Good morning all. I’m a new Homey user and I have 3 Alarm Panel Pro’s and Garage Door Opener. I was hoping to use the Matter firmware, but I think I might have missed the boat on that. I’ve flashed them all to ESPHome and am working through the process of learning how to use ESPHome. If there are any questions or if Konnected would like to get some data on this ecosystem, I’m happy to do remote sessions, answer questions, and gather information. I have one of the new Homey Pro Mini’s and a Homey Bridge.
Alright, I spent a few hours figuring out how to use ESPHome, the ESP Home Integration, and adding a few items into Homey as a test. What I figured out, Physical devices are your ESP Based hardware. Your Alarm Panel zones are your virtual devices. The Zones it talks about in the wizard are the “rooms” in your home. The Class is the sensor type in the Konnected App, for example Garage Door on a Konnected GDO, or Door or Window sensor on an Alarm Panel Pro. I had a full series of screenshots inline with this post but I’m a new user and I just found out, I can only post one picture post. So, I ripped a bunch of screenshots and put it into a PDF file and attached it. And apparently I can’t upload attachments either. Hit me up if you want to screenshot version of this as a PDF.
So far as I can tell:
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Setup your Konnected Devices using ESPHome and the Konnected mobile app.
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Add the ESPHome App in Homey
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Click the Add button in the upper right hand corner of the window.
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Add a New Device
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Choose the ESPhome app to add a device from
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Choose the ESPHome Wizard
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Click the Connect button
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Choose to Add a new physical device
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Enter the prompted information for your device and click the apply link.
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Add a new virtual device. Note: Without a virtual device added and associated to a your physical device, your physical device will be removed from the configuration.
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Configure your new Virtual Device (Konnected’s version of a Zone) and click done. Note, Classes are sensor types in the Konnected App.
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You can also add fields from your Konnected device as capabilities.
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Back out of the wizard and edit your new Homey device.
@Theckman Thank you so much for sharing this information. I’m interested in getting your screenshots and instructions. A couple of questions: 1) Did you have to use the “friendly_name” exactly as shown from the log over on the Homey Pro ESPhome app as I reported in my pripr post? 2) Did you setup the encryption key as Nate noted in his post? I haven’t done this yet. 3) After getting the alarm panel connected via ESPhome, I used the Homey Heimdall app to start setting up the home security system. Did you take the same approach? 4) Are you sharing your setup info over on the Homey Community? It would be helpful there too.
I plan to move the Konnected GDO to ESPHome for local control using Homey. Have you done this too? Any pointers?
Thanks again for sharing your knowledge and experience.
Good morning Ron,
I’m happy to send you my document (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DYY1N4L1Xc284RSwmfYPUjT2VwMbRMyQ/view?usp=sharing). It ended up being screenshots of screenshots so its a bit blurry now, but I think it will still suffice.
I haven’t read your prior post, but I didn’t have to use the friendly name at all. I added a physical device via the ESPHome app and it requests that you give that device a name (anything you want, but it has to be pretty…(lower case with no special chars) and then the IP and if you have a password or encryption key, you add that as well. That ends up being the name that shows up in the Homey App, each one of the virtual devices you add from the physical device become attributes of the device in the Homey App. For example, I am putting together presence and environmental sensors right now. Temp, humidity, barometric pressure, sill presence, moving presence, mmwave module firmware version, mmwave module Bluetooth MAC address, and etc. are all reported as part of the sensor in Homey because I added them as virtual devices from that one physical ESP device.
I haven’t setup encryption keys and passwords yet, I wanted to make sure I understood the process first by getting a few reps under my belt. Then I can go back and add those items afterwards. I’m not as quick as I was when I was younger, so I figured I’d get the basics down first and then secure up the whole thing next time it rains.
I haven’t tried Heimdall, I’ve just been using the ESPHOME app to pull everything into Homey. I’ve been quite lucky. When the folks who built this home built it, they put in sensors on every window and every external door. So, I have old school, bullet proof, wired sensors everywhere. Then, I found Konnected’s Alarm Panel Pro, got one on sale, then got two more during the ethernet issue. So, I got three for the price of 1, I have two more alarm panel boards as well.
I live out in the country behind fences, gates, and cameras. I’m using most of the sensors for smarthome use and to keep the damn doors closed when the kids get excited and forget to close the door while the AC is on. I will end up working on the security aspect, but that is less important to me because of the design of my place. An Army Col. designed the house and he did a good job from a security perspective.
I haven’t shared it there yet. I wanted to see if we could get the Konnected side of the house interested in Homey and potentially give Konnected the opportunity to play with my setup to see if they are interested in doing an integration, either community or official.
I have my GDO on the ESPHome firmware and have it in Homey. I used it to open my garage door just the other day and it worked great. I would say, depending on the number of items in your home(y), it’s becoming very clear to me that Dashboards and Favorite Devices are going to become very useful. I was on Hubitat before and I like Homey a lot better. I still think the Home Assistant Ecosystem is still more developed, but that might be because of the youtube algorithm constantly feeding me ESPHOME integrations with Home Assistant.
Cheers,
Tristen
Thanks Tristen for the details. I can see from your write up that my issue connecting with ESPhome was that I didn’t have a proper “pretty name” for the panel. I too plan to add the encryption key and password after I get everything going.
It would be nice for you to post the info over on the Homey community too. I can see how using ESPhome could end up being a short term solution for the Konnected/Homey integration until there is Matter support on Konnected Alarm Panel Pro.
I plan to move the Konnected GDO over to ESPhome in the next few days.
Thanks,
Ron
Yeah, the who “pretty name” was annoying to me at first, but I get it, you have to call it something. I am really leaning into ESPHome at the moment, it is so powerful and if Homey gets as many integrations and abilities like Home Assistant does, we could see some seriously cool functionality. You should check out fixtSE on youtube, he is a software engineer and does a ton of stuff we can use in homey via ESPHome. I’m stoked, my BME680 sensors just came today. I’ll be doing CO2, CO, VOCs, humidity, temp, pressure, and moving and non-moving presence in every room. I figured I will be able to harvest data to tell how well each room is sealing to the outside, if my air handler is pushing enough conditioned air, etc. from a single sensor. I’m also tempted to use ESP Presence (BLE), It will be nice to know where I left my damn phone when I forget it in the house somewhere. I’m have most of it running already, I need to replace the BME 2xx sensor with the 6xx sensor and I need to switch it over to the ESP32 PoE boards I got. All the sensors are going to be ceiling mount or high on the wall mounted. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to run a circuit of romex through my attic for smart home sensors, that will get expensive quickly. Once I have the bugs worked out with it and the cases 3d printed, I’m going to post about it on the homey board.
Hello Tristen,
You mentioned that you have your GDO connected to Homey via the ESPhome app. I’m working on that now. Which version do you have? I have the GDO White version 2. I updated to the V2 thinking it might help with this issue. It didn’t.
The issue that I’m having is that not all the GDO functions show up in the ESPhome app going through the configuration. The capabilities that don’t show up include: Blue_status_led, garage_door_opener_button, garage_door_range_sensor, warning_led. The garage_door_opener_button is most important since it is needed to open/close the door. Did all the capabilities show up for you in ESPhome? Did you have to modify the yaml file to get these to show up?
Did you find an encryption key to use with the GDO. The instructions point over to Home Assistant for a key which doesn’t help here.
Also, I’m not able to get the ESPHome dashboard because I can’t install the ESPHome. However, I am able to access the GDO yaml file via the Homey ESPhome debug file. The missing GDO capabilities are NOT in the yaml file. I really don’t want to figure out how to modify the yaml file.
Any pointer greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Ron
@Ron_Smith the garage_door_opener_button and garage_door_range_sensor entities are internal entities. They’re not exposed externally by design.
Use the open and close commands on the garage_door (cover) entity to control the door and view its state.
Good morning Ron,
These are the items exposed to me in ESPHome on my GDO White v2.
(please see the picture below)
You can add any of those. The button for close and open comes Door Position and you can use window covering
(please see the picture below)
and the button looks like:
(please see the picture below)
While it looks like a boiling pot of water, this actually shows a closed window shade. You click this button and it will open the garage door.
I hope that helps.
Edit:
