Re lightbulbs I see a bunch of zigbee stuff in your other screenshot, might as well get some philips or ikea zigbee bulbs - they’re likely cheaper, you can probably get them more easily, they’ll function as zigbee routers relaying zigbee mesh data and extending your zigbee network. You don’t need their gateway/hub or switches if you don’t like them (pi can be your coordinator aka. hub aka. gateway). Useful zigbee range is a lot smaller than wifi
Re SD cards dying … yep. ssd is the way to go, 32G is generally enough for anything Home Assistant -ish. related. And yes MicroSD cards tend to die, but if you’re going to be using an SSD and won’t be storing sqlite history or influxdb data (databases) onto a card, the sd will probably be ok. I think they just tend to not have wear leveling or much ram and most are just not built for running an os off of them. It feels like the typical usecase people have for micro sd card is to fill them up with photos once or maybe 50 times, and then never use them again… I’ve had a previous Samsung Evo Plus card die on me after a few months… I had backups/snapshots uploaded to the cloud, so resetting everything from scratch was not really required, but it was still, hmm, uncomfortable. The Samsung Endurance Pro uses older / more reliable MLC flash, it’s not super fast, but it’s worked well for me for a while now. Most of Home Assistant functions will just run from ram anyway - so speed wise it’s fine. One thing I did was change the configuration to not let home assistant keep history (recorder module settings). I keep history inside of influxdb - it’s just much easier for me to use influxdb and grafana for plotting temperature graphs, etc… Point: even if you have basic old MicroSD card, you can probably use it for basic booting just fine as long as you use the SSD for actual data.
Re RaspBee vs cc2531 … I haven’t tried Raspbee, I can’t compare. I think the cc2531 might be more interesting to you, since you can flash them with a “router” firmware (where they’re just a zigbee network mesh relay, and not a coordinator). These cc2531 routers can then maybe just run off of a USB phone battery. This would help you extend the zigbee range to cover your window/door/motion sensors. Normally, people would use sockets and lightbulbs as their relays, but if your power is out… you lose relays.
Re automation rules in home assistant… yes you can pretty much do whatever you want via UI + yaml, and if you want to do something complicated, you can add a shell script or a python scripts as much as you want, … some folks use this Node-Red thing for easy gui automation, I haven’t needed it for any of my stuff.
Re integration with Google Assistant … so, I’ve only integrated with Google Home, I have some switches and lights and temperature sensors visible in my Google Home android app. I can ask the Google Assistant to do stuff for me, and she does it, or tells me current temperature in various rooms. … that whole setup is very ducttape-y, it requires you to pretend you’re a hardware developer and then use your Google Cloud account to run some shrink-wrapped pre-setup components that Home Assistant can then use to export things.
Re Arduino MKR1000 as a smart thermostat … there’s this thing called esphome you should look into. It’s a really easy way to build firmwares for esp8266 and esp32 that Home Assistant can then interface with over the network without too much coding or too much configuration. With it you’d specify what peripherals you have on which pin (sensors/relays/leds/…) or what you want to happen when, all through a simple yaml config. Behind the scenes this yaml gets transpiled into a gigantic main.cpp, compiled, and flashed over wifi at a push of a button in a web ui. The way I started with mine was to just order a couple of lolin d32 from their ali express store, they’re cool cause they also have a built in usb-serial adapter and a lithium battery charge controller. It might save you a lot of time to start with esphome instead of doing things on the MKR1000 from scratch.
Re shopping bag it’s good, be aware that most motion sensors are built to turn on/off things like bathroom lights and garden lights and keeping them on for a while. They’ll send a message when they see something, and they’ll send a message again e.g. 3 minutes in the case of that ikea sensor, or later if they can’t see any motion later. They’re good at noticing motion, they’re not good at letting you know there’s no motion anymore.
Happy holidays.
