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.

  • Admiral PatrickOPEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    I’ve read Zigbee is fairly open, but wasn’t sure if that was universally true or only with certain brands, etc.

    • @[email protected]English
      3•1 year ago

      It works but the manufacturers’ implementations may be a bit wonky at times. Still it’s cool not to have devices on the wifi, and zigbee2mqtt is just great.

    • @[email protected]English
      3•1 year ago

      It’s an open standard, and you can talk to any Zigbee with any Zigbee USB tranceiver.

      It’s also mesh-based. I use Hue bulbs as repeaters, but any Zigbee device that is plugged in to a wall should work.

      • Admiral PatrickOPEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        That sounds exactly what I want. I will definitely be looking into a Zigbee hub.

        Any problematic Zigbee hubs I should watch out for? Or just look for one that’s explicitly supported by HA?

          • Admiral PatrickOPEnglish
            2•1 year ago

            Awesome, thanks. That’s a great starting point.

            Also, it’ll be nice to free up some wifi spectrum. My devices are all on an isolated 2.4 GHz network and that band gets quite noisy.

              • Admiral PatrickOPEnglish
                1•1 year ago

                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]English
                  4•1 year ago

                  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.

                  • Admiral PatrickOPEnglish
                    1•1 year ago

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

                • @wittenEnglish
                  2•1 year 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.)