Hello, guys,
I am planning to dive into smart home stuff really soon. I spent a lot of time researching it, and while some things are clear now, there are still some things I can’t find enough information about, or have not enough experience with it. And I’d like to hear some more opinions before investing money into everything, or at least find more information to research about it! Thanks for your attention!
I want to start relatively small and build from there. At first I just want to automate a few lights, in my room and the hall, making a few ‘night rules’, to make them turn on in dark-red\dark-blue when I go into the hall at night. Adjusting light color and brightness in my room based off the lighting outside (no just by time, preferably using a light sensort to track real light outside the room). I know that it’s an easy task for any hub, and I might not even need HASS for it, but I also want to tie all that down to a simple voice assistant\AI I’m currently developing for fun. But in time, if this goes well, I’d like to automate all lights in the flat, buy a few prota micro bots to push buttons, etc etc, whatever feels fun I am also fairly experienced with Python, so that’s another reason I like HASS.
So first thing is a choice of hardware.
First confusing thing is - which hardware setup works best with hass? Which protocol to rely more on?
From what I gather, hass can either connect to other devices through some of hubs, or directly, using WiFi, Zwave or ZigBee protocols. But which approach is best?
1. What hardware do I need to allow hass to connect to zwave and zigbee devices? For zwave I guess I need a zwave stick, right? But for zigbee? I found this thing (sorry for the russian site): http://amperka.ru/product/xbee along with a usb converter http://amperka.ru/product/xbee-usb-converter . Is this the right way to go? Or is there something like zstick for zigbee? Or should I just use some zigbee hub, like Philips Hue hub, and interact with lighting through it?
2. Which hub works\integrates better\easier with hass? Is there a hab that can work standalone (in case I have to put down HASS for a while, but still havve some automation), AND integrates well with HASS?
3. Which protocol should I rely more on more, WiFi, Zwave or ZigBee?
4. So far I guess that the best way to go is using ZigBee for lighting with a hub, and using WiFi for sensors?
5. Do I understand correctly, that as a HUB server hass can mix all of those, if it can connect to them?
Next on the list is OS.If this goes too far out the scope of one question I may make a separate one, I know stackoverflow prefers smaller questions, but I hope it’s not the issue here? Anyway, I personally prefer Windows as a working environment (feeling more comfortable, and have other servers to run from a win machine) but I noticed that, for example, there are only instructions on building zwave libs for linux. However I saw that there are also windows sources available. So the question is - Did anyone have any success deploying hass on windows and connecting it to zwave, zigbee? Or should I rely more on linux as dev and deploy environment? What would be cons and pros of win or linux? I can only really speak for win so far, only knowing that linux would be a more stable environment to run a server from, but thats not an issue yet.
I plan to use one of Zotac Zboxes or something similar as a server, because I want to run a few other servers from it, not just hass. So raspberry seems a bit weak for that.
Thank you very much again for your attention, sorry for making this post this big, I hope things will get clearer in time, and I will be able to dive into HASS fun, and help with development! I might be interested in improving HASS’s voice assistant part, once I have time to get my hands on it.