Way to determine if device is compatible with Home Assistant

Hi there, I am planning on home automation and already ordered a raspberry pi 4.
I’m quite experienced in embedded programming (made a GPS car acceleration device for ESP32) so any solution is welcome.
I want to know if there’s any way to determine if a device is compatible with Home Assistant. I couldn’t really find any guides online.

For example, are there any signs that these smart switches will be supported?

https://a.aliexpress.com/ _mMEuHqj
https://a.aliexpress.com/ _mMoI0kT
(Remove the space from URL)

I do see that it’s compatible with google home and alexa, does that imply it works with Home Assistant? Are there any other signs?

If it says Tuya then it should be compatible (one of them does) or if it uses the “Smartlife” app (the other one says that) then I’m pretty sure it means it’s a Tuya device as well.

Yeah, I’ve seen that integration. But as far as I’ve understood it’ll only work with an internet connection.
Is there an in-between documentation on how home assistant works? I find the general guide containing to little information and the dev guide is jumping straight to the technical details, which is a lot of info to process just to determine if a device is compatible with local polling/ local pushing

I believe out of the box they are cloud based only. But there used to be a way to convert them to local only (I think it was a project called “Tuya Convert”) but I’ve also heard some of the newer Tuya stuff has been modified so that the conversion was harder or impossible. So you’ll need to look into that aspect to see if that’s available.

The other options for local only is Zwave or Zigbee which has their own implementation and will require a USB controller for the mesh network. Both of which have a HA integration.

And there is a company called Shelly that makes switches and such that offers the option to set it up for cloud or local only. And there is a Shelly integration for HA.

I’m honestly not sure how the Shelly integration works - if it is using the cloud or local aspect of the Shelly devices - because I’ve never used it. I always have flashed mine with third party firmware so they are definitely always local.

And there is always the Sonoff flashed with Tasmota or ESPHome which are also wifi based devices.

Yup, I’ve read more about Tasmota and most of the devices from aliexpress are supported. I already have a flash programmer so it won’t be a problem to flash the firmware. At least for now I am good with the choice of devices.

Thanks for pointing me to the right direction!

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