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.

  • @[email protected]English
    2•1 year ago

    I went all in on Z-wave about 15 years ago (when it was the hottest game in town.) Both Z-wave and Zigbee are “non-routable” protocols, which means they can’t talk to anything not joined to their local radio mesh networks. That isolation guarantees they’re perfectly behaved local devices.

    WiFi devices offer no such guarantees. Anything connected to your IP network has the potential to contact a cloud server. So the same restrictions don’t apply to hubs like the Phillips Hue Bridges, which can (and do) communicate to their company’s cloud servers, unless you do some fancy networking configurations to isolate them.

    I don’t attach any proprietary hubs to my radio network. Instead, I have a ZOOZ Z-wave USB stick in my HomeAssistant server, which serves as the hub for the Z-wave network. For Zigbee, I have a SkyConnect USB dongle, which also can not send traffic outside of the local network.

    Just like the non-routable radio protocols, USB devices don’t have access to a network. The only way they can violate your trust is if you run proprietary software on the host that contacts the cloud on their behalf. So I don’t do that.

    I trust Home Assistant to not communicate to the cloud unless I explicitly configure a connection. (You’ll find many of the 3rd party WiFi device integrations depend upon cloud hosted APIs; Home Assistant does not hide this from you.)