Tonight I finally finished upgrading all my Eve devices to Matter. Despite the time involved, it went about as smoothly as you could hope for.
But then it came time for all the other devices, and it's like I've been walking hip-deep in molassas. Devices are taking multiple, multiple tries to get connected. Though once they are connected they seem to be operating just fine. Hopefully they stay that way.
Since it's now past midnight, I think I'm throwing in the towel for the day. Maybe tomorrow night I'll make some headway on the rest.
The Homey Pro smart home hub is an expensive investment. Purchasing the unit on Black Friday saved me $50 (plus I saved $4 on the ethernet adapter I bundled with it), but I still had to pay a whopping $372.36 for the thing. In my humble opinion, this is radically overpriced, even considering its wonderful capabilities, and I would have been much more comfortable if it were in the $250 range. At the very least, ethernet could have been included. And yet... I get it. This is the cost that's what you'll pay for a Home Assistant box, but that requires a lot of your time to get working, and I've never been ambitious enough to try and wrap my head around it. So paying Homey engineers to do the heavy lifting is a fair trade-off.
The thing that I just don't know is if my investment is going to work out long-term. Athom, the company that developed Homey, was bought out by LG. This could be a good thing in that more money will (theoretically) be available to continue developing the project. But just as Samsung has hopelessly screwed up SmartThings, there's a very real possibility that LG will fuck up Homey and I'll be forced to jump to Home Assistant. Which is probably what I should have done from the start, but I just don't have the time to invest in learning how to make it work with all my stuff.
But anyway...
Homey Pro (which I'll be calling "HP" from her on out) has an IR blaster which can (assumably) be used to control my television, so I put it directly under the TV (where it also has an ethernet hub available for a more reliable signal vs. WiFi).
Once you've got HP set up via the Homey app, you can visit the HP "App Store" to get free apps for controlling all your stuff. Many are created by the HP community... but a surprising number of them are official apps direct rom the manufacturers themselves.
One of these apps is for Aqara devices. It was my plan to integrate my Aqara stuff via the Aqara hub's Matter upgrade. But when I tried, HP said that my hub didn't have any devices attached? So I used the official Aqara app and paired all the sensors directly to HP. And since you can only pair the devices to one hub at a time, that means my Aqara hub is now useless and got tossed in my electronics box. To be honest, the pairing is not easy. The first sensor took two tries (the second took six?!?). Three more to go. I really hope that's the end of it.
Next up I decided to jump head-first into what I've most been dreading... upgrading my Eve Smart Home light switches to the new Matter Smart Home protocol so that they can be controlled via Homey Pro instead of only horrendously shitty HomeKit.
I started with a single light switch that I rarely use. It went fairly well, but took some time...
If all goes well, you then have a Matter-enabled light switch which is accessible by Homey Pro, Apple HomeKit, and even other smart home ecosystems which can integrate Matter devices (like Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa). If all doesn't go well, then you'll end up having to delete the device from HomeKit, reset the Eve light switch, add it back to HomeKit, then do steps 3-5 again. Fortunately, this only happened once so far.
UPDATE 12/4/2024: Over the course of two evenings, all my Eve light switches, motion sensors, door & window sensors, and smart plugs had been updated to Matter and added. Surprisingly, out of dozens of devices, only two light switches ended up giving me problems. But that was easily solved by resetting and re-pairing.
And now the real fun begins.
The biggest benefit of Homey Pro is that it can control such a wild variety of smart devices. And I have a ton of them. Everything from my Roomba robot vacuum to my security system to my smoke detectors (to name a few). Figuring out how to get all that stuff added so I finally have a cohesive smart home that's actually smart and where everything can work together is going to be my obsession for the rest of the week, I'm sure.
To say that I outright loathe HomeShit HomeKit is a massive understatement. Apple has fucked up their "smart home" protocol since Day One.
When the technology debuted it was so woefully incomplete that I ditched it immediately and went with INSTEON. When INSTEON died years later, I decided to give HomeKit another chance because so many people were saying that it was finally a worthwhile way to control your home and devices. Since I was in a hurry, I went all-in on HomeKit and replaced every light switch and "smart device" in my home (at great expense). But I didn't trust Apple entirely because I made sure to buy devices that would be upgradable to the "Matter" protocol so if HomeKit ended up being awful I could just migrate to Matter and control everything another way.
SPOILER ALERT: HOMEKIT is still most definitely HOMESHIT!
HomeKit in 2024 is still a brain-dead pile of shit that is wildly inflexible and doesn't work consistently. Apple has been working on this for TEN YEARS and yet automations suddenly stop working for no reason and devices won't act as expected. Even worse, all you get to work with is the most basic of basic controls...
That's pretty much it. That's all you get. It's fucking embarrassing. Apple has always dumbed their stuff down to the lowest common denominator, but this is just beyond fucking useless if you want to have any kind of smarts in your smart home. What I need is something like this...
I've tried multiple times to do something this bloody simple and it always fails. Ideally I'd be able to use a WHILE statement so I don't have to create a second IF/THEN loop to turn them off, but at this point I'll take anything I can get.
What I'm really looking for is something like this, where the roof heat tapes only turn on if it's been snowing for a while so I don't have to waste energy on a tiny amount of snowfall that will melt quickly...
But do you think basic variables or even a rudimentary timer is available in HomeKit? Oh fuck no.
This is all off the top of my head, and I'm sure once I got into the logic of whatever system I end up with, I'll get smarter on how to best approach the automations I'm looking to create. The point is that stuff like this simply isn't possible with HomeKit.
Enter Homey Pro...
I actually bought one of these devices last year, but ended up returning it because it wasn't able to control the devices I had (mostly because my light switch manufacturer hadn't gotten out the Matter upgrade as promised). Fast-forward to Black Friday 2024 and miracle-of-miracles, my light switch manufacturer has finally released their Matter upgrade!
And so I am once again giving Homey Pro a try.
Today I received the device. Tonight I'll install it. Tomorrow I'll get started on upgrading all my stuff to Matter and seeing if Homey Pro will work for my needs.
And you, lucky reader, get to come alpong for the ride!
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