While poking around in the Homey developer tools today, I noticed something I don’t remember seeing before: a Bindings option when clicking the 3 dots. It shows source endpoint, cluster, target, and target endpoint, and there are options to add binding, restore bindings, and delete individual ones.
As far as I know, Homey has never officially supported Zigbee bindings (direct device-to-device communication without going through the hub). So either this has quietly been there for a while and I just never noticed, or this is a sign that proper binding support is on its way in a more meaningful form?
Has anyone else seen this? Would love to know if this is new or if I’ve just been blind this whole time.
Like the Tx/Rx stats, it was added in v12.13.0 or v13.0.0. Not sure though how to use the bindings-functionality. I also read somewhere this option was added in preparation for the planned Zigbee OTA update functionality.
I think the main reason for all the recent Zigbee changes is because LG wants better Zigbee support for their Thinq ON device. It’s rather suspicious that Zigbee on Homey hasn’t gotten any love for many years, but now that the Thinq ON has gotten Zigbee-certified recently, things are quickly being added (possibly to Homey first, because Everyone Is A Tester™, before it gets rolled out to the ON).
Let’s just say that Athom, probably “encouraged” by LG, has finally seen the light.
Athom has been adamant since basically forever that generic device support is “bad”, and that
device support should be implemented in separate apps. But this isn’t really sustainable in an environment where new devices pop up daily, and lots of apps are developed by community developers that, at some point, either stop working on their apps or are using vibe coding that, from what I’m seeing, requires an app to be in permanent test phase because it can break at any time.
Also, other platforms have had generic device support for a long time, and it’s so much easier for the users (case in point: I’m working on a few DIY boards running Zigbee, and Z2M supports them out of the box because they use standard Zigbee clusters; for Homey, this would require making a specific app just for this particular board…).
So yes, good thing they finally saw the light, although much too late for me (also, this doesn’t fix the issues with the Zigbee hardware).
