My rule for smarthome stuff is that it’s self-hosted, and it has to have a low-tech way to use it. A light switch can be on Zigbee attached to my Home Assistant server, but it needs to function as just a light switch when the network is down.
Have some old stuff that doesn’t follow these rules, but I’m slowly replacing them.
Yeahh probably the smart move, I went ham acquiring some overkill hardware for relatively cheap, and now the power bill is making that evident 🫠
It has been fun playing with a setup like this, but you definitely don’t need 128gb RAM to run the measly services I’ve got, though game servers would be a blast… if I ever had time
I got a frankensteined mini PC with an old 2-core CPU, 8GB DDR3 RAM and 24TB HDD +500GB SSD(cache), running my entire homelab (HAss, Jellyfin+arr suite, Adguard-home, …), works really well. Recently put an old 1060GTX GPU in there, when my flatmate upgraded her PC. I really don’t see why I would need more (unless I planned to run LLMs in any reasonable fashion)
I’m slowly converting everything to run on these little 1 liter PCs. I have three so far (four if you count the Mac Mini NAS), and an Optiplex 7050 SFF that’s been a bit hotrodded with a 300W XE3 PSU, Precision 3420 CPU cooler, & Noctua fans w/extra intake fan.
I like the Optiplex for obvious reasons, but it’s a bit of a power hog with the i7-7700 and 48GB RAM. I haven’t measured them individually, but if I had to guess, the Optiplex probably accounts for a solid 1/3 of the power usage in my entire homelab.
All fun and games when a grey hat hacker “hacks” his way into your living room through your window and starts turning on your lights without your permission.
And someone could throw a brick through my window and take all my stuff. There are some threats that we take care of by having a society where people don’t break other peoples things just because they can.
Usually it’s due to fear of repetcussions, but now anyone in a MAGA hat can throw bricks through your window and take all your stuff whenever they want
I recently bought a zigbee dongle to use with a home assistant VM. Do you have any advice on products? There is alot of stuff out there and I am trying to make sure I get good stuff.
My current plan is that id buy assorted types of lights to fill the roles of actual lighting and mood lighting, and I would pair that with a 4 button switch to toggle between some different presets. Been looking at Moes for the scene switch buttons and Sengled bulbs, and still need to find a solution for having home assistant to turn on or off non-smart items by delivering power or withholding, but i feel like i am flying blind.
IKEA has a lot of cheap, yet quality stuff you can use. The best thing for me is that they are nearby, and things like switches and buttons are super cheap.
Ikea smart home stuff uses Zigbee, and just about all of their devices are supported in Home Assistant, either with ZHA or, better, zigbee2mqtt. I have dozens of buttons, bulbs and sensors from Ikea and they are very reliable most of the time.
I’m running ZHA at the moment, but some of my devices (mainly the plant humidity sensors) keep falling off the zigbee network for hours at a time. I’ve heard zigbee2mqtt resolves a lot of issues with ZHA, would that have any effect?
Hard to tell, it may have to do with your zigbee coordinator or the number of repeater devices in your network.
Which coordinator do you use?
If the network is not well meshed then the link quality could be too low for the sensors to reliably stay online. Adding repeater devices (mains powered devices like bulbs) could help here. Or if you have too many devices your coordinator may be overloaded. I had this problem for a while where I basically had to restart the coordinator because every device was offline. This happened once or twice a month. A firmware update helped here.
Generally zigbee2mqtt is superior to ZHA in my experience, but a little more work to get running. But you will find lots of documentation and YouTube tutorials on how to set it up. Not sure if it will help if your network is “weak” though.
But even if your zigbee network is great there are some devices that are just shit. I have a few analog LED controllers that randomly drop off the network and will only rejoin after cutting power to them. Doesn’t matter how good the link quality is, they go offline sometimes.
So maybe the soil humidity sensors are just not good?
If the network is not well meshed then the link quality could be too low for the sensors to reliably stay online. Adding repeater devices (mains powered devices like bulbs) could help here.
One is within a few feet of the coordinator. I try to just not look at the network visualization as it just causes more headaches, but I have zero “green” connections… Maybe those plugs are just garbage though, IDK.
Well, the coordinator is probably not the problem, and the soil sensors are probably fine, too; from what I have heard Thirdreality devices are generally quite good. I trust you are using a USB extension cable for the coordinator and don’t have it plugged in directly in the USB port?
No idea how good the smart plugs are, but if one of the soil sensors is basically next to the coordinator and still falls off the network randomly then the problem is likely not the plugs or the network mesh.
All things being equal I would suggest switching to zigbee2mqtt and see if that helps. Even if it doesn’t, and the culprit is something else, zigbee2mqtt is (in my experience) better in the long run, because it generally supports more devices than ZHA and is much quicker in getting new devices supported.
There’s the Sonoff ZBMINIR2 device. You install it between a physical switch and the wiring, and then tuck it into the electrical box. It has three different modes:
As a relay, so that you can control the light either with the physical switch or by ZigBee. Works just like normal when the server is down.
Detached mode, so toggling the physical switch sends a ZigBee message to trigger an action on the server, and the server controls the light.
Like 2, but the light socket is always powered so it supports a smart bulb.
I have a couple, and they’re great. They just don’t support dimming.
I mostly use the Enbrighten Zigbee Dimmer. Its dimming function sucks–you have to hold the paddle down until it’s around the setting you want–but otherwise it works pretty well.
My rule for smarthome stuff is that it’s self-hosted, and it has to have a low-tech way to use it. A light switch can be on Zigbee attached to my Home Assistant server, but it needs to function as just a light switch when the network is down.
Have some old stuff that doesn’t follow these rules, but I’m slowly replacing them.
All fun and games until you get a power outage and one of your nodes doesn’t boot properly which means no quorum to start HAOS which means no lights
But that’s what flashlights are for :p
That’s why my HAOS instance runs on bare metal 😁 (Lenovo M710q, G4560T, 4GB RAM)
Yeahh probably the smart move, I went ham acquiring some overkill hardware for relatively cheap, and now the power bill is making that evident 🫠
It has been fun playing with a setup like this, but you definitely don’t need 128gb RAM to run the measly services I’ve got, though game servers would be a blast… if I ever had time
What would you even run on that beast?
I got a frankensteined mini PC with an old 2-core CPU, 8GB DDR3 RAM and 24TB HDD +500GB SSD(cache), running my entire homelab (HAss, Jellyfin+arr suite, Adguard-home, …), works really well. Recently put an old 1060GTX GPU in there, when my flatmate upgraded her PC. I really don’t see why I would need more (unless I planned to run LLMs in any reasonable fashion)
I’m slowly converting everything to run on these little 1 liter PCs. I have three so far (four if you count the Mac Mini NAS), and an Optiplex 7050 SFF that’s been a bit hotrodded with a 300W XE3 PSU, Precision 3420 CPU cooler, & Noctua fans w/extra intake fan.
I like the Optiplex for obvious reasons, but it’s a bit of a power hog with the i7-7700 and 48GB RAM. I haven’t measured them individually, but if I had to guess, the Optiplex probably accounts for a solid 1/3 of the power usage in my entire homelab.
All fun and games when a grey hat hacker “hacks” his way into your living room through your window and starts turning on your lights without your permission.
And someone could throw a brick through my window and take all my stuff. There are some threats that we take care of by having a society where people don’t break other peoples things just because they can.
Usually it’s due to fear of repetcussions, but now anyone in a MAGA hat can throw bricks through your window and take all your stuff whenever they want
Can I program my light bulb to recite the bill of rights, so it will play at max volume once stolen?
I recently bought a zigbee dongle to use with a home assistant VM. Do you have any advice on products? There is alot of stuff out there and I am trying to make sure I get good stuff.
My current plan is that id buy assorted types of lights to fill the roles of actual lighting and mood lighting, and I would pair that with a 4 button switch to toggle between some different presets. Been looking at Moes for the scene switch buttons and Sengled bulbs, and still need to find a solution for having home assistant to turn on or off non-smart items by delivering power or withholding, but i feel like i am flying blind.
IKEA has a lot of cheap, yet quality stuff you can use. The best thing for me is that they are nearby, and things like switches and buttons are super cheap.
Are you using home assistant? Their website says ikea switches arnt compatible with it.
All ZigBee devices, including IKEA and Philips, work with Home Assistant with zero issues.
Ikea smart home stuff uses Zigbee, and just about all of their devices are supported in Home Assistant, either with ZHA or, better, zigbee2mqtt. I have dozens of buttons, bulbs and sensors from Ikea and they are very reliable most of the time.
I’m running ZHA at the moment, but some of my devices (mainly the plant humidity sensors) keep falling off the zigbee network for hours at a time. I’ve heard zigbee2mqtt resolves a lot of issues with ZHA, would that have any effect?
Hard to tell, it may have to do with your zigbee coordinator or the number of repeater devices in your network.
Which coordinator do you use?
If the network is not well meshed then the link quality could be too low for the sensors to reliably stay online. Adding repeater devices (mains powered devices like bulbs) could help here. Or if you have too many devices your coordinator may be overloaded. I had this problem for a while where I basically had to restart the coordinator because every device was offline. This happened once or twice a month. A firmware update helped here.
Generally zigbee2mqtt is superior to ZHA in my experience, but a little more work to get running. But you will find lots of documentation and YouTube tutorials on how to set it up. Not sure if it will help if your network is “weak” though.
But even if your zigbee network is great there are some devices that are just shit. I have a few analog LED controllers that randomly drop off the network and will only rejoin after cutting power to them. Doesn’t matter how good the link quality is, they go offline sometimes.
So maybe the soil humidity sensors are just not good?
Connect ZBT-1
Running six of these over three floors (2x basement, 2x main floor, 2x upstairs): https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0DQTFM1T6
Soil sensors: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DH25W72N
One is within a few feet of the coordinator. I try to just not look at the network visualization as it just causes more headaches, but I have zero “green” connections… Maybe those plugs are just garbage though, IDK.
Well, the coordinator is probably not the problem, and the soil sensors are probably fine, too; from what I have heard Thirdreality devices are generally quite good. I trust you are using a USB extension cable for the coordinator and don’t have it plugged in directly in the USB port?
No idea how good the smart plugs are, but if one of the soil sensors is basically next to the coordinator and still falls off the network randomly then the problem is likely not the plugs or the network mesh.
All things being equal I would suggest switching to zigbee2mqtt and see if that helps. Even if it doesn’t, and the culprit is something else, zigbee2mqtt is (in my experience) better in the long run, because it generally supports more devices than ZHA and is much quicker in getting new devices supported.
There’s the Sonoff ZBMINIR2 device. You install it between a physical switch and the wiring, and then tuck it into the electrical box. It has three different modes:
I have a couple, and they’re great. They just don’t support dimming.
I mostly use the Enbrighten Zigbee Dimmer. Its dimming function sucks–you have to hold the paddle down until it’s around the setting you want–but otherwise it works pretty well.