Hi,
I bought a couple of lamp shades today and have been procrastinating on doing some DIY project with my Raspberry Pi 4 when I realised I could setup a home assistant on it and automate some of the things in my house starting with light bulbs.
I need some help/advice regarding which bulb should I buy? I’ve been reading about ZigBee/matter and that has made me confused about which protocol I wanna go with. Philips hue supports both but those bulbs are insanely expensive.
Should I get the IKEA bulbs which support matter or is it not a mature enough technology still? Or should I go with ZigBee supported bulbs (if so, suggestions are welcome)
I do not own any smart homepods so it’s a start from scratch.
I would also like to have a lumen and a motion sensor to automate turning on and off the bulbs. Will I need a sonoff equivalent dongle/router with matter devices? I know I will need it for ZigBee. Can I have a combination of both the protocols?
I cannot recommend any particular system but I can offer some advice to help you choose, as ever you will get all systems recommended as all people have different experiences. But take this into account before embarking on your choice.
Zigbee and matter over thread (Ikea) are mesh based systems so to get a reliable setup, unless your house is small will take a few devices and only mains powered devices will act a routers and forward the signal. This may mean getting some devices to talk to each other can be tricky until a router is installed between them.
Wifi can seem like a good solution but many ISP supplied routers can only cope with 20 or 30 devices connected before they get a bit flakey.
If you are putting smart bulbs into ceiling fittings you may end up with bulbs being turned off or needing extra smart wall switches making the cost twice what you hoped it might be.
You may then want to fit smart switches to handle ceiling lights but if you are in the UK you may not have a neutral feed to the switches which means any switches you install will not act as routers.
And the biggest tip is try to make everything you install work as it did before, e.g. be able to press a switch to turn a light on (especially with ceiling fittings and wall switches). There is nothing worse than making a visitor download an app to be able to see in the dark.
All of these have their solutions and workarounds but its easier to avoid them in the first place than develope a fix
Good luck and don’t be scared to ask, we like to help.
If you buy a shelly relay to put behind a wall switch, and the set it to “edge”, then you can both turn the lights on/off remotely and physically seamlessly. Example: light switch is on, you turn off the lights off remotely with HA. Person goes into room, sees lights are off (but light switch is on!). He/she flips the switch tho the other position - the lights change back to whatever state they were not in before - which is from off to on. (Otherwise the person would have to toggle the switch off and then back on which is confusing to people). Seamless! Consider this for ceiling switches. However, if you have motion sensors included that you want to tie into things to turn lights on, you will run into a situation where someone tries to tuirn the lights off while they are walking out of the room, and if their motion is sensed after they have turned it off while tyhey are waling out of the toom, then your programming may end up turning the lights back on again! To avoid this, you do have the ability in home assistant to check when the light goes off (or on), if it was done 1. (physically), 2. (by the HA UI), or by 3. (an automation/script). So, in your programming for dealing with motion detection, when the light state was turned to off by the switch manually (regardless of the actual switch state), store the time that was done so that when your programming is about to turn on the lights due to motion, do not do that if the current time is within say 2 minutes of the time you had just stored. I can supplpy the code for this it is actually pretty easy.
I prefer to not use smart bulbs because if power is not supplied to them, then there is no way to turn them on remotely and this causes pain in the ass issues with wall switches and table lamp swtiches, etc. It gets worse. If they are turned off remotely, then how do you turn them on with a switch that is already turned on? For both of these reasons I avoid smart bulbs. Therefore also for table lamps I use smart plugs instead; if someone is in the room then leave them turned and never turn them off remotely, so the person sitting there has full contrrol with the physical switch.
As you get fancier down the road and include switches on dashboards for enabling or disabling automations (at this point you just use if statements in all your automation logic to not touch those switches due to motion detection etc.), for a wall swtich when the automation is disabled, just don’t do anything (which is the proper way to do it in my case sing tim,ers described below). For a table lamp smart plug - when you disable the automation - be sure to leave the smart plug turned ON.
Motion detectors (really good ones - really ‘presence’ detectors) are expensive. I use the much cheaper PIR sensors which if you stop moving when sitting in a room they think you are not there because there is no motion. My workaround, which really works well, is to never turn lights on or off directly from HA! All automations for motion detection just (re)start dedicated timers for each light (with a dedicated duration for each that I also show in dashboards so it is easily adjustable without changing code). Then my lights going on or off are only controlled (triggered) by the timers (re)starting (then light goes on) or stopping (then turn the lisghts off). So for instance if you set a timer to 30 minutes, and there is motion in a room, the lights will stay on until 30 minutes AFTER the motion was last sensed. So even if it is from someone walking out of a room (and not even touching the wall light switch for example), then the lights would just automatically go off 30 minutes after the last motion was sensed. If the person is in the room and his motion is sensed again within those 30 minutes, just (re)start the timer - so the lights never go off while the person is sitting there). Then of course for all of the plumbing for this kind of a setup you want to have automations for what to do if a dashboard timer duration is changed (just restart a timer but only if it is active), etc., etc.
As you can see there are many nuances that start comiung into play. Hope that helps!