I’m hoping to run Home Assistant on my always-on fileserver. I’m completely new to this… The first target is to have intelligent control of a radiant heater in the bedroom and I’ve got a smart plug with Tasmota and some Zigbee temperature sensors on the way. My problem is that my fileserver is in the “office”, well away from the bedroom and the centre of the house. What’s the best way to connect the Zigbee sensors to HA?
This is a rental, so I can’t go digging through walls. My WiFi network consists of three Ubiquiti Unifi AP Lites, one by the TV (close to the centre of the house) meshed to the one by the main router and one in the office, connected by ethernet over powerline. I’m happy to devote a raspberry pi to this if it helps.
If I got something like a Sonoff Zigbee ZPDongle-E (as an example) and connected that to my fileserver, would it have the range to cover the house (from what is effectively one remote corner - not a huge house, though)?
Possibly not. Zigbee relies on having a swarm of mains powered devices passing commands on from one to another. They are quite low powered - a typical setup would have zigbee lightbulbs throughout the building so that the distances involved were never more than a few yards. There’s a post about it here.
The Tasmota plug should be OK, though, provided the wi-fi is.
Huh, OK, that’s not going to work! Alright, RaspberryPi and Zigbee2MQTT might have to be the solution. Can anyone give me any pointers (even if it’s where to go to RTFM) on how HA running on a Linux fileserver would communicate with Pi acting as a Zigbee hub?