I’m sure there are a bunch of “What are great Home Assistant compatible Smart Devices” threads… but I wanted a list of the cream of the crop. The ones you can’t live without. The ones you wish you knew about from the beginning. The ones you can’t shut up about and recommend to everybody. The ones you when you buy them, you want to replace every device in your home with them.
@ThisITGuy turned me on to these. I have no affiliation with them, these things are just Awesome. This thing does everything. It’s like they took every useful feature on the smart-dimmer market and crammed it into one awesome switch. But usually devices like that end up with Feature creep and start looking like the car Homer Simpson designed. The Inovelli doesn’t have that problem. Despite all the bells and whistles, it still comes in a clean, minimalist package.
Amazon has them, but there’s no Prime and I think the shipping is slower. Also be careful because the Black Series is different from the Red Series. Everyone seems to be sold out of Red-series dimmers.
I was going to add a wemos d1 mini from Amazon, but not sure that is appropriate with the Ali express link above hehe. I will also add bare esp8266 modules to the list of loved devices, because without those I couldn’t make battery pir’s that last years on a charge. Another esp mention… esp32 Lora for those times where you need slower yet repetitive data on batteries. I also like my sonoff pow plugs for monitoring appliances (again esp8266).
For non esp, I live my ecolink zwave door window sensors… reliable as heck and batteries last forever. They are a bit bulky unlike my wife, but I love them regardless.
I also love my ecolink pet proof zwave pir sensors. Those are really reliable, and again the batteries last a very long time even with high traffic.
Lastly, and not perfectly related to ha, but I love my Dahua Poe ip cameras. They interface with ha including mqtt sensors, so they kind of belong on the list I think.
I have these in all of my bathrooms and love them. And unlike a lot of other Zigbee bulbs, they work well as repeaters too. I have lots of them that route through each other and some other devices route thru them as well. For the price, they can’t be beat
So this answer answers the “favorite products” question in a more general way. I absolutely love Lustre for finding Smart Home gear and other stuff.
If you never used it, it’s a website/browser extension that’s something like Metacritic for product reviews. It uses Artificial Intelligence to scour the web for articles from review sites (PCMac, Wirecutter (New York Times,) CNET, etc;) and pull their scores, as well as using sentiment analysis to see what people on Reddit/YouTube thought of products. Then it averages those scores together and presents a list of the best products in a given category. It’s from the guys who run slant.co. Again, I’m not affiliated with any of these… I just absolutely love it.
Then when you’re shopping Amazon or whatever it will show you the aggrigated critic/sentiment next to the listing:
Pretty funny that the $10 Wuze bulbs got better reviews than the $50 Philips Hue bulbs lol. Although Philips Hue does make a good product. Just too expensive / inflexible for my tastes.
But yea… I find a ton of cool stuff on there…and not just Smart Home stuff either. You can search their site by clicking the little “Category” thing on the left side.
Im also on the esp side. Tbh ive started with HA as a gui for my ws2812b strip behind my monitor, i wrote an arduino sketch which took the color codes via serial, but i wanted a gui. Tried HA and a hobby was born.
Most devices in my setup are esp8266 based wemos d1 mini boards with esphome. A tradfri 5 button remote and tradfri socket are so well integrated via zha and my cc stick, which i got from amazon pre-flashed for use with zigbee2mqtt. And i cant live without some software like “Disorient” for switching sound devices or OpenHardwareManager to remotely monitor and log cpu and gpu temps.
My xbox one s all-digital on the other hand is kinda okay-ish supported. the official integration is slow due to execution over the internet and the old xbox-rest implementation of openxbox has issues like losing connection to the xbox or the xbox doesnt execute the commands, but its way faster than the official integration.
There are so many great devices to choose from. One of my all-time favorites is the Fibaro switch, but it got recently replaced by the cheaper Shelly switch.
Both Fibaro and Shelly are excellent quality, very reliable and highly configurable. Both companies make products a smart home enthusiast would love.
$50 for the 4K version, or there’s a sweet Netflix deal that I’ll link to below.
These things are great. First off, you can control all your HA stuff with the Google Assistant integration. Second off, you can Voice Control EVERYTHING. “Turn on Game of Thrones.” “Turn on Comedy Central.” Third off, it’s one interface for all your streaming apps. So no more opening Neetflix, then Hulu then Prime. You just select the services you use and it picks from those. Fourth, their movie recommender system is one of the best I’ve ever seen ever. They recomend movies based on your tastes, viewing history and ‘likes.’ It’s as good as Netflix’s recomender engine, but again it works across services.
50 bucks… or there’s a sweet deal where you get a Chromecast + Something like $80 worth the Netflix credit (6 months) for $85. So if you already use netflix it’s basically like paying $5 for the Chromecast.
Also this one isn’t mindboggling but out of all the commercial hubs I really like Smartthings. They have the widest range of decive compatability… pretty much all Zigbeen and Z-wave devices connect to it. If I didnt use HA i would use SmartThings automation.
I have thought about adding voice control, but the cloud requirement is still there pretty much. My HA is all local; even connect through a vpn on my router while away. Also, it isn’t a smart device per se, but I do like my Nortek HUSBZB-1. Kind of it like ST in that it does zw and zb.
