homeassistant

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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io

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Sourcing Local Network Only, HA Friendly Devices (dubvee.org)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/homeassistant

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What kind/brand of devices do you recommend and where do your source them? Things like smart outlets, bulbs, sensors, etc.

I have a hard time sourcing gear because it's all either locked to Amazon/Google or requires the manufacturer's cloud services and their dedicated app.

I'm looking for devices that can work completely offline and only communicate with my HA/MQTT or at least a local base station that can bridge to HA.

For the last few years, I've been buying bulbs/outlets from AliExpress with Tasmota pre-flashed. Before that, I was ordering them from Amazon and re-flashing them, but that was always a crapshoot as not all of them were compatible with tuya-convert. They're also ridiculously difficult to disassemble to flash manually.

Anybody willing to share some tips to source some new devices?

Edit: I've also built a few custom sensors with ESP8266 and ESP-Home but they're not particularly pretty.

Edit 2: Thanks everyone! I think I'm going to look into some Zigbee devices and bridges. That sounds like the most "open" way to expand my smart home gear.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

For contact sensors, I've got like 20 of the Linkind door and window sensors. They're Zigbee, and super responsive. I've basically built my own alarm system with them and HA. At ~$10 (USD) each, they were quite a bit cheaper than the comparable Aqara sensors.