Home Assistant Has a New Foundation, Goal To Become a Consumer Brand - Slashdot
source link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/04/22/1946245/home-assistant-has-a-new-foundation-goal-to-become-a-consumer-brand
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Home Assistant Has a New Foundation, Goal To Become a Consumer Brand
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So many 'smart home' items are nice toys that only work if they can connect to the manufacturer's servers. With Home Assistant, you can build a home automation and security system that is entirely local if you like. It still takes a bit of work because you have to do your research when choosing new devices to add, but it works.
The voice assistant is adequate and rapidly improving, though the recommended hardware is listen-only - voice response is currently mainly available via a phone app.
Anyway, even if you have nothing to plug into it but have an old computer somewhere, it's worth downloading and playing with. Link it to the phone app and suddenly you have family tracking, common calendars, and a weather app. When my kids were in school, I added an RSS feed parser and had it telling me if buses were cancelled or not before we'd even had breakfast. Now I use it wake me up with a weather report and tell me if it's time to put out the garbage and recycling.
Add in a $20 SDR module and it can check your tire pressure for you, maybe pick up signals from a neighbour's weather station. Then you can start extending it with really inexpensive door sensors. This summer I'm adding a floating sensor to my pool to track the water chemistry and temperature and expecting to save a ton of money scheduling the filter pump (with a $20 smart light switch) to run just long enough during non-peak hours to cycle the water and keep it healthy.
I also route inexpensive cameras through it so I can check them from anywhere I want without having them connect to a server in China or wherever.
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Stay away from Wyze. Great hardware... terrible walled garden.
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Globe is another brand you'll find on the discount shelves. Total garbage.
My general rule is to start with Zigbee devices for anything I want secured because they cannot route to the Internet. 433MHz devices for anything I'm OK sending data in the clear (like my weather station).
I fall back to WiFi if I must, a lot of that stuff you can get to work by configuring it with the manufacturer's app, THEN blocking it from further communications with the Internet. I don't like it, and I'm definitely boned if I
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Zigbee has very limited range, in my experience. My Smartmeter uses it, and I have to place my rainforest eagle3 in the garage, as close as possible to the outside meter. Otherwise, no signal.
I live in a very large place. I have 43 Z-wave devices. Those work pretty well.
I also have Yolink devices. 15 of them. The range is better than Z-wave. But the HA integration requires cloud.
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Zigbee does mesh net, so you can plan your device placements to help with range. Though that only applies to line powered devices, so trying to chain the power-miser battery sensors won't work. I have a smart outlet I use to help some sensors that are at the edge of useful range from the hub.
I do kind of wish I'd initially chosen Z-Wave for my low-power encrypted wireless for the extra range, but Zigbee has been adequate for my uses so far and I like to keep things as homogeneous as possible, so I'm not s
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If your lighting is Zigbee, then you've probably already got extensive coverage of your home with the mesh network, such that adding new Zigbee devices will never have range issues. That's my situation, where all my lightbulbs were already Zigbee, so when I wanted to add some Zigbee temperature sensors, no matter where I put them, they were always near a Zigbee node.
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Every smart device manufacturer is a walled garden, how is Wyze any different? They're priced fairly, at least.
Disclaimer: I use 3 Wyze cameras with no cloud subscription and find them adequate.
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Not true. Z-wave is not a walled garden. There is open source software, and multiple manufacturers making devices. No cloud required.
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Wyze still doesn't support RTSP without loading a separate beta firmware version. It has been "beta" since Wyze 2 cameras despite being one of the most heavily requested features. Instead, they chose to focus on everything and the kitchen sink.
Without a cloud subscription, you still have to be able to log in to Wyze servers in order to view the content recorded on your cameras. If Wyze is down, you'd have to manually pull your SD cards as opposed to having your home NVR record the feed.
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Quite.
I started tinkering with it as nothing more than a hobby, and I have some countless dozens of sensors on it now. And most of those are actually just operated in-house and don't require cloud integration at all.
I put three different SDRs on it and it captures multiple weather stations, fridge and freezer sensors, and even passing aircraft (using FlightAware). As well as the other useful integrations like what bin-day is today and what I need to put out.
I obtained for Matter smart plugs for free the o
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Any power consumption figures on the SDR? It's probably not a lot, but they do get warm. So far I've been getting dedicated radios for most stuff. Adding weather station decoding was on my very long to-do list.
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No power consumption data for you, but... I just installed the RTL_433 addon with the config wide open and I pull in everything.
It all shows in the MQTT console with the mosquito_sub command. The challenge can be picking out your own stuff if there are a lot of devices in your vicinity.
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Thanks. Would you recommend any particular dongle? I have some cheap TV ones but they aren't very good.
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