A few tips on making a cheapo smart home

Share your Projects!
1

I’m going to try to keep this short.

  1. Use what you already have as much as possible for your Home Assistant setup. Choose the fastest unused machine around, even if it means asking your neighbors. If you don’t have anything worthwhile already, it’s worth to pay $35 for a pi 4, but beware of the SD card corruption.
  2. You don’t need to pay extra money for your stuff. Try to be creative with what you already have. If you have a spare ESP and a motion sensor, you might want to try installing ESPHome on it instead of paying $50.
  3. If you do want something new that’s cheap, I recommend going to amazon.com, typing your search query in, check “Works with Alexa”, and sort by low to high. Most stuff works with Tuya, or you can reflash it. Here’s some of my favorites I found that way:

new links

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B081NXBJX7/
discounted at time of writing: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B089CQHZNH/
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08732M6TG/
discounted at time of writing: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07NNV4MHS/

old links

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0823WWQ27/
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0824HJ4NN/

  1. And most importantly, follow this guide:
1 Like
2

Yeah searching Tuya on Amazon has yielded tuyaconvert-able plugs for me. Sonoff RF worked once for me, I know that can receive open/close/motion from dirt cheap sensors.

I’ve lost faith in 433mhz.
Zigbee sensors for me know.

And raspberry pi was too slow for video and I worried about the sd card so an old iMac Mini does the trick.

3

Don’t waste $35 on a Pi which will fail the SD card in a few months when a 10 year old laptop is available for free from any of your friends or family. :smiley:

3 Likes