Hi, I’m a newbie on Home Assistant but absolutely fell in love with the community and software. I’m running a Raspberry Pi 3b+ and my setup has Sonoff switches, Bose Soundtouch, Google Home and last but not least Philips hue.
I’m going to flash Tasmota to the sonoff devices soon (need to get my hands on a Windows machine) but was wondering what would be the best hardware to buy for sensors like movement, temp and moisture? There are soo many but since I’m a noob and technologically challenged - I don’t want to make my life any harder than it needs to be. Any advice?
It probably depends on where you live. If I read this forum, I get the impression that the americans have some extra alternatives that are not available here in europe.
I mainly use zigbee and zwave devices at the moment. My preference is z-wave, but these tend to be more expensive and they don’t have as many cheap alternatives available on aliexpress and similar chinese websites. I think the integration with home-assistant is better though and more natural, for this reason most of my devices are zwave, more specifically for your question, my movement sensors are neo-coolcam PIR devices (I’m at work, cant link aliexpres I’m afraid).
For zigbee there’s more cheap alternatives that work fine for me, especially for temperature and and moisture. I have for instance a few of aqara temperature and humidity sensors around the house. These cost less than 10 euros. Since they are battery powered they need a repeater fairly close by, but as far as i know the philips hue lights will perform that function for you. Since you have Hue, I assume you also have a base station, so zigbee might be your best solution for now anyway.
For all these devices I have yet to replace the batteries after more than a year of use. Í have a cheap product for door sensings as well, I have had to replace the batteries for those several times already.
In general I think you defintely don’t want a multitude of gateways and basestations. In the long run I’d buy zigbee and/or zwave radio that works with home-assistant, so your free from a multitude of issues (cloud services, blocking competing products, things like that). I currently have a Conbee stick for zigbee and an aotec stick for zwave. Both work fine, although I’m not altogether happy with the software for conbee.
Hi Sophof, Thanks for this advise. I saw a message on the Hue bridge yesterday that come 2020 outside control for v1 bridges will no longer work. I really really am pissed about this since I invested so much in their ecosystem and now I have to buy another bridge? Anyway - end rant. If I’m locked in with Hue anyway, I might indeed go the zigbee route as you suggested. One quick question - do you integrate those other sensors to the Hue bridge and then to HA ?
I recommend Xiaomi Aqara Sensors. They are really cheap (<= 10 Euro / pcs.) and they do what’s needed. They are really small and powered by a CR2032 battery that will work ~ 12 month. There are two version available: Round shape => only temp. and humidity and the squared ones => temp. humidity and pressure.
But even if they are Zigbee’s you can’t use Aqara sensors with the HUE Bridge. You need to use Deconz or any other Zigbee alternative (USB stick) ir the Aqara Hub (not recommended => china server). I prefer Deconz / Phoscon!
I don’t have a bridge at all, so I wouldn’t be able to say. I use deconz with conbee and have them controllable by HA that way. The conbee is simply a usb zigbee radio that you plugin. It’ll also be able to handle your Hue lights/switches/etc. I currenlty use Ikea trafri and xiaomi as devices, but know the Hue support is good too.
I’ve been meaning to try out the ‘direct’ approach by using the zha component (this’ll remove the need of any other software and supports conbee), but haven’t taken the plunge yet.
The list of things is in my GitHub, if you want the breakdown.
Keep in mind best is personal, there’s no universal best. It’s usually a trade between cost, functionality, looks, convenience, and availability. For instance, for me, my Z-Wave multi sensors are better than my Zigbee ones, because they offer more control - they just cost four times as much.
Yes - I have a wide range of those connected to mine
Omg, you have a huge setup!
Looks like you flashed zigbee hub to use zigbee2mqtt? I guess this is too much beginners like me
I think I will pick up one zigbee hub and start from there.
Most of this is well documented, if you can read and follow guides, all of this, and more, is quite achievable. Flashing the stick for Zigbee2MQTT is trivial, no soldering required. If you can hook up a cable and run some software, you can do it.
The trick is to just start. You WILL do things that are weird, inneffective or just plain wrong, but bit by bit it’ll become easier. When I started that was part of the fun tbh.
I’d be curious to see how easy it is to get started now that HA is so much more user friendly imo.
As @Tinkerer mentions, my experience is that everything is pretty well documented or at least findable. At worst it’ll cost you some time, and I probably bought a few things that I wouldn’t have in hindsight, but none of it is useless. I wouldn’t fret over it too much, although the choice for zigbee or zwave was pretty daunting to me at first as well.
