What Hardware do I need to get started?

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Hi Everyone,
Sorry if this is in the wrong section, or not allowed - I did not see a Hardware section.
Brand new to HA and decided to dive in with some of the black friday deals.

I have some experience with Raspi, mesh networks, and programming and want a HA server that doesn’t rely on the cloud and can still function without internet but is simple to setup and open for custom integration.
It looks like Home Assistant is a good place to start - or is it?

I was set on getting the Smartthings starter kit, it seems like the cheapest way to get started, but last second decided to do more research. My understanding is it will connect directly with Zigbee and Z-wave and WiFi devices with additional hubs which is great. So I ordered a few Sylvania Lightify bulbs (which apparently use Zigbee like Phillips Hue) and plan to get some Z-wave sensors and outlets.

Two major questions:
1 - Should I buy a Z-Stick (~$45) and the Lightify Hub (on sale at Lowes right now for $21) to use the bulbs, or can I get the Smartthings hub ($50 now) to connect to both Z-wave and Zigbee devices?

2- If I do buy the Lightify Hub - am I then stuck in the Lightify ecosystem? Or can I get some Phillips Hue bulbs to work through the Lightify Hub? My goal is to minimize the number of hubs, cords, power adapters, etc so a Hub for each brand/ecosystem is a dealbreaker for me. In my head the perfect solution is a Raspi with a Z-stick and USB Zigbee radio but I’m not sure that’s possible.

Also - are there any pros/cons between getting a Z-Stick and using a Hub like Smartthings? Like for example if you’re using Smartthings over WiFi and your router locks up, everything goes down? I’d rather have super reliable lights and motion rules over Z-wave than have delays or downtime due to the Wifi being bogged down or something.

If there’s a better community to answer hardware questions or somewhere that may have already covered it, please point me that direction! :slight_smile:

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

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Unless somerthing has changed, the integration with SmartThings is through the cloud so does not meet your criteria of not relying on the cloud. I had an ST hub and discarded it for that very reason.

I believe it is possible to root a Wink hub - others may be able to help you there.

When moving from ST, I ditched my Zigbee Bulbs and bought a ZWave stick. If you want to go down the Hue route you can do that locally with a Hue hub - works very well. In theory you should be able to use your lightify bulbs with a hue hub as well.

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I believe I read somewhere that Wink is starting to move more of their processing out of the cloud and onto the hub. I think I may go home tonight and just unplug the network cable from my router and see what doesn’t work after my kids stop screaming.
I’ve never seen my Sylvania devices show up on my hue hub.

In answer to your questions.

  1. I would get a wink hub (gotta got home depot or amazon for this), a z-stick and the lightify hub. The lightify hub works as a range extender for both zwave and zigbee I believe. Wink is a good easy place to link all of them together. HA is great for setting up the rules and schedules for controlling them. It also has the ability for the devices to link directly to HA, but I’ve had some problems with that but if you like to tinker, that could remove the need for the wink hub.
  2. I like the lightify hub not so much because of the lightify eco system, but because it acts as an easy range extender for the mesh network. I’m actually wondering about the benefits of smart bulbs vs smart switches.

If you have a smart bulb tied into a light socket controlled by a dumb switch, you can’t turn it on no matter how hard you try till someone turns that dumb switch back on. But with a smart switch, it doesn’t matter what kind of bulb you have, you can buy a smart dimmer if you want to dim the lights. The only caveat to all of this is colored lights, but they come with their own set of problems. Another thing to be aware of with smart switches though is 3-way switches. The GE smart switches at least require a neutral and a ground at all switches. Most 3-way switches wired today, have a safety ground (the green or bare wire), but only have a neutral wire at the primary switch. Unless your switch is in a multi-gang box where another switch pulled in a neutral that you can tie onto, the GE switches just won’t work.

Hope this helps.

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Thanks! That all helps a ton. I guess I need to do some more review reading on what’s cross compatible. I’d hate to be stuck using only lightify or only hue when one goes on sale.

I did a lot of thinking on light bulbs vs switches as well. For any fixture that’s already wired to a switch and you don’t have any need for color (like overhead lighting) I think a smart dimmer is the way to go. I think color lights or any smart bulb will work best in lamps plugged into always powered outlets for the reasons you mentioned.
Any guest would turn off the switch and ruin any automation that’s set up. If you really wanted smart color bulbs on switched fixtures you could bypass the switch so it’s always powered and install a smart toggle style switch in the switch box that just sends commands to the light instead of cutting power.

This is all theory in my head though. I’ve yet to actually start playing with this stuff.

I’m mostly interested in this stuff to make life easier and eventually have smart locks and smart thermostats and certain lighting to come on at sunset and turn on for motion while we are away to give the appearance someone is home. Garage door sensors will be a must. Excited to get started.

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Okay, I did some light reading about different protocols and hubs. Here’s what I found based on other forums and manufacturer’s pages:

-Zigbee Lights actually use Zigbee Light Link to communicate. I’m not an expert but from what I understand, this is a 802.15.4 protocol that requires additional data formatting for communication. The protocol standard is available for download at that link. If Home Assistant somehow utilized this, in theory you should be able to use an XBee USB Explorer(sparkfun.com/products/11812) or XBee Raspi Shield(amazon.com/Ciseco-PLC-SC12870-Slice-Raspberry/dp/B00C45FGBM/) with some code and talk directly with Light bulbs using Zigbee Light Link.

-Phillips Hue uses Light Link but apparently is slightly variant or proprietary and doesn’t play very well with others from what I’ve read. The Hue Bridge can be used to connect other Zigbee devices (like Lightify) but I don’t think the other way around works. This means Hubs that have Zigbee radios built in (Smartthings, Wink, Vera, others) cannot talk directly to Hue bulbs without the Hue bridge but can talk directly to Lightify bulbs.

-Smartthings v2(support.smartthings.com/hc/en-us/articles/205956900-Meet-the-Samsung-SmartThings-Hub) has Z-Wave, Wifi, Zigbee so it can talk directly to Lightify bulbs (but not Hue without the bridge). When connected to the internet, all commands make a round trip to the cloud. When disconnected(support.smartthings.com/hc/en-us/articles/205956960-What-happens-if-the-power-goes-out-or-I-lose-my-internet-connection-), apparently some things “switch” to local processing and some Z-Wave and Zigbee commands still work but to me that’s a complete deal breaker that it uses the cloud typically. It does have a cool built in AA battery backup for power outages but I’m not sure what it would be good for other than maybe door locks since it can’t do much without power or notify you without internet. At $50 currently it’s the cheapest though. It has 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9, 512MB DDR3 RAM, and 4GB FLASH for specs.

-Wink 1 and 2(wink.com/products/wink-hub-2/#inventor) both have Z-Wave, Zigbee and 433MHz protocols but Wink 2 adds Bluetooth Low Energy. Wink 2 has 2.4 and 5GHz WiFi, an Ethernet Port and they claim it is a Z-Wave Plus Device (although it is not listed on the Z-Wave Plus Alliance website). It could just be that it is too new and hasn’t made the list yet since the Wink 1 is certified.
–Wink 1 has 64MB of memory compared to 512MB on the Wink 2. No processor specs or RAM type found.
–Also apparently Wink 1 can be rooted but I’m not sure the benefits of that. For $56 it may be the best option but it seems lacking in horsepower. Does anyone get any delays or lag with Wink 1?
–Wink 2 root not yet achieved but looks like work has begun(rootwink.com/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=238) already. Currently $99 on Amazon

-Vera has a few hubs, VeraLite, VeraEdge, VeraPlus. I only looked at the VeraPlus because it has Zigbee built in. It also has Z-Wave (Plus Certified(products.z-wavealliance.org/Search/Index?regionId=-1&searchText=veraplus)), Bluetooth Low Energy, and Wifi (2.4/5.8). It’s the most expensive at $150 and the specs are 880MHz MIPS SoC DDR3 256MB (less memory than the Wink 2 but can’t compare the processor)

-The Aeotec Z-Stick is Z-Wave Plus Certified(products.z-wavealliance.org/products/1345) as well so no difference there. I can’t really guess on the differences between controlling devices direct through a USB radio or through a hub on the LAN.

Summary:
After all this I’m going to get myself a Wink 2 hub for $99, a few Z-Wave devices and more Lightify Bulbs while they’re on sale and start playing around with simple things using the Wink interface.
I’m sure I will quickly want more functionality so once I understand the devices well enough I’ll get Home Assistant running on an old laptop collecting dust as a trial run. If that works I’ll go for the full Raspi 3 setup and start customizing. I’m pretty excited to be able to use custom sensors and the GPIO for things.

Hopefully this info helps the next person. Please correct me if I got anything wrong!

EDIT: Wow, so apparently the limit is 2 links per post so I I removed all the “www.” and now this post is a bit of a mess… Sorry!

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Just as a heads up there is a slight delay when communicating to a wink hub through HA. The Wink hub is only connected via the cloud and thus there can be a slight delay as the info goes out to the cloud and returns.

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What is a slight delay? Half second? 3 seconds? Is this for wink 2 hub? Their website says:

What happens if my Internet connection or power goes out?

The Wink Hub and Wink Hub 2 require power and Internet to connect you with your smart products. If you lose Internet connection or power, you will still be able to manually control your products that run on batteries or do not require electricity for basic functionality (i.e. your front door lock) but you will not be able to control them via the Wink app. Once the Internet and power is restored, your Hub and compatible products will reconnect automatically.

There are two exceptions to this rule:

We recently enabled local control for all Wink-compatible, Hub-required light bulbs and switches. This allows you to control your lights if the Internet goes down while you are home, as long as your phone is connected to your home’s Wi-Fi network.

Wink Hub 2 also introduces the capability to run advanced home automations, like Robots and Schedules, locally for improved reliability and speed.

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Sounds like you are following the same path I did. The robots on Wink are nice, but they aren’t as full featured as the scripts and automations you can build on HA. I think once you get HA up and running that you will quickly move any “automation” tasks to HA. I can’t think of anything I have that my Wink 2 doesn’t talk to. I’m sure there are things, but so far so good with the standard off the shelf stuff.

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Ben, so you have decided to forgo the local only route? I too am looking for a solution to this problem as well. Preferably I’d like to have BLE, Zwave and Zigbee capabilities all on my local network.

I’m leaning towards just purchasing the Aeon Zwave USB stick to start out with. I haven’t found a good solution for Zigbee and BLE local radios yet.

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Raspberry PI 3 has Bluetooth and Bluetooth LE built in.

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I started off with a Wink hub, some GE Link lights and a Honeywell WiFi thermo. Added Hue and a Schlage Lock, then sometime after that discovered HomeAssistant. After I got HA setup I added a Zwave stick and replaced the Honeywell with an ecobee and added some Nest Protects. The great thing about starting with Wink is that once I added HA, everything was instantly accessible and could be used together. Anything that isn’t covered by Wink I can do with ZWave. When people ask me how to get started, I always point them to Wink and then when they start really getting into it, I point them to HA. I think of HA as a “hub of hubs” of sorts; the way to tie everything together. Also, I no longer use Wink to control my Hues, instead going directly to the Hue hub with HA.

As far as delays with the Wink, I honestly don’t see it. Most of my commands are now processed at the local level and since HA now talks directly to many of the devices I used to run through the Wink whatever delays were involved by jumping through API hoops is now almost imperceptible.

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How do you like the Schlage locks? I read some reviews that they unlock randomly and have issues around glass doors with determining whether you are inside our out.

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This is what I’m most hopeful of based on a few things I read. For basic lighting, especially using a smart switch to control a smart bulb for example, any noticeable delay or hickups will be very undesirable.

I would still prefer a direct Z-Wave and Zigbee interface from a Raspi or server rather than pass everything through the network but I didn’t see an easy plug and play Zigbee interface. I’ve used a Raspi shield and Xbee radio before to set up simple mesh networks and even having access to every radio’s firmware, it’s still a hugely tedious process to learn and set every variable to get it working the way you want. I’m not even sure how you would go about configuring the firmware for an XBee radio that’s talking to a device you know nothing about internally.
Even then, once you get the radios paired and talking, you still have to use the ZigBee Light Link protocol which is open, but I believe still requires another piece of hardware between the Radio and USB to translate everything into Light Link:

Here’s a good primer if you want to dive into communicating with ZigBee Light Link devices over a USB radio. It certainly can be done and has been, I just don’t know how easy or smooth it would be to roll into Home Assistant since I haven’t even set it up yet.
I’ve written my own XBee packets before and some python code to do it, but it was all stuff natively supported by XBee. Light Link looks like it has hundreds of additional commands and parameters someone would have to write a library for.
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot/samples/zigbeeadapter

I’ll start with a Wink and move forward from there. If it can’t play nice on my LAN (not that there’s any evidence to support it won’t), I’ll put the Server and Wink on a separate switch and truly have a “local only” solution with the Server connected to the main Wifi as the only “path” to WAN.

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I’ve had a Schlage for a couple years. It’s still the only thing connected to my Vera (until HA gets the ability to report the ID of the last person to unlock the door). I’ve never had any issues with it. Zero.

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Not sure what you mean about the glass door issue, but I have never had it unlock or lock randomly. Ever. I’d return it immediately if it did that even once! I’ve actually had no problems with it at all. But mine is paired with my Wink hub; I didn’t move it over when I got my ZWave stick. Not sure if it’s any better or worse via ZWave.

I just moved a Lutron switch (paired with my Wink) into my office, which shares a wall with my living room where the Echo is. Once I got everything renamed and set up and then rediscovered with Alexa, I tested it out and it was almost instaneous; by the time Alexa had finished saying OK, it was already on. So that’s through Alexa’s cloud to Wink’s Cloud and then local execution on the hub. Still so quick!

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I agree, my lights are usually on before Alexa says ok.

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I picked up the Wink 2 hub today from Home Depot with $5 off for signing up for text alerts.
And a bunch of full color Lightify bulbs from Lowes with their 40% off sale plus a few $15 off $50 coupons. I grabbed an Iris contact sensor too because they were cheap.

So far I’m fairly underwhelmed. I cannot get the Iris to pair with the Wink hub. I only bought one in case this happened but users are able to get Smartthings to pair with Iris sensors so I figured I’d be able to get Wink 2 to do it based on this from Wink’s FAQ:

Can I connect products other than what is listed on the Wink Products page?
In most cases, yes! The Wink Hub and Hub 2 have options for generic Z-wave and generic Zigbee Wave devices. However, for the best compatibility and 100% confirmed functionality, it’s recommended you use Wink-certified products. We work with these partners to design the app experience, complete testing, and cross-train our customer support teams to ensure a smooth experience.

It will let me search for generic Z-Wave sensors but there is no generic zigbee sensor option which is what the Iris sensors use.

The first lightify bulb I tried to pair took 6 or 7 tries before it found it. The 3rd or 4th try wink said it paired but didn’t and I had to delete it and start over. The second bulb worked instantly though. It’s fun changing the colors and brightness, latency doesn’t seem to be an issue. Very instant feeling but it does have a lot of quirks. Half the time it takes 2-3 presses in the wink app to turn on the light and sometimes it will flash the last color it was set before turning on white. No way to know if that’s Wink or the Lightify bulbs yet.
One bulb randomly switched to white from blue after about an hour when I didn’t even have the app open. Not off to a good start.

I guess it’s already time to get HA running.

Is there a chance of getting any Iris sensors working by using HA? Or does everything have to be connected in the Wink App first to work?

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Doubtful - wish you’d posted here before buying the Iris stuff as I would have told you not to buy it. I’m not sure how the ST people get the Iris to work but I know it doesn’t pair with the Wink. I looked into this once. Lowe’s is pretty good about returns though so you should be able to get your money back as long as you have the original box.

If you’re looking for a good sensor set that works with Wink, I’d suggest the GoControl sensors. I have a bunch of them and they pair right away. You can buy them in two different kits:

https://www.amazon.com/GOCONTROL-WNK01-21KIT-Essential-Z-Wave-Security/dp/B00XUXYSWU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1480597544&sr=8-1&keywords=gocontrol+z-wave

https://www.amazon.com/GOCONTROL-WNK01-311KIT-Premium-Z-Wave-Security/dp/B00XUXYT6K/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1480597614&sr=8-2&keywords=gocontrol+z-wave

Once you get them paired into Wink, restart HA and you will see them show up as binary sensors with the same name you used in Wink.

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What’s everyone’s thoughts on the VeraPlus? From what I can tell it does all its controlling locally, but also has cloud capabilities for remote access (which wouldn’t need to be used if you have HA externally accessible). It also has Zwave (plus), BLE, and ZigBee built in.

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Oooh Iris. I bought one of their plugin outlets and I’ve never been able to get it to pair with anything. Return it to Lowes and get your money back.
How close are your lights to the wink hub? I installed two lightify white bulbs last night in our bedroom. Evidently it’s right on the edge of my zigbee coverage. I got one of them to link once, the other one never did. But I also know that the bedroom is a considerable distance (close to 100’) from the hub and the signal has to go through several walls. The bedroom is isolated enough that I had to install another AP in there for reliable Wi-Fi access for my phone and tablet. The reason I ask is that when the lights don’t sync, the do blink a couple of times when you turn them on.
To fix my problem in my bedroom, I was going to install a trail of probably 3 zigbee bulbs in the hallway leading to the bedroom, the problem is that when the hallway lights get turned out, my path to the bedroom goes away. So I may just bite the bullet and get a second wink hub for the bedroom. I’m not sure how wink or alexa will like seeing two wink hubs, but I may be about to find out.