I have overall IT knowledge, at least average in most of the specific sectors, but “Smart Home” is a completely new topic for me and I’d love some opinions on my specific approach, so I don’t flush my money & time down the drain with wrong purchases. I’m also going to setup local NAS server + maybe a TeamSpeak server.
I currently have ~18 Tuya Zigbee devices connected under Smartlife app (ZB3.0 Dimmers for LED Strips, Radar Presence Sensors, PIR Motion Sensors, Outdoor lamps). I’d like to extend my automation possibilities and I think Home Assistant is the way to go. Moving from cloud to local network is a big plus.
My plan in short:
Revive my previous PC, setup Proxmox, install Home Assistant OS in a VM there.
(do I need this? is the biggest/only plus-side here that all my devices will stay local?) Buy Sonoff 3.0, plug it in that old PC, install the HA Add-on for MQTT (I already found plenty of tutorials).
Pair all my devices again with the Sonoff/HA directly, bypassing Tuya Smartlife.
All my devices are now directly connected to HA via Sonoff LOCALLY (Zigbe2MQTT) and I can uninstall Tuya Smartlife app.
or option 2:
PC, Proxmox, HA on a VM.
(do I need this?) Buy Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1 and plug it in the PC.
Tuya ↔ HA Integration (also saw some tutorials, seems easy)
Have all the control under Home Assistant, but SmartLife is still neccessary and I’m cloud-based.
Am I missing something? Will it work? Should I rather go for Rpi / HA Green setup instead? Should I just stop wasting my time and stay within Tuya Smartlife app since I won’t get much more value from all this?
I think you are a little confused with how you are thinking of the Zigbee network. To try to simplify things, think of Zigbee as a single separate network which has a main router. The main router is a called a coordinator and each Zigbee network can only have one. Since you are already using you Zigbee devices you have a coordinator and most likely the Tuya Hub. This Hub is connecting to the Tuya IOT platform which is controlled by the Smartlife app.
In essence the Zigbee devices are being controlled locally via the Hub, however, the Smartlife app use the Tuya IOT platform to access the Hub. This API is proprietary to Tuya and not open source. There are a few integrations that give you local control as the developers have reverse engineered some of this closed API, however, they won’t necessarily cover all devices and it could be prone to failure especially if Tuya make changes to the API.
In both options you are unsure if you need a coordinator and in the first you list the Sonoff whilst the second lists the ZBT-1. In essence both would be used to provide the same functionality and would replace the Tuya Hub and provide an open API.
The way I would set this up since you will use a PC with Proxmox on is:
1). HA OS in a VM
2). Zigbee2Mqtt in an LXC (passthrough the USB coordinator)
3). MQTT Server (Mosquitto) in an LXC
My choice of running Zigbee2Mqtt in a separate container is so that a restart of Home Assistant doesn’t also restart the Zigbee network (it can take some time for a Zigbee network to establish the best routes over its mesh).
Your only real choice is which coordinator to buy and either the Sonoff or ZBT-1 are fine as USB devices. With USB you are limited to connecting these directly to the PC and it is recommend to use an extension cable to get them away from the PC to reduce the interference. If you have ethernet cabling in the property then you could look at other coordinators such as those from https://smlight.tech/ which will allow you to place the coordinator further from the PC and potentially in a more central location.
Thank you sir, that’s super helpful! Glad I asked before doing anything
Indeed I have RJ45 plugs with connection to my router all around the house so this might be a good idea.
So what you’re saying is I should get some Z2MQTT coordinator, re-create my Zigbee Mesh (pair it) on that coordinator, setup my Z2MQTT separately, not on HA to increase independence.
Sounds great!
My only real problem left is if my AliExpress Tuya Zigbee devices are going to work in Z2MQTT then. My Zigbee WZ1 dimmers are 99% going to work.
Already went through both mentioned links and the device list, I already have the Tuya - HA integration running, but in terms of sustainability and scalability I’ll be going for MQTT soon.
I gave up on the Device List as it’s a guessing game witth those random cheap AliExpress mini PIR sensors. My most expensive devices are WZ1 LED Controllers, and although I can’t find them on the list, I can see a closed github issue with it so I assume it should work GitHub Issue WZ1
