this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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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 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My lighting is all Lutron, which has local control. Then for other devices I use Zigbee, and cameras are all on BlueIris. Audio is Russound. Local control is a red line I won't cross, if it requires some kind of cloud connectivity to work, chances are I won't buy it.

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

Local control is a red line I won’t cross, if it requires some kind of cloud connectivity to work, chances are I won’t buy it.

Agreed.

Cameras are next on the list, but one thing at a time. These periodic expansions/refreshes get expensive really quickly, so I'm trying to temper my desire to gut and replace everything at once. lol