The Homey Podcast

Andreas Dantz of Spiel und Zeug, a German smart home YouTube channel with 417K subscribers, joins Abe on the Homey Podcast.

They talk about letting AI build the automations you’d never get around to, and whether a smart home still needs buttons.

00:00 Introduction
01:01 Testing the Aqara FP400 presence sensor
08:35 Building automations with AI
18:16 Schneider Electric’s bid for Shelly
23:13 Apple’s rumored smart home display
27:25 Does a smart home still need buttons?
33:38 Retiring the HomeKit experiment for Matter Bridge
41:10 German smart home platforms: FRITZ! and Homematic IP
50:44 Thread 1.4 and combining Thread networks
58:11 Where to find Andreas

Patrick Hunt’s YouTube channel, Make Smart Matter, isn’t just a name: his smart home runs on dozens of Thread Border Routers.He joins Abe to talk through his experience running that setup on Homey Self-Hosted Server, which has been smooth so far.On Matter as a whole, he’s largely positive, but just as clear about where the standard still falls short.

Homey Portal is our first product with a screen: a round 2.8-inch touchscreen wrapped in a stainless steel ring, for the desk or the wall.
In this episode, co-founder Emile and Abe go through it. Where the idea started, a live demo of what it does, right down to the sound design that shapes how it feels to use.

Abe from Homey talks with Eric Welander, who’s been documenting his smart home on YouTube since 2018, about the week’s biggest news: Google’s new smart speaker and SwitchBot’s parent company buying Nanoleaf.
They compare notes from the CSA (Connectivity Standards Alliance) event, then walk through Eric’s own smart home setup: how it’s built, what’s changed over the years, and where Homey fits into his daily routine.

Danny Oosterveer from De Groene Nerds joins Abe to dig into how a smart home becomes a full energy management system (EMS). They cover solar production, EV charging automation, dynamic energy pricing, and the automations that turn all of that into real savings on energy and money.
Danny co-hosts the Dutch podcast De Groene Nerds, where he covers sustainable living and smart energy for more than 25,000 engaged listeners. He’s also appeared on Dutch national news to explain dynamic energy pricing, the same topic he and Abe dig deeper into here.