful and flexible. It’s along the same lines as the now Kramer acquired $100 iRule, but for a much more interesting £5 per client platform. It’s not appropriate for average consumers though… but perhaps that suits you ?
I think this is well worth investigating …but … there’s quite a lot of politics and positioning at the moment plus you’re on shifting sand technically with Athom’s aspirations and restrictions.
May way of trying to solve both the lacking of a ‘customizable dashboard’ and the missing ‘advanced (desktop) flow editor’ problems is: MQTT Gateway. The first release of the MQTT gateway app (Homey 1.5 & 2.0) is submitted to the app store and currently in review by Athom. I’m using the MQTT protocal to communicate with Node RED & create a dashboard with Node RED Dashboard. A quick search reveals The Home Remote also has a MQTT Client to communicate over MQTT.
Very interested in your MQTT app as I use it extensively here in my HA system. NodeRED too although I don’t use their dashboard.
I have played briefly with HomeRemote but it’s a very frustrating app to get to grips with, very capable but lacks any useful recent documentation with their community forum being the place to go but very archaic. It needs a drag and drop interface.
… but I’m still persevering with HR and the MQTT plugin seems to work… once you do battle to understand how.
Thanks for all your feedback. @robertklep I’ll get Bill the developer to liaise with Athom for this and hopefully they can put something in place soon.
I’ll also ask Bill if he can put together a video on the MQTT integration tutorial. I know he is very busy and wont get time to do this for a while, but it will help others in the future.
As for using The Home Remote, yes as I said, its not the easiest to use. But once Bill integrates Homey into it officially, it will auto generate pages for your Homey Hub/s, then you can simply cut copy and paste your own pages and or layout in.
This is an ancient topic (I know), but did anyone continue using TheHomeRemote? I’m a heavy user (with a Global cache module, a LightManager, Philips Hue bridge etc) and want to add my Homey to it. I have it working with plain MQTT (writing and reading the status of lights etc.), but there is a Homey Script available, but no explanation how to send commands or how to receive (for instance) the onoff status of devices.
My MQTT list get’s longer and longer and it would be fantastic if I could replace that with the script. I’ve asked the same question at the THR forum, but 4 days later still no answer. Partly It works now: I’ve changed the script so I can send commands like to devices (hallamp/onoff/true), but that’s about it for now, no clue how to get the status of a device. Anyone?
IIRC Homey MQTT uses the homie specification. The spec is detailed here (click on specification). https://homieiot.github.io/
From section 7.3.2
To give an example: A kitchen-light device exposing the light node with a settable power property subscribes to the topic homie/kitchen-light/light/power/set for commands:
> homie/kitchen-light/light/power/set ← "true"
In response the device will turn on the light and upon success update its power property state accordingly:
> homie/kitchen-light/light/power → "true"
I.E. you read the current state from the light using the topic payload immediately above into Home Remote
When you want to command the light to change state you append …
/set
to the topic and write to that topic from HR. As in the construct at the start of the excerpt from 7.3.2 above
Note the small arrow directions are different. I think you are reading and writing to the same topic. As a general principle you never read and write to the same topic in MQTT as it creates nasty looping possibilities.
PS. Homey and homie just coincidentally sound the same … they are different things
Thanks for the very quick answer! I will try this tomorrow (it’s rather late here), but what’s still not clear is what I exactly need to fill in @ the Binding and Value of the EventDisplay and Datadisplay. The normal MQTT methode works fine. but might end up in an absurd long list of items. I’ve spent hours already (I’m not lazy and quite a fanatic scripter myself), but I can’t figure it out.
I’m sorry I’m not using Home Remote so I can’t help much…
I’ll take a look later at the screenshots you posted (it’s late here too) but I hope the topics and payloads usage that I posted helps.
I know a user from the Hubitat forum using HomeRemote via the (my) MQTT app which implements the same homie protocol and he is very enamoured with HR. So it should work as outlined.
