Homey Pro mini | Smart Home Hub for Home Automation – Features Zigbee, Ethernet, Matter & Thread. Compatible with Apple Siri, Amazon Alexa & Google Home.

the power is in the flows and local network
The initial setup of this smart hub is probably the easiest thing since it’s just a matter of supplying it power and connecting the ethernet to the router. After some initial firmware updates, it’s ready to go via the phone app or the desktop web app at my.homey.app and setting up an account.As far as adding my existing smart devices to this hub goes, it installs some apps based on the brand of the smart devices and of course it needs to also be compatible with the communication protocol (there’s a separate hub that can also be linked to this to extend it to work with more communication protocols). I was able to add some things via just logging into my existing accounts with the various smart brands, but when I was going through that process, I ran into some authentication issues where the homey website was having issues. I ended up going to do something else for an hour before trying again, then it started to work again, so I guess there were some server issues. I assume that if I wasn’t re-pairing my devices directly to the hub, then it’s going through the internet to operate the devices. I may be wrong here, but I assume I would need to re-pair each and every smart device with the hub itself in order to have it work completely locally where if my internet didn’t work, all the devices would at least still operate via the hub.The speed when operating the devices are about the same as when using the smart devices apps or via alexa/google. The homey app does allow for what appears to be much more powerful workflow feature, they call flows, that lets you create routines that are more advanced and across all the devices that can connect to it. It’s similar to the alexa app’s routines, but again, much more advanced and visually appealing.I think the only other oddness about using a third-party smart home hub is that I would still need to use the original app in order the update the firmware of the devices. I think some newer communication protocols probably handle it, but older devices may not have that same luxury. And if it’s not paired with the original app, then I’m not sure it’s worth re-pairing to the original app, which I assume would then need to be re-paired back to the hub after. And if I had it in some workflow, wouldn’t it break until it is fixed? Of course, I could just leave it un-updated, but then it wouldn’t be updated with security fixes. Anyway, that was just something that I was thinking about with regard to that scenario, so I’m not sure how that whole scenario would actually play out.All in all, this smart hub is great if you want to go full local management of all smart devices, so the internet isn’t required. The workflows are also much more advanced. For me, while I have a lot of smart devices, I don’t really have too many smart device workflows. The 2 or 3 that I do have works fine inside alexa’s ecosystem, and alexa also already automatically finds all my devices, so as far as basic functionality goes, that has been good enough albeit requiring internet connectivity.

worked great
it is a great product and I am glad there is a cheaper hub then the homey pro, they just need to work with the supported apps

Simple to setup and use. Get started in 5-10 minutes.
Homey mini pro has a very straightforward setup of devices and you be can up and running in a very short time. Besides the account creation, the software system inside the device is ready to go and once you’re inside, you can just start adding devices. I’ve been using mostly for temperature and humidity sensors and also for remote on/off switches with power usage. Setting that up was 5 minutes of work.The design of the user interface and how to interact with the data is good and slightly different. I have experience with home assistant. In homey, you add the devices and then you have access to flow and insights from the data from the devices which gives me more information about the data recorded by the devices.This does require an Athom account to setup and use even though this is a local device. I expected just a simple web portal to manage the device but “homeyId”:null” message when I access the device and is just an API endpoint. So have to run it off my.homey.appAnother issue that I had was with my real time power metering device. In home assistant, it showed amp, wattage, voltage and total power usage but I didn’t see it in the homey. The wattage didn’t show decimals and only the insights section had energy and power usage which doesn’t update as frequently.Overall, this is a very easy and straightforward smart home hub to setup and use. However, compared to home assistant, it isn’t as flexible and powerful.

I have not set up everything yet but I am very happy so far.