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] 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Yeah, that's probably the direction I'm going to start looking. Pretty much every device I run uses MQTT to communicate with HA, including some custom buttons I keep around the house.

The only sticking point is going to be reconfiguring my HA server to speak to a USB device. It's currently Dockerized, and I've got little experience passing through USB devices that aren't serial adapters. Not a deal breaker, but definitely a speedbump.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I've tried a few different USB zigbee coordinators, but the one I ended up sticking with is the 2652 based coordinator from tubeszb that is Ethernet or USB. I had issues with the USB passthrough to the vm whenever I had to restart the vm, so using that one over Ethernet fixed all my issues.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Yeah, ethernet would be my preferred bridging mechanism. Thanks for the recommendation. Will look into some bridges from TubesZB.

[–] witten 2 points 2 years ago

Passing through a USB device might be as easy as adding --device /dev/your/usb/device to your docker run command-line, first making sure the permissions on that device are such that they can be read by the container. (Or use the devices: equivalent if you're using Compose.)