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Smart devices are turning out to be a poor investment
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this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
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Zigbee2mqtt + homeassistant = all I need at home and away.
All my zigbee devices just report in and I automate my home that way.
I have high hopes for matter but in the interim: I've got shit working great. Window sensors to automate air filters going on and off, a humidifier running in response to a few sensors around the apartment, grow lights on and off on some simple timers.
More complicated things like fans and lights for a 3d printing enclosure? Easy: octoprint has a homeassistant hook and I can listen in for printer start/stop.
Local control will always beat out the "easy solution" IMO. It's just a bit more setup.
But it's not a solution I could hand off to technically illiterate grandparents.
I’m really impressed with the breadth of devices homeassistant supports. It tracks the location of me & my wife via our iPhones. When we arrive at home after dark it turns on the exterior lights via zwave. We have 4 WiFi enabled ceiling fans from Big Ass Fans it can control, along with our Ecobee thermostats. Our washer & dryer use Insteon IOLinc modules to notify us when cycles are done. And in a few months we’re having a solar system & Powerwall installed, both of which have home assistant integrations as well.
If we’re talking lights - Lutron Caseta all day. Those things have bullet proof connectivity, support all the major platforms, have great support for homebrew stuff, have hardware that has remained the same for a long time, and local network and switch pairings work offline. If Lutron folds up shop, a lot the “smart” stuff will still work.
Yeah but downside: I rent
So everything I'm doing is with smart sockets haha
I feel your last line. I'm a competent user (read: great at following tutorials) and couldn't get HA/mosquitto/z2m all working together. I wish I could, but I wouldn't dream of passing it to even my brother, it's so far from plug and play. Huge shame, because it's so attractive.
Yeah it took a bit to get it all working. Zigbee2mqtt runs on an rasp-pi in the middle of the apartment for good coverage. The mosquitto broker is on the same box as HA but it took a couple tries to figure out how to get it to talk to HA.
Once it was set up it was pretty great. Occasionally I'll have to restart the rpi to fix some communication breakdown or another.
The main non-userfriendly aspect is that I have to ssh into the rpi and edit a text file then restart the docker container to accept new devices into the network, then change the file back at the end.
No other option though: I live in an apartment complex. I can't just blindly accept new devices.
You might want to try out ZHA then. Its a bit younger so it doesn't support lesser known devices that z2m does and it has its quirks with other devices. But it comes almost out of the box with HA and is a 1 click install. The latest HA update brought firmware updates to the frontend, but I believe z2m already had that for a while.
I have been running zha for half a year with some Ikea lights and some nous smart plugs and the only moment it has misbehaved is when the power to one of the router nodes went out and it stopped sending zigbee messages to certain other nodes.