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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I like to shop at https://cloudfree.shop/ when I can. Their pre-flashed Tasmota smart plugs are nice and support MQTT/fully local integrations.
Cloudfree is great, and the owner is really nice.
There’s also: https://www.athom.tech/
I also recommend athom they’re the only plugs (ESPHome) I’ve found that immediately import upon WiFi connection and still work for on/off and simple metrics in HA when blocked to the outside internet. Only downside is they can’t seem to connect to hidden SSIDs but I haven’t seen them pinging or reaching out to anywhere else.
I use a lot of Aquara Zigbee sensors with a USB bridge on my HA server. It works well, and is stupid cheap.
I’ve read Zigbee is fairly open, but wasn’t sure if that was universally true or only with certain brands, etc.
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.
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?
They post a list of recommended devices here: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/zha/
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.
If you have an mqtt server running already, you may want to check out zigbee2mqtt as an alternative to ZHA. Here’s the supported adapters list, most of them are USB dongles that you’ll have to plug into your home assistant machine.
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.
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.
Shelly does some nice devices which can easily run offline-only. Apart from that, the pre-flashed Tasmota devices work really well for me.
Yeah, the Tasmota devices have been rock solid for the last few years. Absolutely no complaints. They’re just not quick to ship from Ali.
Also, forgive my ignorance, but can you elaborate on Shelly? I’m googling that and not getting any relevant results.
He’s talking about Shelly.cloud, it’s a great manufacturer with cool devices, most of them are easy to flash with Tasmota or ESPHome, but the original firmware is good too, and can be set to work 100% offline.
Fantastic. I’ll give them a look. Thanks!
Zwave always works for me - but costs more. ZigBee is the bulk of my devices. If possible, I avoid tuya stuff but some solutions are only tuya (switches without neutral wires come to mind.)
For contact sensors, I’ve got like 20 of the Linkind door and window sensors. They’re Zigbee, and super responsive. I’ve basically built my own alarm system with them and HA. At ~$10 (USD) each, they were quite a bit cheaper than the comparable Aqara sensors.
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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.
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
I’ve got a few devices from athom, their stuff comes pre-flashed with FOSS firmwares such as ESPhome or WLED!
Yeah, your edit definitely got it. Looking back in time, if I knew what I know now when I bought all my devices, I would’ve gone exclusively zigbee. Faster, extremely reliable and they expand and remap to each other automatically. I’ve slowly started replacing my non zigbee stuff with em.
I have U-Bolt Pro Z-Wave locks and they’ve worked quite well for me.
For sensors and switches I’ve had good luck with Zooz, which is also Z-wave.
For bulbs I’ve had good luck with Tp-Link KL-135 Wi-Fi bulbs.
I’ve heard lots of good things about Aqara and will be who I use when I want to use zigbee devices.
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.)
