Considering migrating from Smartthings to Home Assistant

Hardware
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Hi all

I’m fairly new to Home Assistant although I’ve been using Smartthings for several years. However since the switch from Groovy to Edge drivers I’ve been having various issues across nearly all devices.

I have several devices such as Aqara contact, motion and temperature sensors, Wemo bulbs, Meross smart plugs that I have been using with Smartthings.

I’m considering switching to Home Assistant as it’s getting to be a pain managing all the problems.

I have a Raspberry Pi4 that I use for emulator software at the moment and I’m considering looking at installing HA to a sdcard and running it up on that Pi to see how easy it is to setup a couple of my devices. If everything looks good then I’ll look at buying a dedicated Pi4 for using with HA once they are a bit easier to source.

As the devices I have are Zigbee devices I’m not sure if I would need to get a Zigbee antenna to allow the Pi to connect to them. I’ve been looking at SONOFF ZBDongle-E and the SONOFF Zigbee Dongle-P dongles but I’m not sure of the differences between them and which would be best to use with a Pi4 setup.

Does anyone have any experience with either or could recommend one over the other (or any alternatives)?

Thanks
Peter

2

The main difference between those sticks is that either works well with HA’s native Zigbee integration (ZHA), but only the P works well with Zigbee2MQTT.

I would say that you don’t need a Pi, you can run Home Assistant OS in a VM on something else that’s always on, or buy a second hand small PC from the last decade. If you do buy a Pi though then you should strongly consider both using an SSD instead of an SD card (to avoid the inevitable SD card failure that’ll follow in a few weeks or months) and to use a powered USB hub for the Zigbee stick and SSD to avoid the inevitable power problems that using a Pi brings.

3

Thanks. I’m not sure whether I’d want Zigbee2MQTT or not but maybe that would be the stick to go for just in case.

I could probably setup a VM on my Truenas box to use instead of a Pi to run the Home Assistant OS in the longer term. At the moment I was just thinking of a simple test setup to make sure that the devices I have look like they are working. If I do stick with a Pi though I have a few spare small capacity SSDs lying around so that might be better than using a SD card.

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