Start making my home smart. Where should I start?

I have nothing smart in my apartment in Norway. So I want to start. What is the best solution? I read about Xiaomi, are there other possibilities? I was going to start with a camera, burglar alarm on the door, a sensor in the living room. But I will expand eventually. What is the best brand? Where can I buy it at a fair price?

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There are a wide variety of solutions available. The question is what you want to do with your automations. There are a couple of different levels of home automation.
Level 1 is your basic smart light or smart device that can be controlled by an app from your phone, but doesn’t really talk to anything else.
Level 2 is where hub based systems come in. These systems like HomeAssistant, SmartThings and Wink just to name a few, allow you to connect various devices to a hub which allows the automations run on the hub to take in puts from all of your devices and decide what to do.
Since you say you want to setup a burglar alarm, Level 2 is where I think you want to go. Since you are on the “Home Assistant” forum, I’m going to suggest that home assistant is an excellent tool for accomplishing this.
What you will need.

  1. A raspberry pi (or other relatively powerful system) where you can run on of the variants of home assistant whether it be hassio, a docker version of home assistant, or a generic linux install of home assistant. Hassio is probably the simplest to get started with but it also puts the most limits on what you can do as far as getting to the underneath side of the application.
  2. I’m going to suggest that you go with zwave, others here may suggest other infrastructures, but I personally like zwave. So you will need a zwave radio that plugs into a usb port on your raspberrry pi.
  3. Devices. There are a wide variety of zwave door and window/door sensors, alarm sirens, light switches both in wall and plugin, that you can then control from HA to do whatever you want in the event a door or window is opened.

Home Assistant is infinitely expandable as well. There are new devices added ever release. New releases come out every 2 weeks.

I hope that gave you some degree of an answer but I imagine it probably will prompt more questions than it answered. Just let us know. This group is very active and there are a great number of really smart people here from around the world that are happy to help.

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Oh, what I could do with this straight line.

There are as many answers as there are people on this forum.

I am a newbie- three months ago I was looking at my configuration.yaml file with total confusion. (I am still confused, but my system is growing all the time.). The assistance you can get from other users on the forum is quite good.

Are you looking for plug-and-play, or are you comfortable with Raspberry Pi and maybe also Arduino? I prefer the DIY approach using a Raspberry Pi and an Aeotec Z-stick as my Z-Wave hub and Home Assistant server. I also use Node-Red to interface between Home Assistant and my ESP8266 sensors of my own design. In my house I have several DIY sensors, mostly temperature, and a couple of light status where there are no smart switches (attic and basement). I have an equal mix of Sonoff Basic and Touch modules plus at last count seven Inovelli Z-Wave switches. Also four various IP cameras looking at the garage, driveway, front and back porches. In testing is a replacement for my lawn sprinkler system which consists of four Sonoff 4CH switches.

Remember, three months ago I didn’t know the difference from Z-Wave and ZigBee. (Which reminds me, I have two lamps with Ikea Tradfri lights). If not for the generous assistance from the people on this forum, I probably would have given up.

So, start slowly and don’t hesitate to ask for help.
Hope this helps.

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Omg

There are so many new things to look into. I was going to buy Xiaomi system, but now I do not know.

you need to ask you if you want to:

  • discover possibilities (a simple connected and compatible sensor and a light is good for disciovering what we can do)
  • make some fun stuff (maybe you have already something compatible and you dont know it, like your TV, or something like that, you need to check the component page)
  • make some real usefull stuff (really depend of your home and your lifestyle, for exemple, if every evening, you turn on your tv, you turn off your main light, you turn on a little light, and you close your cutrain, … it can be usefull to do that with only one button)

Assuming that you cannot wire everything in an existing apartment, make a deliberate choice for one or more wireless platform(s):

  • Wifi/MQTT (ESP8266)
  • Z-wave
  • Zigbee (Hue, Tradfri)
  • 433 MHz
  • Etc.

Don’t forget MQTT.

@TheKing- there’s no need to be confused, and no right or wrong way to add some smarts to your apartment. The Home Assistant community has a lot of people who have experience with just about every technology mentioned in this thread, and almost every one of them will integrate with Home Assistant.

Some technologies are better than others, but the price of entry is a pretty good analog to the efficiency and quality of the technology.

Top of the heap is Z-Wave. By the time you install your first switch and hub, you are well over $100 out of pocket. Each additional device is an incremental cost starting at $30 for simple sensors or switches.

Dead last is 433 MHz. It’s also the cheapest technology. Remarkably unreliable and incredibly short range. But cheap. I have a couple of 433MHz switches in my system.

Here is an article from C-Net that pretty much summarizes your options. Which way you depends a lot on how comfortable you are with technology

Since you said “apartment”, let’s assume that you are renting and don’t want to make in-wall installations. There are several Z-Wave and WiFi switches that just plug in and are relatively easy to integrate into Home Assistant. I have WeMo and Sonoff devices like that in my home.

Since I built my own hub from a Raspberry Pi and Aeotec Z-Stick, I don’t have the slightest clue to guide you on a hub purchase. Personally, and this may be just me, I will not buy anything that is cloud-based. I want everything in-house. Ohers may have input on this.

So, get a plug-in switch or light controller and a hub, and then the fun begins.

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Sonoff devices are very good as they are WiFi/ESP8266 which are nice and cheap and allow you to turn on and off power to individual devices which can open your eyes and get you excited about home automation. There is also documentation on how to add some simple one-wire sensors to it’s GPIO ports so you can measure light, temperature or humidity. Also by updating the firmware to Tasmota you can instantly control them from HA as well as Alexa. Hope that helps.

I haven’t read other replies, but I’m SUPER cheap… and love this stuff, so have been comparing prices and features and cost/ease of use comparing everything…

This is all opinion obviously but I’ve ended up with:

  1. Echo Dot (s) I have 3 throughout the house all plugged into Klipsch 2.1 Speakers so they can do whole house music on the cheap.
  2. Color Hue Starter Kit (4 pack of bulbs) on sale preferably (I paid 149 but it took FOREVER to wait out a sale) You can get refurb kits too for cheap every once in a while. I think those were 99 for a 4 pack?
  3. Etekcity wifi Plugs (4 pack) You can use these to turn on and off “dumb” appliances or whole power strips, I use them to turn on and off all my computer accesories so they don’t vampire power, and for a bunch of studio lights I use for video and photography so I can just shout to alexa to turn them on and off while I stay behind the camera. (mind the amp ratings of the switches) (Cheapest Smart option)
  4. GE Zwave light switches for the hardwired lights
  5. Lutron dimmer for Dining room Chandelier
  6. Harmony Hub - Super essential if you have a lot of AV equipment. I can switch between xbox, ps4, tv, with a quick shout to alexa
  7. First Alert Zwave Combo smoke/co alarms (Cheapest Smart option)
  8. Honeywell Wi-Fi 7 Day Programmable Button Control Thermostat (Cheapest Smart option)

1-3 are literally the greatest combo in the world + 6 if you have a complicated AV setup.

For a Really well rounded setup I would go with 1-3 + the Samsung Smarthings starter kit.

I love home assistant and everything, but it’s a lot more complicated than retail stuff… I’ve finally gotten hassio running good, and I’m still going to pick up a Samsung Smart Things starter kit just so I can do all the Alarm stuff through that and maintain easy integration without needing to do special programming.

Then piggy back off that with Hassio to integrate my existing Thermostat, smoke alarms etc.

USA only :slight_smile:

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Xiaomi are great for the little remote buttons (round ones). They are great as light switches as they have 3 functions each which you can program in HA for anything you want. Being battery powered means no need for wiring and they can be portable. I have them mounted with velcro so they can be moved easily if I want to take a switch with me in the house. They do require having a Xiaomi hub but I then use that as a hallway night light (controlled by a motion sensor) and doorbell speaker (my doorbell button is also a round Xiaomi button).

A Broadlink RM3 mini costs a fraction of what these do and have the same capability. I have two of them (in separate rooms) and they work perfectly with HA

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Does the broadlink have bluetooth control?

not the RM3 mini. I dont have a need for that at all. everything in my system is either wifi, zigbee or z-wave. bluetooth is far too short range to be of any use other than presence detection in my opinion (and even then most houses would need multiple detection devices). My home automation system does most things without user input and the rest i use voice commands for. If I have to use a phone or tablet etc then I may as well grab the old fashioned remote control…

I use bluetooth on my harmony hub to control kodi, so from that point of view I find harmony superior for controlling my media system.

what is Kodi running on? I control my Kodi via wifi…

The problem with Sonoff is CE approval; or lack of it. As the OP mentioned he is in an apartment so I would be extremely cautious ensuring only CE approved devices as if a fire starts you do not want to be where the finger points.

A fire means a sealed location and inspectors; and insurance will find any and all reasons to avoid payouts.

You need this then https://www.itead.cc/wiki/images/f/f7/CE_Certificate_for_Sonoff_Series.pdf and this https://scontent-lht6-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t31.0-8/27709656_1988873107806781_4638647702299222669_o.jpg?_nc_cat=0&oh=4b59902a845943f718c973f2eaf106a2&oe=5C608D9B

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Read the standard. It does not cover electrical safety, it covers wifi.

I have both a broadlink RM pro and a harmony hub and remote and I can tell you it would take a serious amount of HA programming to get the broadlink to do what the harmony does.

I would definately recommend the harmony hub for AV equipment over broadlink. We have put all our remotes away and just use the harmony. It took me less than an hour to have all my equipment programmed and the activities are brilliant.

Broadlink has its place - I use the broadlink for my stereo and other RF stuff, but that’s all, and its very basic controls like on/off and vol up or down.

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