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My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

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Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#2

Post by casenjo »

I really enjoyed reading this, thanks for posting. I've been struggling to find a more sustainable solution on my end for all the sensors and buttons I have set up. Anecdotally I feel their battery life tends to be shorter based on whether they're in busy locations or not. I've ordered the CR2477 and CR2450 batteries they use in bigger quantities but I'd much rather be able to recharge them instead. Have you ever found devices of this type that allow them to be recharged?

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#4

Post by tylergetsay »

casenjo wrote: post #2

I really enjoyed reading this, thanks for posting. I've been struggling to find a more sustainable solution on my end for all the sensors and buttons I have set up. Anecdotally I feel their battery life tends to be shorter based on whether they're in busy locations or not. I've ordered the CR2477 and CR2450 batteries they use in bigger quantities but I'd much rather be able to recharge them instead. Have you ever fou…

I have been using ZWave motion sensors that have USB input so no battery required, for buttons I have replaced a lot of wall switches with Tasmota switches that are programmed for single/double/hold click actions on multiple buttons. This can be great on multi gang switches where I have one button control the relays in all three switches, leaving two buttons open.

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#5

Post by tristanperry »

Great article, thanks for posting. I've been on a smart home journey myself, but I'm still currently relying on Alexa for most integration and a Hue Bridge. It works well for the 30-40 devices I currently have.

I totally agree that Home Assistant is probably the way forward for many power users, but it doesn't quite feel beginner-friendly enough yet (although the HA devs do seem to be making some great improvements in this area).

I'm still undecided on Matter and Thread. Both are naturally great technologies, but I can't see Google/Nest opening up to Amazon/Ring and vice versa. Not in any meaningful way, at least. My hunch is that Matter will help smaller smart home companies, but not make much difference for the pre-existing 'walled gardens' that the market has. I hope that I'm wrong though.

(Disclaimer: I blog and do YouTube videos as Smart Home Point, but I mainly cover consumer friendly products - and hence I haven't delved into Home Assistant too much)

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#6

Post by andylynch »

casenjo wrote: post #2

I really enjoyed reading this, thanks for posting. I've been struggling to find a more sustainable solution on my end for all the sensors and buttons I have set up. Anecdotally I feel their battery life tends to be shorter based on whether they're in busy locations or not. I've ordered the CR2477 and CR2450 batteries they use in bigger quantities but I'd much rather be able to recharge them instead. Have you ever fou…

Have a look online for LIR2450s. They are rechargeable button cells.

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#7

Post by KennyBlanken »

> On caveat is that I have started running into some reliability issues (occasional device unavailability) once I exceeded 50 or so devices. This seems to be common for Zigbee networks,

It's patently ridiculous that you could add a lightbulb to your network and be unable to get in your front door the next day because now you have too many devices.

Even more so when you consider that the standard is twenty years old and should be extremely mature.

This is the problem with all this home automation stuff...all of them, Zigbee, Zwave, wifi - seem to crap out as soon as you have a decent number of devices. WiFi seems the least robust for high device count, but why haven't Zwave and Zigbee figured out how to get their systems to work for a large number of devices, a decade-ish into things?

Security is also something of a joke for both zigbee and z-wave.

> I'm excited about the upcoming Matter and Thread standards which are likely to replace/augment Zigbee (and Z-wave) as true interoperable home automation connectivity standards.

Interoperable, but you'll be forced by vendors to use someone's online services. There is no way Matter and Thread will be designed in such a way that you will have freedom from paying somebody every month and give data that will eventually make its way to marketers.

Edit: the author's upstairs window automation devices are ludicrously dangerous from a fire safety standpoint as there appears to be no easy way to open them if the device breaks or loses power. Folks, do not remove manual control from windows. It's not just dangerous, it's likely illegal. Windows and doors MUST be operable, easily, by one hand.

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#8

Post by FanaHOVA »

I tried to build a company around this in ~2014, we built our own boards and everything, and had a fork with HASS that had more defaults based on our hardware. Too bad it didn't quite work out as a business.

The 3D designs for the hardware cases are still on GitHub: https://github.com/Smart-Torvy/3D-Objects

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#9

Post by secabeen »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #7

> On caveat is that I have started running into some reliability issues (occasional device unavailability) once I exceeded 50 or so devices. This seems to be common for Zigbee networks, It's patently ridiculous that you could add a lightbulb to your network and be unable to get in your front door the next day because now you have too many devices. Even more so when you consider that the standard is twenty years old a…

> It's patently ridiculous that you could add a lightbulb to your network and be unable to get in your front door the next day because now you have too many devices.

I am not aware of any keypad zigbee or z-wave door lock that depends on that network to unlock in standard config. Yes, you could set it up that way, to unlock based on presence detection, etc, but that's on you. The standard setup is a local code list on the lock, with updates and status reported to home automation to enable integration. Most locks also have a standard key backup as well, so you're doubly protected.

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