HELTUN joins Works with Home Assistant

Blog
#1

Today we’re excited to announce a Works with Home Assistant partnership with HELTUN!

HELTUN’s thermostats, switches, and switch panels integrate with Home Assistant via Z-Wave (Z-Wave stick required) completely locally so that devices react instantly to your commands which allows for the best user experience with Home Assistant.

With automatic firmware updates via Home Assistant we will continue to provide the best user experience for their devices.

HELTUN is an Armenian-US high-tech hardware company focusing on Z-Wave-based smart home and building automation solutions. The company’s focus is to redefine energy management with smart programmable thermostats and switches, aiming to utilize the most advanced features and functionality on the market.

We’re proud to offer this new integration and can’t wait to hear what you’ll build on-top of it. To learn more about HELTUN products, have a look at their website.

Learn more about the Works with Home Assistant partner program.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2023/03/03/heltun-partner/
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#2

HELTUN joins is one of my favourite singers.

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#3

These are super expensive, even considering the ZWave aspect

#4

We keep being told that ‘zwave devices comply with the standard and will just work’.

Where is the benefit?

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#5

Indeed. Already the plastic holder only for such a shelly type wall box relay has about the same price of the whole device from shelly or sonoff :bowing_man:

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The thing (relay) itself costs about 5 times more :money_with_wings:

:free: advertisement for the company?

Beside they not really actively “advertise” the “Works via Z-Wave :registered: with Home Assistant” on their products as far as I can see. :point_down:

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But it looks like the heltun marketing department actually is “smart” enough and uses all available “free tiers” for product placements and advertisment :man_technologist:

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#6

Your are quite wrong about this. To promote your product to every market, you need to have those logos over there. People make choices according those.
Zwave is a standard, but it had zillion iterations already, interpreted differently by different companies. To make something fully functional, you need to have the kirks, as you need to have with many Zigbee devices.

Read this reddit topic and you will have some understanding why these “works with” agreements are important.

And just to note, this device is not Matter compatible as being Zwave. They cannot ride that wave. So they have to show that it works with products what people might have.

Maybe also have a look at frient.com. They went through and made sure that their products are compatible and working with those hubs.

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#8

Generally I was disappointed with z-wave, and that is before considering how expensive that stuff is so. Ie. MINUTES after disconnecting device from the smart plug it would read it’s power consumption as last value it had, etc. I agree with the point, you are probably making, shelly WIRED stuff works better, it can even do wifi extender if one wishes for it. In my opinion, wifi devices for wherever it is possible are best in transparency how they work or debugging issues you WILL have with other protocols.

For battery operated stuff, now I use only home kit (homekit accessory protocol) which is just BLE wrapper.

#9

Please stay on topic.

#10

I don’t call any “Z” stuff my own but typically Zwave people/owners don’t get tired to say Zwave is superior to Zigbee as it doesn’t have any of this iterations/kirks/quriks and whatever it is but always works because it is much stricter.

Beside the Heltun stuff is even “Zwave plus v2” certified which should (even) allow updates without the manufactures bridge and also guarantee full compatibly no matter (not matter :wink:) which platform is used :man_shrugging:

I think the question from @nickrout still stands:

(over any other zwave [plus] {v2} compliant device) :thinking:

Z-Wave encompasses a broad ecosystem of smart products and services that work seamlessly between brands and versions […]

Z-Wave certification ensures that all Z-Wave products work together with each other regardless of brand, including backward-compatibility between versions. The certification process includes technical testing, programs for uniformity of marks, and enforcement of the certification standards.

While other technologies claim interoperability, only Z-Wave offers interoperability at the product level. This ensures manufacturers, integrators and end users that their products and services will work together with all certified Z-Wave products.

Interoperability - z-wavealliance

Not only zwave fans say it is “superior” to all other technologies but even the alliance claims it :thinking:

Reading stuff like this I just end up with the same conclution every time: It’s a bad idea to invest in devices you can’t completely own. :man_shrugging: You loose any “right” to repair, modify or extend functionalities when buying hardware that doesn’t allow you to role your own software on it. :game_die:

I own more than 50 pre-made (esp based) devices and none of them advertised “works with” - still they are all first class citizens :trophy: of home assistant and will probably till they give up :bulb:

#11

The ability to upgrade firmware without the manufacturer’s hub is a great feature, which I had omitted to think about in my earlier post.

Also there is a specific programme for esphome Made for ESPHome — ESPHome

I would love to see HA pairing with, say, Shelly. Their devices are usually painless with HA, but occasionally there are problems which I have no doubt could be fixed much quicker if Shelly devs worked hand in hand with HA devs, and if a “Works with…” sicker revocation was an incentive.

#12

You are probably never heard of multi endpoint devices and their state reporting, or met with older Fibaro and Qubino devices.

But in your ideal world, all these issues must be feature requests and not an issue with the standard…

Smartthings hit a hard wall a few years back when they enforced a Zwave standard compliance and had to realise that it broke most of the Fibaro devices’ functionality.

#13

Now that you say it - Maybe I even have some in my network? :wink:

Could be - for example - a wall switch which not only has various locally attached relays (lights, fans, etc.) but at the same time interacts with hygrometers and/or buttons which are not physically attached but visible (and maybe even controllable) from HA thru that very wall switch? :twisted_rightwards_arrows:

No :warning: As said I prefer devices that I can “really” own :hugs:

Aren’t rules there to be broken and standards to be… deprecated?

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The best one can do imho is to bet his or her horses on the most open (and widely supported) hardware possible. For example while one probably still can use Zwave devices of the series 300 or older it might not be the best idea because they do not support encryption - and one (who posses “only” the hardware) can’t role their own :scream: So while the device (probably) still works because the zwave system is backwards compatible it might not be the smartest choice to make use of such devices :man_shrugging:

Mitigations for these vulnerabilities vary based on the chipset and device. In some cases it may be necessary to upgrade to newer hardware, for example, 500 and 700 series chipsets that support S2 authentication and encryption.

On the other hand esphome didn’t had a dedicated encrypted api (but obviously supports encrypted wifi) back in the year 2020 but as of it’s open nature a full api encryption was “shipped” a year later :fireworks: Also esp’s couldn’t work as a bluetooth proxy 3 years ago - but now they can. Esphome didn’t “comply” with the bthome standard - but now it does. Also the improv-wifi standard wasn’t supported the time I deployed already more than 50 devices around my house - now all my esp devices support it (even the ones I bought more than 5 years ago). Last but not least the time I started it was necessary to have a local program to install esphome on my devices - now things once improved drastically again and thank’s to espwebtools all that’s needed is just a browser :raised_hands: The thing is: If it is open it can be “shipped” later - things improve and so does your own(ed) hardware :rocket:

For some (open) type of hardware it’s possible to support “standards” which didn’t even exist at the time of manufacture :mage:

Well we “saw” already ho good (or bad) tuya teamed up with the HA devs :-1:

  • From a (commercial) company point of view I would say “free devs - we take them”.
  • As a HA user I would really hope the devs wouldn’t “waste” time with other companies/people products. As the ecosystem is open everybody is free to have their product supported (if they really want).

To my knowledge there simply is no revocation “system” in place (yet?). I also really doubt that nabu casa can do much the moment a company turns out to not comply any more to the rules but continues selling :ship:/:poop: loads of the product (which now “doesn’t work with…”) but still have a fat “works with…” printed on :man_shrugging:

#14

Yeah its called lawyering up. However I don’t know what legal protection HA has taken with it’s name. Pretty hard to trademark a name that is wholly descriptive of the product/service.

An example of good protection that has been adopted is Kodi - it won’t ket it’s name be associated with piracy. But part of the reason it can trademark it’s name is that it doesn’t describe what is in the box. The previous name (Xbox Media Centre then XBMC) was less easy as the product was in fact a media centre.

I would hope though that HA at least has a contract with the Manufacturer taht enables HA to say “hey you aren’t complying, stop using our name and logo”. Another problem of course is that China has zero respect for intellectual property rights so enforcement is difficult. OTOH the internet is powerful and a campaign saying “hey f***er you have no right to use our name/logo” could get far reaching.

But I digress, I sure get your Tuya example of the problem with cosying up with manufacturers. However Shelly do seem to be a different kettle of fish. And simply a contact at Alterco/Shelly where a dev could go to get a guaranteed response to “hey what’s up with this new device, the integration may need some tweaking, giz a clue” would enhance Shelly’s reputation & sales, and HA’s reputation as something that “works with Shelly” - a concept that should go both ways I feel.

#15

Well the “Works with Home Assistant” program has varieties for “via Zigbee”, “via Z-Wave”, BlueTooth, Cloud, Matter.

Whatever some OTHER vendor hasn’t applied for and been approved for doesn’t really relate to here, because HELTUN got the “via Z-Wave” program.

Whether the point of “This is available through Z-Wave even without the sticker/program” isn’t so much of the point. Theoretically, everything Z-Wave SHOULD be compatible, just by virtue of the Z-Wave certification (one of the big selling points over Zigbee). But the point here is that

  • Some Manufacturer’s went silent and stopped updating

So Home Assistant made a program to help the community have confidence in various vendors and keep the user experience from ending up crappy by requiring the Manufacturer to

  • maintain the integration of their products in Home Assistant
  • offer a good user experience
  • give us (Home Assistant) an engineering contact to escalate issues
  • Letting them (the manufacturer) use certain “Works with Home Assistant” badges, according to the agreement with Nabu Casa and the manufacturer

This is taken almost word-for-word from the first couple paragraphs on the “Introducing” post.

Introducing the Works with Home Assistant program - Home Assistant (home-assistant.io)

I’m CERTAIN HA is working with loads of other vendors - just look at how many other “joins Works with Home Asssitant” posts there are - and probably some vendors are not finding it worth the effort, or not responding. China will still slap whatever-the-hell logo they want on whatever product they want, regardless of what is legal, and that’s for lawyers to deal with.