Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Homey Pro is the one smart hub to rule them all…or is it?”.
This is a smart home hub called homie Pro, since I started using homie Pro, it’s become an essential part of my smart home, just as much as a smart, plug or a smart bulb might be. The problem with homie. Pro, though, is that when it doesn’t work, it really really doesn’t work. Let’S start with what homie Pro actually is think of homie Pro as a brain for your smart home, a lot of people will have lot lot of different Smart Home Products from many different brands. All running on different protocols, you’ll have a smart hub for your lights.
Then you’ll have a different hub for your locks and then you’ll have multiple apps to run everything. It can be a huge mess. Homie Pro solves this problem by bringing Everything Under One Roof. Everything runs through homie Pro, and then the best part is is that everything is then run through one app making it.
So you can go to one place and control everything about your smart home. You’Re, probably wondering how the homie Pro can do this inside the homie. Pro you’ll find a Linux based computer. Think of it like a Raspberry Pi but beefed up incorporated into this computer are connections for all the major smart home protocols.
Zigg Z-Wave matter thread, Bluetooth, infrared, you name it homie pro has got it. This allows homie Pro to either connect to or in some cases, completely replace the smart home hubs that you already use, making it the One-Stop shop for everything in your house having all of your smart home devices funneled into one Hub is cool and all, but it Doesn’T really mean anything if the software that allows you to connect to that Hub? Isn’T any good. Thankfully, this is where homie really shines.
I think the homie software is so good that it might even be the best companion software I’ve ever used. The homie Pro offers software that works both on your smartphone and your desktop. The desktop version has some more capabilities than the smartphone application, but they’re pretty much designed exactly the same. So what I’m teaching you now on the desktop is also going to work for your smartphone. So when you first open the app you’re presented with your home screen, this gives you quick access to information about.
What’S going on at your home, you have some weather up here. You have the people that live in your home. You have some quick devices. You know things that you access all the time and then some favorite flows here in the devices section.
You can see all the smart home devices I have in my home, organized by room. That’S how I’ve done it, but you can organize this any way you want to so this worked best for me, but whatever works best for you go ahead and do it homie Pro gives you full customization here inside each room. I have total control over all the devices in that room, so, for example, with the TV lights in the living room, I can click this button here, click over here and turn them off.
Now the TV lights are off or I could go over here and control. The slider a little bit and turn them on turn them up turn them down whatever I want to do so. This is something that you’ve probably seen before in, like the Google home app, for example, but the homie Pro gives you access to everything, even things that the Google home app wouldn’t support. In addition to that, you also get more direct control over a lot of devices, for example, where the Google home app might just allow you to turn the device on and off the homie. Pro app is going to give you access to much more control than just that.
Flows are basically routines or automations. This is what homie has called their automation. System. Flows are really easy to put together and can be really powerful.
So, let’s start with a really simple one that I created: this is my Sunrise automation. So the way this works is, is you have your when and your and and your then so when the Sun rises and I’m home or my partner is home, then, and then I have a list of things that happen after that all happens. So if the sun is rising and I’m not at home and my partner’s not at home, none of these things happen.
So that’s where the power comes in, because now all you have to do is drag and drop things around add cards in take cards away and build your perfect routine, and you can have as many of these as you want working at all sorts of different variables. This is another cool one that I created. This one is based on a motion sensor I put inside my cat’s, litter box. So when the litter box motion detector goes off, meaning my cat went into the litter box and the TV is off and it’s between 8:30 a.m. and 1000 p.m.
then the vacuum comes out and cleans right in front of the litter box. Because when my cat gets out of the litter box, he brings some of the the litter out with him. So this is a really cool routine that you could create with homie Pro – and this took me – maybe 5 minutes to put together – which may not be the case for a lot of people who are using something like home assistant, because you have to learn all sorts Of coding tricks to do that, if you wanted to get more robust about, what’s going on in your smart home, there is a script editor in homie Pro. You have to install it and you have to learn a bunch of stuff, but if you’re the kind of person who wants even more control over their smart home homie Pro can give that to you. Of course, you might just be doing the same thing with home assistant already, so you wouldn’t really see a need to switch over to homie Pro. But the benefit of this is that if you start with homie Pro using the simple flow system and then decide you want to advance to something else, then homie Pro can provide that for you. Another thing I want to touch on is this Insight section. This allows you to see what’s going on as far as energy consumption, for your devices in your home, for example, with this desk light, you can see uh the power usage over the past few few days.
You can see when it was on when it wasn’t on how much power it was using, and you can get a good idea of whether or not that device is sucking too much power from your grid. This is especially important if you have solar power or are in a place where energy consumption is super expensive, but you can see voltage. You can see all sorts of different things in all these helpful graphs, so you can really get an idea of what’s going on in your house at any given time, so you’re convinced that homie Pro is super cool, but what’s the catch the catch is. Is that it’s not easy being the one Hub to rule them all, although homie Pro does a great job of incorporating thousands and thousands of devices into its system, not everything is going to be covered, and this can create some serious compatibility issues with the Smart Home Products that you already own, for example, my nanoleaf panels, are officially supported by the homie app and they worked flawlessly right out of the box. My smart dimmers, though, are officially supported, but for some reason they disconnect constantly pretty much every day, which means that at least once a day, some of my flows don’t work properly and then my Robot vacuum isn’t supported at all. I have to rely on Community Support to make it work, which basically involves hacking together an app to incorporate with homie itself. These issues mean that homie Pro is not the set it and forget it device that you might be hoping for. Unfortunately, you’re either going to have to do a ton of troubleshooting have to buy new smart devices to incorporate with homie or wait until a IAL support comes to homie for the devices that you already own.
This is a big problem, but it hasn’t been a big enough problem for me to stop using homie. I still love it because I love the software and I love that it works with most of my devices and I’m just hoping that over time, the other devices that I’m having problems with will get fixed. Eventually, these problems – I’ve mentioned with homie Pro, prevent me from recommending it to just any smart home user.
The way I see it, there are two types of smart home owners. The first has some devices a light: some plugs, maybe a lock. They don’t need homie Pro.
On the flip side, you have people who have so many smart devices in their house and so many routines and automations to cover them all that their entire life is basically automated. Those users definitely could use homie Pro, but they’re probably already invested in the home assistant ecosystem and they probably already have a server running everything, so homie Pro would be kind of ir relevant, really homie Pro is designed for the people in the middle. The people who have a lot of smart home devices and want to get into automations but at the same time, don’t want to get into home assistant or people who want to get into the power of Home assistant, but don’t want to build anything for them. Homie Pro is a perfect all-in-one system, you buy it, you set it up, you get going, it’s easy to use, the learning curve is low and you can get started making your smart home dreams come true.
I want to wrap this up by addressing the elephant in the room, which is price here in the United States. The homie Pro cost $ 399 $ 9. That’S a lot of money for a device like this, especially when you know that if you want the home assistant route, you could build something yourself for less than half that keep in mind, though, that the homie Pro doesn’t involve any subscription Services. You pay your $ 399 and that’s it.
You never have to pay anything again. Also, the homie Pro is capable of running your entire smart home locally. Assuming that you have the devices to support that, if you do, you could run your entire home without any internet connection which be a real Boon for people out there who value their privacy. The company that creates homie has been around for nearly 10 years and has released a lot of devices over those years, most of which are still supported today. So investing in a homie Pro is a good idea in the long run, because you are going to get the support that you need over the next few years. The only thing you’re going to have to accept is that you’re going to have to do a lot of troubleshooting when you first take it out of the box, and you might have to replace some of your smart home devices or wait until those devices get support.
But if you can look past these flaws, the homie Pro is going to be a great addition to your smart home, just like it was for mine, .