I’ve been experimenting with HA on RPi4 and I’m currently having mostly Hue, Trådfri and BLE devices with their integrations running and visible in HomeKit. So good so far but now I want to add more devices and ZigBee seems to be a good addition now to add more devices. Ultimately, I want to have all the crucial devices visible in Apple HomeKit in addition to HA itself. HomeKit is the main user interface in my setup.
What would be the recommended ZigBee brand and setup as the default choice whenever possible? I’m thinking of having RaspBee II, ZHA and Aqara ZigBee devices. Is that a smart choice? There seems to be interesting devices with reasonable price from Aqara and they are available at my local stores.
Some of my requirements
- Reliable
- Reasonably priced
- HomeKit can be used as the main frontend via HomeKit controller integration
- Devices should include at least: door sensors, temperature, air quality, water leak sensor, motion sensors
- Long term statistics supported
- Energy monitoring
I’ve understood that most probably I should get the hub in order to be able to update the firmwares but maybe I should be using some other ZigBee hardware for the actual HA hub functionality at the end. My plan would be that I’m setting up similar devices for some other locations as well and I could then bring the brand’s hub there to do the updates. How complicated that would be? I expect the devices needs to be unpaired and paired but hopefully I could still keep all the HA configuration intact without removing it from HA. Is that possible?