Hi. Been lurking for a while. Slowly piecing together my DIY HA installation. Just wanted to ask, in case I’ve missed it… Is there a group, tag, category or page dedicated to integrations and hardware that work without a cloud platform tie-in? I feel like this is a sufficiently broad interest to be justified.
I am willing to go to great lengths to get things to work. Like a lot of people, I have no interest in Amazonk, Goohole, or Fapple living rent free in my house. My interest in HA reflects my desire to do SmartHome automation without that. Searching is fine, but the clutter of things I will never be interested in makes browsing less so. It would be nice if there was a section carved out exclusively for Open hardware integrations and jailbreaks.
While looking for “Local Push” or “Local Polling” is a great first step – anything that says Cloud can and should be rejected quickly – it’s not good enough.
There are some devices labeled “Local” that require either or both
proprietary apps on a mobile device to set up
cloud to set up
It’s further not clear that “Local” integrations will reliably work over time if the device is not connected to the cloud. It may be true that HA communicates locally, but if the device decides to brick itself because it can’t phone home, it still won’t work.
Unfortunately there’s no clear definition of Local Push etc., and no clarity on whether one can buy the device and use it locally, or if it needs cloud setup.
Of course, you might be ok with cloud setup and then firewall, and you probably also have all your IOT devices on a separate vlan/SSID.
All that said, zwave is good, and any device that has any ability to connect via wifi is suspect. Read the manuals and look for “first install our (spyware) app”.
Look for Zigbee or Z-Wave devices. Those are designed to be local only. Virtually all commonly available WiFi devices are going to have a cloud dependency out of the box. Some can be flashed to use ESPHome, and of course you can build your own ESPHome devices which work over WiFi.
There’s some debate over where Thread and Matter are going with local control. I’m personally going to wait that one out. Zigbee had been working great with the ZHA integration for me.