I’m looking for a bit of info around home assistant and wifi devices as I am new to the scene.
It seems people need to flash their devices to get them to show up in Home Assistant. Once this is done typically they device does not show up in say google home or TuyaSmart app. Is this true?
Are there devices that work with Home Assistant without lash (ie. out of the box)?
I’m looking for some smart wifi plugs that will work out of the box with HA and also remain within the smart apps (e.g google home). I"ve read that it is possible with the tp-links, but I haven’t heard any thing about other brands.
I am also looking for an IR universal remote that works with the apps and HA out of the box.
The ability to potentially flash these devices in future would also be a plus.
You’ll want a zwave/zigbee stick. Otherwise you’ll make the dumb consumer mistake of putting 50 lightbulbs on wifi and having problems. It’s all about the access methods you use. I prefer zwave, personally.
This all comes down to having a decent wifi/network system. I had trouble with lots of devices on a basic router setup, but now with an Ubiquiti setup my wifi is rock solid with over 50 devices on wifi, plus a bunch of ethernet devices.
Yep and it’s a bad idea. Every time you reboot wifi the whole system goes down. Turning on microwaves means you degrade signal. A malfunctioning device can mean your whole house goes down. It’s unreliable because wifi is shared with heavy bandwidth consumers which means your messages collide and have to be retransmitted. Additionally wifi is high powered and not intended for short quick messages. Regardless of how many ips you can put on your subnet, the best routers out there say they handle up to 50 devices.
If you have multiple APs this is not an issue. Update one at a time.
Man you need to get your microwave serviced.
This is no different to Z-wave or Zigbee.
This is not true.
This is also not true.
I have a highly reliable wifi based home automation setup with over 100 clients.
I tried 433MHz once. Horrible, unreliable system with no feedback.
I had nothing but trouble with Z-wave in the early days too (though admit that this has likely improved since way back then).
The only thing wifi does not do well is battery powered devices. They take up to 10 seconds to connect from sleep. Fortunately this is not an issue for me. I have a few wifi door/window sensors (most are wired sensors) but those ones are not for lighting or security, just the more latency tolerant heating control.
We haven’t even started. You want a legit conversation about this?
Like, how many of your wifi bulbs are using wpa3? How many of them allow direct connection? How long do you think it would take me to take your network offline with a Raspberry pi dropped off outside your house? How Long do you think your bulbs would remain under your control if I was on a laptop outside your house? If I got access, how long do you think it would take to get your network under control? How easy is it to change your wifi password? Do you care about privacy? Do you care about security?
Lets assume for a moment that you are not outside my house, where I would be alerted to (and have a record of) your presence by wired cameras and sensors but that you are in fact an appreciable distance away with a cantenna or yagi instead.
You spend a while sniffing WPA2 packets only to discover that I’m not an idiot and have individual high entropy passwords for each device. Nevertheless, perseverance pays off and… you’re in!
In my IoT VLAN.
Now what?
Leave a swear word on my MQTT server?
No, that is also encrypted and password protected.
I’ve got better idea, go buy a brick and a balaclava.
No system is perfectly secure. My level of paranoia is appropriate for my situation.
I too have an elaborate network. My security system is on a totally separate hard wired ethernet network without VLans. The rest of my network is segregated by roles. Including my guest network VLan.
Would you recommend the average person use wifi for home automation? I certainly wouldn’t. For most it’s a matter of loss of security, or loss of privacy. One or the other. No getting around it without a fancy professional network setup.
Even with my knowledge I wouldn’t want to use wifi. Makes it too hard to change passwords when I want.
Probably not, a lot of them are still using the default password in their router.
The average home assistant tinkerer?
Yeah I would.
There are plenty of well documented guides on this. Rob over at “The Hook Up” on YouTube has just started an excellent series of how to videos on wifi.
So what I am hearing is that wifi is mainly problematic due to security, hence people flashing their devices, which disables any cloud functionality and keeps everything on the LAN…?
The flashing of devices with alternative firmware does remove reliance on cloud servers and keep all your data local. Which is great. Some devices like Shelly don’t even require this. They come with a local option built in.
Adam’s main objection to wifi devices seems to be related to WPA2 security that these devices use. Not a big issue where I live. But if you live in high density city accommodation it may be worth considering.
Also you will have to beef up your wifi hardware with a multi access point system as your network grows. The average all in one home router/switch/wifi AP will not be capable of serving more than a couple of dozen devices.
There is a cool toy called REDACTED BY MODERTOR you should check out @supagu, @tom_l. It will deauth devices from a wifi network, then watch and collect the handshakes as they reconnect. It works on nearly anything using wpa2.
I’m saying wifi is great for computers. They have user interfaces and keyboards so they can keep up with changing security, get more updates, are not deployed enmass, don’t need fast reaction times to do their jobs, can consume more power without it being problematic, and need the flexibility to be mobile. None of those apply to most automation devices. That’s why they created zigbee and zwave.
If you go to the smart home store, they will happily sell you wifi light bulbs. They are a technically inferior product, but because everyone has wifi they can sell a lot of them and don’t need to worry about standards.
I’m really looking out for everyone here when I say wifi is not for automation, if you rely on it. Just don’t use wifi for home automation.
Do what? Set brightness? Color? Connect with the press of a button? Set transition times? Yes. It’s all done via HA UI. Change color while off? I don’t know. I don’t change their color. Probably since the low power chip is always on.
There is no FUD here. I just gave you a list. Wifi wasn’t designed for home automation. It was designed for laptops.
Try Shelly plugs, they have native integration but can still be flashed if you want, and local access does not block their cloud app (which can be disabled completely)
Do not be afraid of wifi or attacks on WPA2, they are years old and most implementations have been patched to not be vulnerable to most of them long ago. These are targeted attacks, and you can greatly limit your attack surface in may ways, most importantly by using a different wifi network and key for all IoT devices, using a strong key, using vlans, and keeping firmware up to date.
If you have quality network infrastructure, you will not have any capacity issues with adding devices, my access point is rated for 250+ simultaneous devices, and I am not even close. And I am adding another 2 access points later for better coverage.
Also my microwave has never knocked a device off the network, but it does make a pair of 2.4GHz wireless headphones cut out if you get within 4 feet of the microwave.
No, that is a separate issue, the wifi attacks are about decrypting data being sent by the device, flashing with alternative firmware can allow a device with no HA support to have HA, or to uncloud the device, or possibly unlock new functionality.
I have a few Wifi bulbs, they work just fine, respond instantly, and did not require any flashing for fully local access. The rest of my lighting control is done through Lutron switches which run on 433Mhz.
