I’m planning to put HA on a pi, with a usb antenna

I can’t decide which bulbs to use, Philips hue looks great but it’s pricey and I’m pretty sure it’s got too much “phone home” crap. I don’t want anything to leave my network. If I can use Hue bulbs without the hub, or block the hub from phoning home I would consider it?

I found some Sengled bulbs that look fine, but I don’t know if they are any good.

Can someone recommend some decent bulbs? Colour ones preferably, but white is OK too.

Any other advice? Got a home server, so can host just about anything to get this working together.

  • @fluxxEnglish
    2•2 years ago

    When you switched from pi3 to NUC , did you notice any performance improvements? I’m asking because I run my setup on a rpi3 and it mostly works ok, but the latency is sometimes high, so I’m wondering if upgrading the host will improve things.

    • @AwkwardPenguinEnglish
      2•2 years ago

      For me i did. It was buggy on a rasp all the time. Plus from time to time memory would clog up and the instance would stop functioning. Haven’t had any issues since upgrading to the nuc. It just works and I migrated all devices to USB radios. So Bluetooth, Zigbee, zwave, serial power meter, serial heat meter, serial ups, everything just connects without hubs or anything.

      Would definitely recommend! Just get a cheap second hand one on eBay or so.

    • @GiuloEnglish
      1•2 years ago

      I didn’t, but because the pi already worked fine and didn’t have many addons running. I have since introduced tailscale, diyhue, frigate without a tpu, etc and the nuc has been rock solid (even with 4gb of RAM and a Celeron J3455).

      I think it comes down to what addons you run and what type of storage you use (if you’re using an SD card on your pi, you might want to boot from an SSD instead). Also if your zigbee dongle is old like the Nortek one, you might see improvements in responsiveness when upgrading to a zigbee 3.0 stick.

      • @fluxxEnglish
        2•2 years ago

        I have a newer ZigBee 3.0 dongle and run a few add-ons, but nothing big - z2m, nodered, mosquito is all I use. I will upgrade anyway, but I’m not in a hurry, it works fine, apart from an occasional delay in switching, which might be network related.