Last week saw the introduction of a brand new smart home hub to the UK market
Dutch start up Athom successfully launched Homey on Kickstarter in 2015, more than doubling their funding target for the project.
The 12cm diameter sphere contains a 1 GHz ARM CPU with 512MB RAM and 4GB flash storage. Athom say all your data is stored locally, and is not shared with them or any 3rd party.
The radios inside can control a vast array of smart home equipment including those using Z-Wave, ZigBee, Bluetooth, WiFi plus 433 MHz and 868 MHz system too.
It’s been designed to look good and be worthy of a spot in your living room, useful as it has six high-power Infrared-LEDs to control TVs and other IR devices.
A combination of the included software plus plugin ‘apps’ means Homey already works with over 20,000 devices and that number is growing every day. Think hardware like Nest, Philips Hue, LightwaveRF, Chromecast, Sonos as well as software and services like IFTTT, Google Assistant, Spotify, Plex and Facebook Messenger. The list goes on and on.
The Flow Editor provides an easy to use drag and drop style GUI to create complex logic using When / And / Then columns.
- Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n 2.4 GHz
- Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy 1
- ZigBee 2.4 GHz 2
- Z-Wave Plus
- 433 MHz
- 868 MHz
- Infrared Receiver
- Infrared Transmitter (6x)
- NFC (ISO14443A)
Athom has chosen the UK and Scandinavia (Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden) for the first international launch outside the Netherlands and they aim to cover most of Western Europe later this year.
No products found.
It certainly looks like an exciting new system and we’ll be reviewing it in the coming weeks. In the meantime Homey is available from Amazon and direct from www.athom.com.
Last update on 2024-11-08 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API
How about Alexa?
@Milko – https://forum.athom.com/discussion/2837/alexa-skill-status
Cool, thanks. Looks good, although much more expensive than the ncube, which was my first choice up to now
@Milko, it’s true that Homey is a bit more expensive, but for that, you get much more connectivity than just Z-Wave (including Bluetooth, Zigbee, 433MHz [lightwaveRF, Somfy, X10…] AND a truly open (and easy to use) platform with tons of integrations, ranging from News Headlines to Tesla (see also https://apps.athom.com ) thanks to a very active community (https://forum.athom.com ).
In any case you’re on my shortlist guys:-)