in few months I will move to my new house so I was thinking to make it smarter. My goal is to focus on usabiily with an HIGH LEVEL of WIFE ACCEPTANCE!
So I have few question about it.
First of all, affidability: I would like to use HA as CORE of my smart home for all the activities related to SECURITY, POWER CONSUMPTION MANAGEMENT and, of course, FUN (media management, multi room solution and so on). Do you think that HA is ready for alarm security (via zwave) or should I focus on some alarm company (linke SATEL) and connect it with HA?
Second: in wall vs wireless solution. Do you think that WIFI is sufficiently mature for multi room solution (via mopidy and snapcast) or should I focus on something wired (with a different economic effort of course)?
Thank you in advace for all your suggestion and link!
Read like crazy until your eyes fall out. There is no complete answer to any of your questions. It will take work and commitment from both you and your wife. She will need to improve her patience as you learn.
Use a separate alarm you can integrate to HA. While doing it in HA gives you more flexibility, if something goes wrong the WAF score goes right down because it’s “your fault”.
Don’t worry too much about the tech right now, think about functionality - eg “I’ll want a motion sensor, temperature sensor, and light sensor in this room”, and things like getting neutral wires to all your light switches.
Multi room audio has a bunch of commercial solutions, including the likes of Sonos and Google Home Max. If you’re already contemplating voice control (IMO you should be using it over tablets) then those will do multi-room audio and voice control.
Then sit down and look at you (and your wife’s) behaviours. Think about what you want to automate, and then combine those two to work out the mechanics. Usability should be 90% automation, 9% voice, and 1% manual (the numbers are a bit made up, but you get the idea hopefully) - basically, consider reaching for a device as a sign that you’re needing to put more work into something
Try not to put all your eggs in one basket.
As tempting as it is to have an all in one solution, consider what happens if your Home Assistant server goes down. Does your house come to a grinding halt ? Are you still able to operate lights etc ?
I’ve gone the cheap and cheerful route using mainly sonoff’s and nodemcu’s reflashed with ESPeasy.
ESPeasy allows for some on board logic, so if the worst happens and HA dies, light switches, AC etc still work as expected.
You’re right. Definitely. I’ve waited to answer (sorry for that) because I noticed that here in Italy there are only few solutions that can be integrated in HA. Maybe the best for me seems Satel Integra, but in the component page I’ve read that I have to untick the encryption.
So you think this will make my alarm weak?
I will check with my electrician if neutral wires are present in my rooms. I was looking for sonoff who are cheap, based on good hardware, and hackerable (in hw and sw).
I’ve googled a lot and found many solution. I think I will go to a custom solution with RASPBERRY + Hi Fi amp + in wall speaker + microphone. So I will have the chance to have a multiroom solution based on mopidy+snapcast integrable with Google Assistant or Snips.ai (I don’t like very much to have a big brother in my kitchen).
I will try to talk with her about solutions. But she is more interested in furnitures, colors, and other fancy stuffs while I’m focused on technologies .
The rules engine.
This alone gives ESPEasy almost limitless flexibility.
I was having issues with contact bounce on my garage door sensor, denounced with a timer in rules.
I wanted extra functionality out of a push button, a timer in rules gave me a long and short press to trigger different autos in HA.
Sensor status’s were spamming my MQTT server, I was able to store and compare variables so payload was only sent went status changed.
They also have a neat feature where they can talk directly to each other over UDP. Only setup required is to give each one a unique number.
Within minutes I had two nodemcu’s with espeasy, one with an led, the other with a magnetic reed switch, with the reed switch state on one switching the led on the other. No intermediate server required !
I could go on, but I’m on my phone and my finger is getting sore from tapping
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