Smart Home recommendation?

[ebastler]

It's a wet winter over here -- I finally need to build and deploy water level sensors for our rainwater and drainage cisterns. Which opens the can of worms of smart home systems, since I would prefer to select a radio standard and hub/bridge/server which also lends itself to being expanded with further sensors and actuators later.

Yes, I'm aware of various dedicated forums for this topic. But they all seem to be frequented by people who have made "home automation" their full-time hobby... I don't want to do that, and am hoping for more pragmatic advice here. Here's a list of my requirements or preferences so far -- I would be grateful for recommendations:

• Read/control a few sensors (water level, temperature etc.), heater valves, a few lights.
• Allow basic automation, especially time-based control of lights and heater valves.
• Support commercial off-the-shelve devices, preferably from multiple brands, plus the ability to add homebrew sensors. WiFi modules (ESP-based) are apparently more common, cheaper, more widely supported than Zigbee modules for homebrewing?
• Support for battery-operated sensors is desirable. Zigbee would be preferable over WiFi from that perspective.
• Must not require cloud-based control, let alone subscription services. I want a local hub under my control. Remote access (via a router connection) is not a necessity for me.
• Open-source firmware on the hub might be nice, but is not a must-have. For the devices, I would actually prefer if I could use them off-the-shelf, with certain brands/standards known to just work -- rather than having to install Tasmota or another alternative firmware on each device.

Many users seem to end up with a handful of servers and bridges for multiple standards and brands. I would much prefer to avoid that, for simplicity and easier support. But find it difficult to assess the market:

How much of a standard is "Zigbee" or even "Zigbee 3.0"? Can I assume that any Zigbee 3.0 device works with any Zigbee 3.0 hub? Is "Matter" already a thing, with wide support by multiple manufacturers, including non-cloud solutions? Is there a clearcut way to decide between Wifi or Zigbee (or something else?) as the radio standard?

Many thanks for your input!

[Spar59]

Whereas Zigbee is a standard, certain manufacturer's are selective in how compliant their devices are.

For example Philips hue bulbs (now Signify I believe) although Zigbee would communicate only with a Philips hub, I assume this is done by effectively programming Philips assigned MAC address range into the bulb and if the bulb finds something that doesn't match it won't talk to it!  Having said that I still think Hue bulbs are the best but it is a pain to have to use a Philips hub as a bridge from my Samsung Smartthings hub to my Hue bulbs.

There are many manufacturer's and unfortunately their degree of compliance with the standard varies.

I am very satisfied with my SmartThings hub as it can do most things without assistance from the cloud but Samsung have recently decided to part ways with home automation and hence the long term future is unknown - however many developers, both professional and amateur, work on building features for it.

If you have a home assistant it may be possible to link Zigbee devices directly to it but this may lose functionality if your internet service is down.  E.g. the later Amazon Echo devices can directly link to Zigbee devices whereas older ones needed to do so via a Zigbee hub.

[kripton2035]

my conclusion so far is to make your own ...
there are too many manufacturers that don't talk to each other, you will always find some device that will not talk with the others already in place...
I decided to make my own esp8266 or esp32 based devices, all with arduino IDE (and OTA update if needed) .
each device has a small html page where you can read the values and send orders to other devices.
I can access all of them with any browser, from remote if needed through a vpn.
each sensor can send data to a local postgres database, and I can read these datas with a desktop program I made
simple and efficient.
I find home assistants and equivalents way too complicated for what I need.
I have NO device that connects to a cloud server to operate.

[Doctorandus_P]

As long as you don't buy equipment from different manufacturers you don't have to have a lot of different gateways to connect everything together. Overall, manufacturers don't like standards very much. They all try to create their own little walled gardens, and "the open source community" has done a lot of reverse engineering to create the ability for interoperability.

In the hobby market ESP32 and ESP8266 have been popular. Unfortunately Espressiv is also calling other IC's "ESP32", so you have to watch the additional characters in the type number carefully. Modules with these IC's are easily and cheaply obtainable, and you can also buy commercially available equipment with these chips and just reprogram them to use more standard protocols over WiFi.

If you want to go low power, then JeeNode may be an interesting solution. It's less integrated, He uses an atmega and a separate radio, but because of that it can also be very low power (running a few years on a coin cell).

https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=JeeNode
https://jeelabs.org/202x/jnc/
https://www.digitalsmarties.net/products/jeenode

[shangaoren]

Home assistant ?

Open source, can operate with many sensors (in my case zigbee, with a special key, working with ikea, philips, xiaomi devices)

Can interact with wifi, zigbee, zwave ...
Run on Raspberry
Customisable

[ebastler]

Many thanks to all for your input!

The "dedicated" solution suggested by kripton2025 is what I did for my first generation of water level sensor. (Which did not survive the first winter, for reasons unrelated to the automation platform...) But with a second sensor on the to-do list right away, a couple more sensor ideas in the back of my mind, the desire to get alerts sent to my phone, a Kindle-based dashboard display waiting to do something useful etc., I think the added complexity of an automation hub makes sense for me.

Home Assistant looks like the right platform for me. It checks all the boxes: Cloud-less, requires some setup work for the server (but giving you good control in return) but not for each sensor/actuator device (unlike Tasmota), can support devices from many manufacturers as well as homebrew.

I will take a closer look at JeeNode, which I had not come across yet. Technology-wise it seems a distant cousin (and maybe a precursor?) of Zigbee, also operating in the 868 MHz band. Since I will probably want a Zigbee gateway anyway, for smart lights etc., does Jeenode have significant advantages, regarding power consumption or other parameters?

In any case, I will dig out a Raspberry Pi and give Home Assistant a try next!

[Psi]

Home Assistant is great, it supports lots of devices and there's lots of active development.

One downside is that it can be a bit of a learning curve if you want to do advanced automation / glue logic using NodeRed inside Home Assistant.
The NodeRed interface is very nice looking and appears simple but actually understanding how to use it all is non-obvious,
ya just have to watch lots and lots of videos of other people doing things and figure it out that way.

[bingo600]

IMHO

You should decide if it would be a PSU powered device, or a Battery powered device as the first step.
That would prob. "dictate" if you want to go "WiFi" or "radio" ,  as WiFi can be quite powerhungry.

Jeenodes (W. RFM12xx) are kind'a dead ....
New nodes seem to use RFM69 - (Use 866 or is it 868 MHz in EU) - There should be room there, as that band has a max 1% xmission duty.
I think one of the RFM69xx was designed to be pin compatible with RFM12b

The 433MHz band is free wo. any restrictions, but super occupied by chinese thingies that just blast away.


You could also go for NRF24 (2.4GHz - If your 2.4 band isn't totally polluted by WiFi)
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005649263594.html?

The Arduino - RF Nano has onboard NRF radio
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005593408190.html?



You do have FHEM too - It's afaik a German project ... But Perl
https://fhem.de/


For ESPxxx

Remember to look at

ESPHome
https://esphome.io/cookbook/leak-detector-m5stickc

And/Or Tasmota
https://github.com/arendst/Tasmota/discussions/15620

I think i read that ESPHome plays well with Home Assistant (HA)
But I also read that Tasmota now has a HA addon

Both could save you tonzz of coding/integration

[nfmax]

Node-RED works really well as a standalone gadget integration platform. You don’t have to embed it in HA!