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Xiaomi Home Integration for Home Assistant

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Re: Xiaomi Home Integration for Home Assistant

#131

Post by int_19h »

carlgreene wrote: post #20

Home Assistant is one of the best open source projects I've come across. I've been using it for 5+ years on an older RPi and it's been pretty rock solid. Countless updates and everything just keeps on chugging. I've landed on a mixture of MQTT and Zigbee communicating devices, the latter being much easier to set up and maintain. There's an integration for just about everything I've wanted, some better than others, bu…

Unfortunately the UI is very convoluted, with all the advanced concepts exposed upfront.

Re: Xiaomi Home Integration for Home Assistant

#132

Post by mrandish »

dietr1ch wrote: post #61
diggan wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think (some correct me) you can group most devices into the following categories: 1. Device requires internet for setup, and for usage 2. Device requires internet for setup, but after that don't need it anymore 3. Device can be fully setup without internet, and used without internet Personally I aim to be fully within 3 as much as I can, but some devices are really hard to find at a good price point that falls into…

I'm not buying any device that's not 3, everything else turns into a brick as soon as there's some larger change. I have some older Google Speakers, and while they seemed to be 2, after being powered off for long enough they can't be set up again, not even with internet access since their firmware was also outdated and the app isn't able to set them up again.

> I'm not buying any device that's not 3

Same here. My gold standard for this is hardware that comes with the open source Tasmota firmware (or which can be flashed to Tasmota). All 75 light switches in our new house run Tasmota firmware and to me it's the perfect combination of simple, flexible and yet deeply powerful. Devices can be controlled via MQTT, web requests, webUI console or serial and not only does it avoid any cloud dependency, Tasmota devices aren't even dependent on having a router to coordinate locally with each other! They can be set so that if they don't see a wifi router, they'll form an ad hoc mesh network.

To me, this is the ultimate in reliability because even if the internet connection is offline, even if the Home Assistant Raspberry Pi crashes, even if the wifi router crashes - as long as there's power, the lights will still always communicate and work together in their device groups. When we built the house I just ordered cheap ($15) wifi light switches from Amazon, flashed them with Tasmota, configured their device groups, labeled where they went, and gave them to the general contractor's electrician, who knew nothing about home automation. So we didn't pay anything extra for special installation, design or programming - in fact we got a $5 per switch discount because they didn't need to supply the dumb switches.

The only slightly tricky part was convincing the very old-school electrician he didn't need to run traveler wires for all the three, four and five way switches. Even after I explained it to him, he didn't quite believe me that they would work so he could test them with just his temporary construction power in an unfinished house with no internet, wifi or controller hardware. I just told him to start by installing the fixtures and switches for a hallway and he was amazed when switches along the hallway controlled fixtures they weren't connected to - including sharing dimming memory and the behavior of the micro-LED strip on each light indicating brightness and status!

Re: Xiaomi Home Integration for Home Assistant

#133

Post by teekert »

dietr1ch wrote: post #61
diggan wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think (some correct me) you can group most devices into the following categories: 1. Device requires internet for setup, and for usage 2. Device requires internet for setup, but after that don't need it anymore 3. Device can be fully setup without internet, and used without internet Personally I aim to be fully within 3 as much as I can, but some devices are really hard to find at a good price point that falls into…

I'm not buying any device that's not 3, everything else turns into a brick as soon as there's some larger change. I have some older Google Speakers, and while they seemed to be 2, after being powered off for long enough they can't be set up again, not even with internet access since their firmware was also outdated and the app isn't able to set them up again.

I have Hue lights, they're nice, always just work. But now (some time back) they suddenly require an account and I get ads in the app. I have always easily moved Hue lamps from the Hue bridge to the Home Assistant SkyConnect (now called Connect ZBT-1, much better ahum). I sleep better because I know I can do this.

Re: Xiaomi Home Integration for Home Assistant

#134

Post by int_19h »

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #89

If you are thinking of deploying Home Assistant (HA), let me give you a few tips that I should have known when started. HA environment is vast. There are myriads of options, features, and functions. There are some gotchas that can be costly down the road. All of the following are "for now, as you start out": Do not gyrate over which version of HA to run. Run the HAOS loaded on RasPi, or a dedicated machine. You can m…

As far as hardware, you can just get https://www.home-assistant.io/green (plus https://www.home-assistant.io/connectzbt1/ if you need Zigbee and Matter).

Re: Xiaomi Home Integration for Home Assistant

#135

Post by Fabricio20 »

Havoc wrote: post #65
nevi-me wrote: post #4

Better late than never, I have 3 of their bulbs in the house, and not being able to integrate with HA prevented me from buying more (at least before Matter was announced). I've been using them with Google Home, so the lights weren't automated with HA. I'll try the integration out.

They sold bulbs under various brands. I’ve got some very old ones branded yeelight that work entirely offline with HA. Tried to rebuy got a different brand and they don’t work offline properly. Bit of a crapshoot These days I try to buy preflashed tasmota gear. Things like athom.tech

I got some of those Yeelight ones (gen 1/gray plastic and gen 2/white plastic!) but my experience has been really bad. Even if their app allows you to enable local mode it's laggy and just... stops working after a while, it also seems to break if it can't reach xiaomi servers (pihole). Wondering how you got yours to work, mine are just trash at this point and i've since switched to proper local devices.

Re: Xiaomi Home Integration for Home Assistant

#136

Post by nomel »

alamortsubite wrote: post #91
jillyboel wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything can fit in group 3, but manufacturers want to steal your data so they try to pretend otherwise.

You're giving them the benefit of the doubt here. In my experience, not only are they greedy, but they're also inept and lazy.

To steel man a bit, they're also trying to make things as easy as possible for the generic public that they want to buy their device, who doesn't know what a hub is, and definitely doesn't want to learn, to turn on a lightbulb.

Re: Xiaomi Home Integration for Home Assistant

#137

Post by Carrok »

Someone1234 wrote: post #9

I include this when considering buying something integrated. For example Philips Hue is overpriced, but their Home Assistant integration is top tier and ultra-reliable. Contrast that with myQ garage door openers (LiftMaster, Chamberlain and Craftsman) recently breaking Home Assistant support on purpose, to essentially replace it with nothing, and they're dead to me. So Xiaomi adding support, assuming it is reliable,…

I retrofit my 20 year old garage door opener with a $13 Shelly switch (Shelly 1 Gen3 ). Now my garage door is smart with zero outside dependencies. Blog post I used as reference: https://simplyexplained.com/blog/make-garage-door-opener-sma...

Re: Xiaomi Home Integration for Home Assistant

#138

Post by mavamaarten »

tills13 wrote: post #103
mavamaarten wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've actually done my migration the other way around. I started with zigbee2mqtt, saw that HA now offers ZHA and switched to that. It just works with all devices I own, so the end result is one less moving part I need to update so the choice was easy.

The nice part about mqtt is other things can subscribe to the same stream. I've also seen people do some really interesting things with hosting a copy of HA in the cloud -- this is what they connect to while outside their network -- and using mqtt to push updates to a local HA.

Okay but if you have Home Assistant in the center of all things, why would other things need to subscribe to that same stream?

I use MQTT but for me it's only a tool for getting a certain device integrated in HA. I don't see why I would want more devices to communicate that way.

Plus, from my development background, I have grown to really dislike event buses. And mqtt sure feels like a weird big non-strict event bus with some persistence.

Re: Xiaomi Home Integration for Home Assistant

#140

Post by tedivm »

teekert wrote: post #133
dietr1ch wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not buying any device that's not 3, everything else turns into a brick as soon as there's some larger change. I have some older Google Speakers, and while they seemed to be 2, after being powered off for long enough they can't be set up again, not even with internet access since their firmware was also outdated and the app isn't able to set them up again.

I have Hue lights, they're nice, always just work. But now (some time back) they suddenly require an account and I get ads in the app. I have always easily moved Hue lamps from the Hue bridge to the Home Assistant SkyConnect (now called Connect ZBT-1, much better ahum). I sleep better because I know I can do this.

Yeah I also use Hue lights, but since I don't use a Hue bridge and simply use Zigbee directly the lights have no internet access and I have no restrictions on usage.
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