What kind/brand of devices do you recommend and where do your source them? Things like smart outlets, bulbs, sensors, etc.

I have a hard time sourcing gear because it’s all either locked to Amazon/Google or requires the manufacturer’s cloud services and their dedicated app.

I’m looking for devices that can work completely offline and only communicate with my HA/MQTT or at least a local base station that can bridge to HA.

For the last few years, I’ve been buying bulbs/outlets from AliExpress with Tasmota pre-flashed. Before that, I was ordering them from Amazon and re-flashing them, but that was always a crapshoot as not all of them were compatible with tuya-convert. They’re also ridiculously difficult to disassemble to flash manually.

Anybody willing to share some tips to source some new devices?

Edit: I’ve also built a few custom sensors with ESP8266 and ESP-Home but they’re not particularly pretty.

Edit 2: Thanks everyone! I think I’m going to look into some Zigbee devices and bridges. That sounds like the most “open” way to expand my smart home gear.

  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOPEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I’ve read Zigbee is fairly open, but wasn’t sure if that was universally true or only with certain brands, etc.

    • DamageEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      It works but the manufacturers’ implementations may be a bit wonky at times. Still it’s cool not to have devices on the wifi, and zigbee2mqtt is just great.

    • ABoxOfNeurons@lemmy.oneEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      It’s an open standard, and you can talk to any Zigbee with any Zigbee USB tranceiver.

      It’s also mesh-based. I use Hue bulbs as repeaters, but any Zigbee device that is plugged in to a wall should work.

      • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOPEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        That sounds exactly what I want. I will definitely be looking into a Zigbee hub.

        Any problematic Zigbee hubs I should watch out for? Or just look for one that’s explicitly supported by HA?

          • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOPEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            Awesome, thanks. That’s a great starting point.

            Also, it’ll be nice to free up some wifi spectrum. My devices are all on an isolated 2.4 GHz network and that band gets quite noisy.

            • DamageEnglish
              2·
              1 year ago

              If you have an mqtt server running already, you may want to check out zigbee2mqtt as an alternative to ZHA. Here’s the supported adapters list, most of them are USB dongles that you’ll have to plug into your home assistant machine.

              • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOPEnglish
                1·
                1 year ago

                Yeah, that’s probably the direction I’m going to start looking. Pretty much every device I run uses MQTT to communicate with HA, including some custom buttons I keep around the house.

                The only sticking point is going to be reconfiguring my HA server to speak to a USB device. It’s currently Dockerized, and I’ve got little experience passing through USB devices that aren’t serial adapters. Not a deal breaker, but definitely a speedbump.

                • boothin@infosec.pubEnglish
                  4·
                  1 year ago

                  I’ve tried a few different USB zigbee coordinators, but the one I ended up sticking with is the 2652 based coordinator from tubeszb that is Ethernet or USB. I had issues with the USB passthrough to the vm whenever I had to restart the vm, so using that one over Ethernet fixed all my issues.

                  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOPEnglish
                    1·
                    1 year ago

                    Yeah, ethernet would be my preferred bridging mechanism. Thanks for the recommendation. Will look into some bridges from TubesZB.

                • witten@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  2·
                  1 year ago

                  Passing through a USB device might be as easy as adding --device /dev/your/usb/device to your docker run command-line, first making sure the permissions on that device are such that they can be read by the container. (Or use the devices: equivalent if you’re using Compose.)