I am looking for a setup that does not need to phone home to the vendors servers. Is the Philips Hue Bridge a good hub? Can you work with most of the Philips Hue stuff without phoning home?
I am looking for a setup that does not need to phone home to the vendors servers. Is the Philips Hue Bridge a good hub? Can you work with most of the Philips Hue stuff without phoning home?
I went with an Ethernet-based Zigbee radio. You hook it up to an Ethernet port with Power-over-Ethernet (“PoE”) and it receive Zigbee and sends it over the network.
Why did I do this? Because I have several servers at home, and they are all clustered together (Proxmox). I am able to live-migrate my HA VM from one server to the other with only a few milliseconds of downtime.
If I were using a USB stick, this wouldn’t be possible because once you pass through a hardware device you’re locked in to that host.
Now, my setup is for a LOT more than just HomeAssistant, but considering it’s also doing local DNS, routing, and hosting a NAS, being able to have a highly available setup (even if it isn’t perfectly highly-available) means neither my security updates nor my hobbyist tinkering needs to upset the rest of the family.
I put off getting into Zigbee/ZWave for many years because I either did not know about this option, or it was not yet available.
I have a hue hub (since that is where it all began for me) and I still use it despite the additional Zigbee network. The Hue hub offers some stuff you can’t do with HomeAssistant, and it lets myself and others still use other apps and features like Entertainment Zones (sync with a TV). It integrates well enough with HomeAssistant that it’s not really a hinderance with my use case. It does work local-only, but it does also have cloud features like Remote Access, remote routines (Turing on lights when you arrive etc, which I just do with HomeAssistant now) and software updates. But, your lights will continue to work without an internet connection, yes.
You’re not really locked in if you use Docker to pass the device, but I do understand what you’re saying.
Migrating from one system to another with Docker would require moving the device and the config data and database over. It wouldn’t be difficult, maybe 5 minutes of work, but I can see how someone who wants to run a setup like yours would prefer an easier method.
I also started with/am still using a hue hub. It integrates nicely with homeassistant, but I already know that if I want to expand my smarthome into other signee devices, I will have to spend more $$ on a second zigbee antenna, and I will have to move my hue lights over to that if I want the network to mesh together.
I don’t regret anything about it though. The hue hub has been rock solid and super responsive for me, and every review I’ve seen seems to conclude that hue lights are pretty much the best if you want color accuracy, smooth transitioning/dimming, and responsiveness. I will probably lean more on smart switches in the future, but starting with smart bulbs is good for now while we wait to see the Matter/thread devices roll out.