While searching for a reliable, but certainly also affordable option to connect our home lighting, I was thinking to select the following hardware:
Sonoff relays ( https://www.itead.cc/sonoff-wifi-wireless-switch.html ) to do the actual switching. Threads on these forum indicate that they work well over MQTT with Home Assistant. Additionally I’d like to wire a simple pushbutton over GPIO for local control.
The Sensebenders would communicate over NRF24L01+ or RFM69 radio connections to Home Assistant.
I am looking for feedback from people with similar installations. The cost for such an installation seems to be much lower than doing this with purpose-built ZWave devices. However, what about reliability and latency? Are there other options with similar cost that would be better?
I’m using a few sonoff relays, flashed with Sonoff-MQTT-OTA-Arduino (or the newer version Sonoff-Tasmota). I’ve been using a couple of them for a few months now, with no problems whatsoever.
I’ve played around with MySensors a bit and even have a few MySensors nodes still in operation. Although I haven’t reached a definitive decision yet, the MySensors system is not as reliable as esp8266/sonoff is. Sometimes it’s easier to add a new node and it comes with a lot of node types built in, but from a reliability standpoint my vote would definitely go to sonoffs.
The sonoff relays work really well (I’m using it with ESPEasy firmware) as long as your wifi network is reliable.
I have a MySensors dual switch (connected to two on/off wall switches) and usually works well but from time to time takes a while to react (like 2 seconds or so). I’ve used the same switch with Pimatic before using HA, and it always worked well, so it may be an issue with the HA component and not with MySensors itself.
Another low-cost suggestion for buttons is the Xiaomi Smart Home familly. You can get the hub for about 30€, and buttons for 5€. You also have nice cheap sensors.
Another alternative is having a 433Mhz receiver. There are a lot of 433Mhz remotes, including some that you can tape on the wall and look just like the normal house wall switches. I also have some of those and they are 100% reliable for me.
Thanks for your feedback lexam79 and abmantis. Question to you both: Do you use NRF24L01+ or RFM69 with MySensors? I can imagine that the radio connection is important in the reliability/latency.
The Xiaomi is attractive for its cost, but I’m a bit worried about vendor lock-in and I like how I can pick any simple pushbutton to work with Sonoff/MySensors on GPIO. Are you aware if the Xiaomi button also just shorts a connection (such that you could replace the default button with any other pushbutton)?
I currently have some 433MHz equipment (Dutch KlikAanKlikUit flavour). Yes, it’s cheap, but I’m not too happy with it. If the signal doesn’t come accross (which happens quite often for me) you just have to keep pressing the button as the sender does not wait for confirmation from the receiver.