I’m a new user of Sonoff. I was really exited of the announced features and specs.
But I’m a bit surprised when I started testing it.
Zigbee devices are great but not being able to see the status of the devices in the ewelink app is pretty weird. I dont get it. Like you can add as many wifi devices as you want but if you have Zigbee devices you can’t control it remotely and see their status…
I mean, the idea of local lan control is perfect. From my understanding local control means if I loose internet connection then everything that is “local” continues to work.
It doesn’t mean that everything that is local cannot be seen remotely and you cant control anything remotely.
One other thing that would be great. I have Smart Life switches that are running automations. It’s great but I loose internet, everything act up and lights turn on in the middle of the night.
I had the impression that I would be able to take control of all thoses devices with the ihost local router but I dont see any way of doing this. For the switches I think I could reflash them with tasmota firmware but for the light bulbs I still need to figure it out…
Yeah, the original intention of iHost is to make a local gateway which do not rely on the cloud services, so from the first start we don’t make the remote access or remote control as the priority feature, but we do know a lot of users have a similar request, we will evaluate later but not now.
As far as the lights, they don’t have the feature named power-on state, so it is a really frustrated it will be on when power restored, it is a hardware based feature actually, we will keep trying to find a work around to smooth the experience.
Thanks for the reply.
I currently own and use a Habitat hub. It’s designed to work locally but you can still access and view everything remotely.
Ihost should really consider this kind of approach. I dont see any benefit of being local only without any possibility to see and monitor what is going on. Think about the alarm feature and door sensor… this is kind of useless if it can be viewed remotely…
You can do this but the onboarding process is really bad.
install the TailScale Docker image
create a dashboard on the iHost with the things you want to control
add your phone to Tailscale and note what IP address the iHost has (it won’t change without reinstalling the docker image)
turn on Tailscale automatic turning on if it is available in your app. On my phone I click on the person on the top right and then “VPN on demand”. It uses split tunnelling so only IP addresses starting in 100 get it. Does not apply if you have a VPN anyway, so you need to manually select which to use as often only 1 can run.
load the IP for the iHost followed by “/cast/“
save the webpage for the iHost dashboard to your home screen.
All done. Now you can see and control Zigbee devices on your phone.
I have recently bought the sonoff iHost. I do love the local functionality “idea”, its faster and more reliable as we do have a very unstable ISP in SA.
I recreated most of the automated scenes on the iHost, it was a time-saving task, only to realize that some were impossible to recreate since they need the sun set and sunrise times to activate some devices. I feel that the iHost can overcome this issue as there is already database with the sunrise/sunset tables available for offline use, which is quite accurate by year and date timestamp.
My initial reason for purchasing the iHost was the idea of building my own security system, performing automatise scenes at the times when there is no internet access available and also for the fact that it already has a built-in Zigbee bridge. The lack of it being incapable of remote monitoring defeats its entire purpose, since you can’t see whether the alarm is being armed or disarmed, see which device is activated, and also the notification thereof. ** The iHost also does not creates its one local WiFi network, and for Zigbee devices paired to the iHost cannot be remotely accessed or viewed via cloud.|
The localization of the iHost invalidates the reason for the lack of the above features and capabilities of iHost as all these devices rely on internet connectivity for updates, even for the iHost.
My idea of the iHost is that it has the same purpose and functionality as the Cloud base version of eWelink, in terms of remote control and monitoring, but still has the advantage of performing automatic scenes for the times there is no internet available.
But at currently, for me, buying the iHost is a waste of money and time.
I got the iHost to help intergrating everything now i cant,
I have a farm and is not always there so not to be able to see the security nor to help with watering the plants, was not I wanted to do.
Isn’t it simpler to make a mobile application that will manage the devices on ihost like homeassistant has? Ihost is currently a semi-finished product. Waste of money!
The Home Assistant app works perfectly without paying. You just need to set up port forwarding in your router, register a DDNS, and enter the link in the Home Assistant mobile app.
I use iHost to bridge devices into Apple HomeKit. Apple Home app then provides my solution for controlling both locally and outside the home. This works flawlessly for me.
Another solution with iHost is to bridge into another system, Smartthings in my case, and have local control, if I need remotely. While for simple control while in the house bridging into the Matter on my iPhone works great.
