I have been really surprised at Athom’s decision not to put an Ethernet connection on Homey, that would have made the whole system much more reliable at virtually zero extra cost. Based on different discussions on this forum it seems that it will be impossible do hack this with the current hardware.
Which is why I looked in another direction; it is possible to replace the WiFi antennas of an access point and a device with a coax cable (see for example WiFi Over Coax). This creates a dedicated wired connection which is free from interference and cannot be jammed. So I see some benefits but would be interested to know if anyone has ever tried this or as any thoughts on this
Very interesting approach. I have already converted a few Homeys to external antennas and may have a few tips for you.
You have to open Homey. This can be complicated because both halves of Homey are glued together. In this trend you will find tips on how to open it.
Homey’s wifi is easy to access. A pigtail connector is hidden under the red heat sink, onto which the cable for the adhesive antenna is plugged. You will find the adhesive antenna in the upper half of Homey. You can cut off the antenna and solder the cable to the coax socket.
My initial thought: “asking for trouble”. It may work (I guess it did for the guy whose page you linked to), but there are plenty of catches that I can think: ground loops, or the fact that RF-over-the-air is quite different from RF-over-coax (with very different attenuation characteristics).
It also sounds like a solution to an XY problem. For instance, if your Homey suffers from interference, why not place it near a (wired) AP?
Although I sometimes feel that the connection between Homey and the WiFi AP is not 100% stable, that is not really my problem. I use Homey for home automation but also as controller for my home security system. At the moment Homey’s wifi connection is by far the weakest part of the whole setup
Good point, I would put an external antenna connector on Homey. To use it as AP you would have to disconnect the cable and connect an antenna, then it is accessible as an AP. After setup remove the antenna and connect the coax cable again. Not super user friendly but normally you only need to do this once.
That sounds contradictory: the connection between Homey and your WiFi AP isn’t really the problem, but Homey’s WiFi connection is?
In any case, I would suggest looking elsewhere for solutions, this one sounds like too much can go wrong. OTOH, it’s your Homey and you’re free to do with it what you want
that was a bit of contradictory statement. To put it more clearly, for normal use WiFi is fine, but since it can be jammed quite easily WiFi is a problem when you also use Homey as a security system
I will start with putting antennas on Homey (wanted to do that anyway). If I use antennas that can be screwed off, I can easily test the cable idea. Need to find some time though, will let everyone know after I have tried this.
If you use ZigBee (same, easily jammable, frequency), or Z-Wave (868mhz also easily jammable as a lot of proprietary security devices have the same, but without their heartbeat signal) devices, making your WiFi signal wired isn’t going to help much in terms of making a good security device out of Homey.
Homey is a problem when you use Homey as a security system You don’t want a security system that depends on a working cloud connection or disables apps/flows when it thinks they are called too often, or any of the other possible issues that Homey can have.
also a good point, and definitely a weak point in the whole setup, but my cameras are wired so these cannot be jammed. I am not sure if I can detect jamming of zigbee and Z-wave, but if I can, I can at least send out an alarm for that
When Homey’s wifi gets jammed on the other hand an cannot do anything anymore, so for me that is the first area to focus on
Sorry to be the bringer of bad news - the previous posts about this not working are true.
An Ethernet connection has a different encoding/modulation than the Wifi connection, they are incompatible. Connecting an ethernet cable to a wifi device will not work. Please do not break your Homey by trying it out.
That’s not what he’s trying to do, though. He wants to connect two (WiFi) antenna connections to each other using coax, so basically a wired wireless network.
Ah, sorry I misunderstood, but then the remark about different transmission characteristics/attenuation applies and it would still not work IMHO.
Thanks for pointing this out Robert.
As a jip and janneke logic you would think it could work, but that doesn’t work that way. A WiFi signal is sending and receiving. When sending these signals directly in with a qoax instead of antennas. You actually send a transmission signal straight into another WiFi module. this will lead to damage to the other WiFi module or wursr. BTW it doesn’t work. Sy🙄
I did find some descriptions where it does work, but as you point out, you cannot directly connect the two antennas; you need to reduce the signal strength to prevent damage to the receiver.
In this question on Stack Overflow, the required attenuation was given as between 50dB and 60dB and that worked fine as reported by the author:
I have performed the test using 60 dB fixed attenuators supporting up to 18 GHz. When using the 5 GHz band, we were able to successfully record data transfer rates of exactly what we expected in a wireless bridge configuration. The only issue we saw with our configuration was the fact that there was leakage from the SMA connector leads, so clients that were not connected via the wired SMA/coaxel cable were also able to connect to the server.
I think that this could help too : TP-LINK AV500
Since you have to power the homey anyway just plug it with a AV500 WiFi point and connect the router module on your main router. That way your homey is within 1meter from the WiFi point … just my 2 cents for 50euro
You don’t want a security system that depends on a working cloud connection or disables apps/flows when it thinks they are called too often, or any of the other possible issues that Homey can have.
