There’s my next project
2 Likes
Now it’s not available, but it cost me 80€
Uhhhhhhh… 
1 Like
I do have those buttons. But they are a bit problematic while battery powered, I have to wait the wifi to power on before anything happen. It takes like 2-4 sec to have input sent to my home-assistant. When the cable is plugged, it works “instantly”. How ever, their relays are nearly perfect, can fit inside a regular switches mounting box and is able get input in addition to WiFi, also from the original dump switch.
Check this out.
This is a Shelly 1 inside a little box 
2 Likes
I’m at around 100 devices, 408 entities.
I’ve just been through my automations and merged ones that were related etc, tidied up a lot of things I was no longer using etc.
Home assistant is smooth and responsive, and the system barely on tick over.
With a system like KNX you get a lot of devices very quickly. For example, I have a KNX device that has 20 switching channels. For HA, these are 20 switches. Plus 20 sensors for the operating hours counter (if activated), plus further sensors if the channels have current measurement for example. HA does not know that they are all located in one housing. It’s hard to differentiate between devices and entities here.
So, in hardware we have roughly:
KNX:
- 20 channels switching
- 12 channels switching + measuring current
- 12 covers (position and angle)
- 32 dimming LED channels
- 16 binary input channels (10 in use currently)
- 12 room temp. controllers (floor heating)
- 16 presence detectors (max. 4 channels each => up to 64 presence detectors for HA). All of these devices measure illumination and temperature => 32 sensors for HA)
- 15 further temp. sensors (included in touch buttons)
- weather station (wind speed, temperature, illumination, rain, date/time via GPS)
zigbee:
- 32 devices (temperature/humidity sensors, door sensors, a few LED bulbs and some plugs)
ESP2866:
- 10 (?) devices - sensors and 3 plugs
onewire:
- about 10 sensors
and of course some “software only entities” like templare sensors.
That sums up to:
I don’t think, that our house (150 m² / 1600 sqft) has a really huge KNX system - there are houses with a lot more devices.
I run a lot of AppDaemon Apps, that why automations is so low.
All that runs on a small NUC with Celeron processor. Feeling very smooth (and if there is a problem sometimes, then it is because of my bad python skills for AppDaemon). But 99% of the time, everything runs really smooth.
1 Like
I’d like to add, that “if you cant program it” is more an issue of software licence than an issue of skills. It’s not really difficult, but you need an ETS licence.
ETS professional is 1000 € net. I split up my house in 4 project (<20 KNX devices each) so I can use ETS lite. For me this works great and the cost was around 100 € if I remember correctly (you get a discount if you do a small “webinar”)
1 Like
cheap? $25 bucks because my wife is too lazy (spiteful?) to tell google home to turn off the lights.
Motion and/or contact sensors solve that problem 
Just make sure to use long timeouts.
1 Like
amazing hack!
TBH I cannot understand the hype around voice assistants. They are so slow in daily use. I have voice assistant in my cars since 10 years ago… And you know what? Changing AC temp using a knob on dashboard is 1000x quicker than telling the VA to do so…
The same for operating in house devices. I admit it can be last resort helper when you have no free hands at the very moment. But for common use? Don’t blame your wife. Actually she’s the best feedback that the technology is not in pair with needs of household
4 Likes
haha. She sets the needs and standards of the household (in this regard).
The use cases in my house justify the hype. For instance, turning on an entertainment area; In the living room, we don’t have a set time that either me or my wife sit down to watch TV. Being able to tell Alexa to turn on the living room TV, XBox, or music is much easier than fiddling around with our phones and/or remotes. One command kicks off a routine that turns devices on (or off) and sets up lights and switches in that room. Same thing when we go to bed at night. Sometimes, we like to watch something before we go to sleep. So, all I have to do is tell Alexa to turn on the master bedroom TV and that kicks off a routine that sets the lights, TV and source on my Apple TV.
Another one is if my wife wants to take a nap during the day. Since all of our lights are motion controlled, being able to walk into a room and tell Alexa to turn off the motion sensor prevents the lights being triggered at times when they normally would be.
I also have all of our music services tied to routines rather than the native Alexa handling.
Without the voice assistants, my home automation would be a lot harder to use, imho.
100% agree. First sensors. Secondly switches. Lastly voice, last choice by far. The only use case I preffer the voice over anything else is for changing TV channels.
The family always helps making the smart home better 
, they’re the actual designers.
However, I would miss it if it weren’t there tbh. Recently my internet went down for a couple of days and I was suprised of how much I missed the voice.
@code-in-progress I would still use switches for the majority of those things, but that’s just personal.
1 Like
Voice is good for some things. Changing music while cooking etc, turning on or off lights when you are carrying things in both hands, setting reminders,
1 Like
Yeah, but I’ve grown lazy in my old age and tbh, I forget 99% of the time to hit a switch, odd as that sounds. It’s not that I don’t have them EVERYWHERE (I do), but we’ve just grown so accustomed to barking at a voice assistant, that’s it’s now muscle memory.
I have a couple of rPis running Mycroft for that very reason. If my internet ever goes down or Alexa isn’t available (usually due to some random AWS outage), my Mycrofts step in and pick up the slack. The only reason I don’t use them 100% is because they lack some of the tie-ins to music services that we use (specifically Apple Music, Plex and Youtube).
1 Like
I’ve been using HA for just over a month, and currently have 63 devices (491 entities) already 
, and not really dug into all the things I can do with the system (our apartment lighting circuits don’t have a neutral wire, so not even started on automated lighting).
That said, I’ve been using smart plugs for a while (integrated to Alexa), so moving them over was an easy start, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised at all the things in my house that HA integrates to out of the box (wasn’t expecting my car or household heating system to be found/added for example).
Working my way through setting up scripts and automations now, and ensuring I document everything via Git. I’ve even managed to set my wife up with a Github account, so she can submit issue requests to add features as/when she thinks of things 
I’ve been using HA for about a year. ~200 devices, ~400 entities.
Pros:
–Fast/responsive
–Easy to set up and use for doing basic stuff
–Great solution for larger homes to bring together many different brands of devices.
–Easy to teach others how to use for doing basic things
–Easy to use for creating pretty tablet interfaces for mounting to walls
Biggest cons with many devices:
Speaking for myself (I don’t have coding experience): I feel like HA is geared for people who want to do: basic automation between brands of products that wouldn’t normally speak to each other, a lot of sophisticated automation, and/or control a somewhat limited amount of devices/entities. Unless you do a lot of customization the interface isn’t made for hundred of devices. It’s great to do scenes, music control, temp control, etc… but easily accessing and controlling many individual devices is annoying. Having a dashboard with all my devices is just too much. My solution has been to create multiple dashboards (one for each room/area) and then have a main dashboard that links to each one (see screenshots).
–The interface is pretty, but difficult to customize. Examples:
–With so many devices I’d love to dramatically reduce font/button/graph size but this isn’t easily doable.
–No easy way to have a single dashboard but then customize based on device screen type. I want the same “main” dashboard to show up on my phone, computer, wall-mounted tablets, etc… but HA requires me to create different ones if I’m very particular about how I want things to display correctly on each.
Other General Cons:
–Learning curve is steep if you need to get into writing yaml and you don’t have coding experience.
–Backup options aren’t ridiculously simple. I can easily take a snapshot but automating the snapshot and automatically exporting to dropbox, my computer HD, or whatever requires way too many steps.
Looking at my entity counts :
Automations 108
Binary sensors 202
Sensors 884
Lights 53
Switches 315
Trackers 45
Media players 36
- I have over a 120 computer controlled light switches … 100% of all switches in and around my home using Insteon with ISY994i
- Zwave Locks for doors and outdoor gates … I’m using Vera Edge to control my zwave devices and dcs alarm panel for door window open close events
- 26 cameras that I serve from a blue iris gaming pc … I processes each camera with tensorflow using Google usb coral processor connected to HA for entity identification and alerts
- I’m using a Intel skull canyon nuc with 16gb for dram and 200gb ssd to run HA in a python venv with Ubuntu 18.02
- 4 wall mounted tables using tileboard
- System is fast and responsive
- make sure you limit you recorder data base … and the number of entities you monitor (aka graph) as this was slowing down Lovelace display
- I started many years ago from rpi to generic nuc … lots of horsepower is needed to deal with cameras and hundreds of entity’s but by offloading key systems to isy994, Vera and blue iris pc helps to maintain a smooth running home environment
2 Likes