Purchasing new hardware for sensors, advice needed

Hardware
1

Hello everyone!
I’ve been using HA for a few months and I want to go deeper in automations and devices. Other than Google, Alexa and TVs, here’s the hardware I have so far:

  • Five Yeelight color lamps (Wifi)
  • Two Sonoff Basic (Wifi)
  • Two Tuya color lamps (Wifi)
  • Three Tuya 3 gang/button light switch (Wifi)
  • One Tuya RF Alarm with door and presence sensors (Wifi+RF)
  • One Tuya IR controller (Wifi)

In my country Tuya is the most available and cheapest option, and it worked well enough for my uses back then.
Here are the shortcomings I have right now: The RF alarm, sensors and the IR controller aren’t directly integrated and I can’t automate anything outside of Tuya based on these (I use scenes as a workaround, but not ideal). Not to mention that Tuya cloud connection isn’t as reliable as I’d like.

So, I would like to go ahead and buy a few reliable (preferably local controlable) sensors that integrate well with HA, mainly:

  • Two temperature sensors
  • Five door sensors
  • Three presence sensores

I’ve read about Zigbee, Zwave, BLE, MQTT and such and I’m a bit confused as what devices to buy in order to get a good experience.

For these sensors I would like to purchase the most mature/reliable/painless solution that we can get in HA. So, what’s my direction? If I go with zigbee, should I get a stick or a hub? What integration to use ?

Thanks in advance.

2

The newest devices from Tuya have realtek chips inside but if your devices are a bit older you could flash them with ESPhome or tasmoa so you can fully integrate them into HA and don’t have to rely on the cloud.

https://tasmota.github.io/docs/Tuya-Convert/

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3

I would go with Zigbee as Zwave has a low range, BLE isn’t very popular and MQTT requires wifi/WLAN and could slow down your network speed if you have too many devices. Also, in comparison to BLE and MQTT, Zigbee operates in an own mesh network, doesn’t need as much energy and supports a much larger number of devices.

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4

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately the RF Alarm and IR controller aren’t compatible. But I’ll flash my lamps and switchs as soon as I get a proper door and presence sensor.

For now if I want to have a tuya door sensor turn a light on, it has to be a tuya light.

5

Thanks again. I’m also leaning towards Zigbee and saw plenty of devices to buy.

Should I get a Zigbee hub like Aqara/Sonoff or a Zigbee USB stick directly in HA? Which one seems be easier to maintain/integrate?

6

Unfortunately, I made the mistake and bought some wifi devices so I don’t have a zigbee network installed yet. But I’ve often read about using a zigbee stick works fine because it only has to be connected to a few other devices. The rest will be done through the mesh system. The next smart device I’ll buy is definitely going to be a zigbee one.