Request help for initial Smart home

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Hi all, I have only recently started learning and researching about Smart home devices and automation. Home Assistant sounds amazing with endless possibilities but all hugeee learning curve for me.

Location - Australia (if it helps or makes any difference in buying hardware for me).

We have a major renovation coming up next year, so to get some experience I am planning to do some smart home automation at the current home, so I can plan and learn from my experience.

Currently our home is a low set 3 bedroom house.
We will be going to double storey with total 400m2 built area + plus outside. So I will plan lot more things based on my experience here.
Planning to go with Homekit Automation setup.

Equipment I have

  1. Basic Router – HG659 ( I know this is very basic but will this work?) I will buy new mesh router for the new place.
  2. iPad 9 for Homekit / iPhone / Mac book Pro
  3. Normal dimmable downlights (not smart) with normal switches.
  4. Currently the Living Room and Kitchen downlights have the “Neutral” wire to them.

Equipment I plan to buy

  1. Home Assistant Green (Is this the easiest compared to buying Pi and setup and all the hassle)
  2. Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 or Sonoff ZBDongle-E (EFR32MG21) – best for strong mesh & Australia. Any suggestions as I will try to take whatever so I can take it to the new place.
  3. I am thinking of buying the EyZEEÂŽ Zigbee Smart Light Switch Australia instead of buying new Smart downlights for my current setup. (So just replace my dumb switches with smart switches and use the dimmable downlights. Would that work or any other suggestions?
  4. Outdoor Security Camera (Battery – Eufy 2C/3/3C) I would like POE but then I have the buy the network switch and so on also run the wiring to the outside.
  5. Add couple of Sensors (Aqara T1 Motion Sensor) so I can work on the automation for setting up the scenes and so on.

I am not very techi, so I would like things which are compatible and works easier. I have been using the Chatgpt/Home Assistant forums and others for my research for my learning.

Please suggest and advise how I can setup easily and start on my Smart home journey.

Thank you very much to everyone in advance.

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Great is Home Assistant is, you’ll want to have a home that works as usual when HA should fail. The easiest way to accomplish that is to use smart wired switches and dimmers with dumb lights (assuming you do not care for color for the main lighting).

If your home will get new wiring, make sure the boxes for light switches also contain a neutral wire. It will greatly improve the options you will have to automate. Deep boxes also help if you want to hide smart switching material behind ordinry switches.

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I think Edwin’s advice is right on. I plan my house to act like uninitiated guests expect, whether HA is up or not. I also went through a big reno lately and used that process to expand my experimental pilot throughout my house. I use a combination of Z-Wave and Zigbee, ZooZ and Enbrighten switches, fan speed control, dimmers and outlets. That mix has allowed me to build strong Zigbee and Zwave network throughout my house. Something to consider is remote access. I constantly use an OpenVPN back to my router to keep my remote access under local control. I don’t think your router supports OpenVPN, but it has L2TP. That is legacy IPSEC based security. You’ll need to consider whether that is a limiting factor for you. There are obviously other types of cloud-based remote access methods for HA as well

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As far as cameras, make sure the ones you pick integrate well with HA. Some battery powered cameras don’t monitor requests for RTSP streams from the network. I have Reolink Solar battery cameras. They require the Reolink NVR to integrate with HA. HA integrates with the NVR as opposed to individual cameras to control, and pull events and streams.

You’re probably already looking at this, but consider some combination of motion, contact, and presence sensors to keep spousal approval strong. You don’t want the lights to go out in a room, when they’ve been sitting still or standing behind a shower door for a while.

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This is a cult. Get out while you still can…

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For camera’s you should use frigate as your NVR and then use the frigate integration to access the frigate NVR. There is a frigate container you can addon directly to your HA controller, but I’d recommend you don’t overload your smart home controller with secondary features. Put secondary features on their own hardware where the hardware can be sized appropriately. With camera’s you’re going to want good object detection, which frigate provides.

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Don’t buy equipment now that you will not use straight away. The pace of technological change is rampant in the home automations sphere, so fast that even artificial intelligence cannot keep up.

For your new home plan your infrastructure carefully. You only get one go at this up front.

Dedicate a small area for your equipment in a LOCKED facilities cupboard where all the cables end up, and have a UPS set up to keep the important things going in times of power outage. The power cable for the facilities cabinet goes to a dedicated circuit on your electrical switchboard inside your house, not outside where it can be easily accessed and turned off, or worse, toggled repeatedly to crash your equipment and turn it back to default settings. WiFi cameras are no good if thieves have turned off your power at the meter and your router is not working. What if your NBN is cut, or down? Is 5G fallback on your cards? What alerts are going to get back to your mobile phone in a timely fashion if you are not home? Are you going to be able to turn on your electric blanket remotely so your bed is warm but not toasty, based on estimated time to arrive home? Automagically? Let your hungry Alsatian free to chase away vandals rampaging in your back yard?

Are you going to lock yourself into the Apple ecosphere, with their deliberate marketing driven incompatibilities and vendor extensions? Are the alternative choices any better?

Cat 6e or faster cable is cheap to run at home fitout time before the plasterboard walls, ceilings and insulation go in, but horribly expensive and ugly as an afterthough. Get your sparky to run some to critical areas of your home such as the shed, garage, lounge, TV room, games room, kitchen (WAF matters), front and rear doors for cameras and locks, bedrooms, bathrooms, eaves on each corner and above access doors for hard wired cameras, your water gas and electricity meter for monitoring and leave it behind the wall, ready to be used as needed. Pretty much every room including any roof and subfloor space for security, solar and batteries. Put in draw cables/nylon string in any conduit so you can run added cables later. Have ‘latent’ conduit running between floors, unused but with drawstrings in them, ready for future cabling works Yes, use a kilometer or two of the stuff, all going back to your utilities cupboard. It will save you a lot of grief later as flaky wireless connections rear their head - just punch a hole in the plaster and install an outlet socket and plug the other end into your POE switch mounted on a neat rack. Just make sure to accurately mark locations on a detailed house plan, carefully tucked inside a pocket in the inside of your locked facilities cupboard and keep it up to date as your requirements change. Take lots of photos so you know on what side of the studs the cables are to be found once the plasterboard goes in.

Allow room inside your facilities cupboard for added equipment such as a security system recorder, 19" rack POE switches, a small PC to update your Raspberry Pi running HomeAssistant, and a bar you can fasten your cabling to, leaving a neat finish. Make sure it is ventilated well, but no spiders or dust can enter.

Yes, you may spend up to a thousand dollars more putting in the infrastructure backbone added to the cost of a multi-thousand dollar building, but the cost savings and convenience, as well as reliability in the long term will be worth it, not just for yourself, ypur wallet in being able to control your hone to an inch of its’ life for optimum quality of life and cost of living, but for when it is time to move out of your smart home into something bigger, better and grander, it will be far easier to sell for a handsome profit as you planned ahead of time.

Best wishes.

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Thank you all for so much valuable information and lot to think about and research.
As mentioned I am currently only doing simpler/minimal smart home automation for my current home and to keep costs down.

When we are planning on the renovation of the new place, I am going to buy lots of new equipment and get CAT6e wiring as much as possible and lot more automation after my experience from this current project.

So after your suggestions, I am planning to go with this setup, so please advice:

  1. GMKtec Mini PC Ryzen 5 3500U (mini PC) and then install Home Assistant on it.
  2. Sonoff ZBDongle-E (for Zigbee gateway)
  3. Reolink Dual wide angle camera for outdoor security camera. Outdoor camera from Amazon
  4. Few Shelly Dimmer Gen 3 (For behind the current switches with neutral wires)
  5. 2 x Aqara Motion Sensor P1
  6. TP-Link 5-Port Gigabit Easy Smart Switch with 4-Port PoE+

Above is like a starting point so I can place the couple of sensors and smart downlights, with camera and start on the automations.

Do you think I am on the right track or please do suggest some hardware or better options to go with for my current project?

Thank you all :slight_smile:

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Sounds like you’re headed in a good direction for a start. Basic stuff that should definitely work. There really isn’t a wrong way to start. WiFi will inevitably become more important as you develop your home. A good current gen mesh WiFi will probably be critical to eventual success.

I could be wrong, but I think we all make changes as we go and learn. The HA community is strong and active. Sounds like you’re good at adapting what you hear to work for you.

Search the community board when you hit challenges after looking around, but don’t be afraid to post a “stupid question”. I’ve saved Hours of frustration by asking what I know is a simple question.

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Thank you so much for the kind words. I am just trying to listen and learn from the experts. I will definitely be reading a lot more material and posting a few questions and hopefully not bug too much :slight_smile:

Also regarding the Wi-Fi, I understand its very old, but I wont be loading up with any more hardware or features.
This is just to start learning the possibilities of HA and how much I can learn.

Thank you again.
I will keep you guys posted on the design and how I go.

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Hi all, just a quick update.

I have received the mini PC + switch as mentioned above. The Sonoff ZBDongle is on the way.
I have installed the Proxmox and the Home Assistant successfully and working perfectly and very excited.
https://www.derekseaman.com/2023/10/home-assistant-proxmox-ve-8-0-quick-start-guide-2.html.
Thank you for the amazing article it was very helpful for a newbie like me and worked great.

For my current scenario I would like to experiment but also dont want to spend too much on the hardware currently at this house.
Could you please suggest the following:

  1. I am planning to buy 3 x Shelly Dimmer Gen 3 (For behind the current switches with neutral wires). Am I able to connect 2 different switches located at same location to control 2 locations i.e. 1 switch (living room), 2nd switch (dining) which maybe connecting to S1 and S2 accordingly or would I need a Shelly Dimmer for each switch? (hopefully that makes sense). or please suggest better hardware/method.
  2. I am thinking of mmwave sensor but FP2 is too pricey for my situation as I dont need multiple locations. Any suggestions for more affordable option which meets my criteria? Is anything from Aliexpress an option at all or is the reliability quite bad to even try them?
  3. I need 2 outdoor cameras. I am happy to get Reolink (wired) as they work really well but any suggestions for the models or any other better options?

Also please suggest for any further additional hardware or articles I can see to get better experience for my future project.

Thank you again.

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Good progress! For cameras, I really like my Reolink TrackMix POE, and it integrates very well with HA. As for other hardware, consider adding fairly early in your automation journey a sensor or two that report the outdoor environment, such as temperature and luminance. This can be useful for all sorts of automations down the road (it’s dark out, so turn on some lights… it’s hot out, so adjust the AC or window blinds… etc.)