Affordable Sensors

Third party integrations
1

I love and use home-assistant for my home automation integrations, however the big issue i have is affordable sensors.

This topic was sparked by the aeontech flush mounted reed-switch >$80!

What is an affordable way of getting sensor information from your house? does anyone have any suppliers or eco-systems that has decent yet affordable sensor suites/base stations?

My current 240v Switches are the following:

My Current Sensors Are:

i want to get some temperature, light, door, motion, etc without having to sell my child off to afford it. The Xiaomi stuff looks like it is affordable, but it doesn’t integrate with anything just yet. I am not against building my own sensors if there are decent and robust plans for them.

Any ideas/suggestions would be superb!

cheers,

2

If you don’t mind building sensors on your own, I’d suggest to take a look at MySensors which integrates with HA, and you have the freedom to build custom sensors based on a variety of blueprints and code samples provided. Get the parts from Asia via eBay or Aliexpress, not through Jaycar, and you can build simple sensors from around 5-10 AUD each.
The price though is the time you have to invest in building and testing the sensors.

I decided to go with a hybrid model: buy Z-Wave sensors for standard scenarios like door, window, motion sensors - because it just works out of the box - and build my own sensors for simpler use-cases and where there’s no off-the-shelf product available.

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3

Capital smart homes in the ACT regularly have the gen 5 aeotech multisensor on a buy 3 get one free deal or similar if you can wait and risk stock running out - currently $49 each

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4

cheers Exxamite - i might just go down that route. I have seen MySensors around, but never really investigated to deeply. I am a big fan of wireless and battery powered sensors, and i have have just done my first custom PCB, so i may go down that route.

I am curious about their sleep function in use - is it low power sleep? does it put the radio to sleep as well? Will look further into it!

Cheers

PS: I have a heap of RFM12B radios at home that i would like to use, though they all seem to be RF69’s.