Budgeting for a New Setup

Hardware
1

Hello HA community!

I am looking into the smart home ecosystem! Over the last few weeks I have spent countless hours researching HA. I would still like some personal opinions on different devices.

I want to start small and slowly add on. With that in mind, I will be only automating one bedroom and one bathroom to start off with. I only have a budget of around $150 USD, not including Raspberry PI.

So far I have ordered:
ESP8266(10)
2 of the bulbs from this post(30)

Now, I’m trying to figure out what else I need. I’m probably going to get an echo dot. Any other essentials I need? I’m fairly tech saavy so probably going to go with MySensors and MQTT for most of my setup. Anyways, just trying to figure out what to get. Would love any input. Thanks!

2

A very good choice, since that is what I have :slight_smile:. I can recommend the My Slim 2AA Battery Node | MySensors Forum as a basis for battery based sensors. Using an ATMega328P rather than a full arduino board makes the batteries last much longer.

3

For very good and quite cheap solutions take a look at the Sonoff products from http://itead.cc . Cheap and hackable :slight_smile: