Turtles, a Shelly/Zigbee home automation tool in Elixir
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Re: Turtles, a Shelly/Zigbee home automation tool in Elixir
#2What light switches did you use, if any?
I also want to use Shelly dimmers, but I haven’t found simple stateless light switches. I want automation and app control in many cases, but also want simple tactile button for on/off or hold for brightness control. Amazingly hard to find.
Re: Turtles, a Shelly/Zigbee home automation tool in Elixir
#3What light switches did you use, if any? I also want to use Shelly dimmers, but I haven’t found simple stateless light switches. I want automation and app control in many cases, but also want simple tactile button for on/off or hold for brightness control. Amazingly hard to find.
Not OP, but the Shelly 1 works very well as a simple switch, and it supports both physical and remote operations. Not sure what you mean by "stateless", though (I mean, the thing is either on or off?), so that might prevent you from using it, but otherwise it's highly recommended!
Re: Turtles, a Shelly/Zigbee home automation tool in Elixir
#4> * Rationally, I might have been better off going with Home Assistant, which has ready-made integrations with Shelly, Zigbee dimmers, and probably thousands of other device types, but I wanted complete control and hackability, and I preferred to spend time building my own system rather than learning and customizing Home Assistant and maybe never getting it to work like I want it to.*
This thought was correct. Home Assistant is absolutely incredible, easy to use, polished, and flexible. You can get it to do all of this easily.
I got it installed and configured within ~3 hours.
Re: Turtles, a Shelly/Zigbee home automation tool in Elixir
#5What light switches did you use, if any? I also want to use Shelly dimmers, but I haven’t found simple stateless light switches. I want automation and app control in many cases, but also want simple tactile button for on/off or hold for brightness control. Amazingly hard to find.
Not cheap but Leviton 5657-2W might be the one you want
Re: Turtles, a Shelly/Zigbee home automation tool in Elixir
#6Nice! I also control my lights using Elixir and a Hue bridge (through Home Assistant). https://github.com/Manwholikespie/mojodojo
Re: Turtles, a Shelly/Zigbee home automation tool in Elixir
#7> * Rationally, I might have been better off going with Home Assistant, which has ready-made integrations with Shelly, Zigbee dimmers, and probably thousands of other device types, but I wanted complete control and hackability, and I preferred to spend time building my own system rather than learning and customizing Home Assistant and maybe never getting it to work like I want it to.* This thought was correct. Home A…
I've got some Shelly Plugs. I decided to operate them with a self made web app running on my home server. That app makes HTTP calls to the API of the plug. It's very simple, just a curl from bash would work. One call to turn on the plug, one to turn it off and one to read the power meter. I put buttons on the web page and it does what I need.
There are no dependecies from other services and especially no dependency from Amazon or Google (the plugs work with them too.) Given the size of the web app maybe it also spared me some time because I suspect that installing, configuring Home Assistant and learning how to use it and what works and what doesn't are not zero time activities.
Re: Turtles, a Shelly/Zigbee home automation tool in Elixir
#8> * Rationally, I might have been better off going with Home Assistant, which has ready-made integrations with Shelly, Zigbee dimmers, and probably thousands of other device types, but I wanted complete control and hackability, and I preferred to spend time building my own system rather than learning and customizing Home Assistant and maybe never getting it to work like I want it to.* This thought was correct. Home A…
I've got some Shelly Plugs. I decided to operate them with a self made web app running on my home server. That app makes HTTP calls to the API of the plug. It's very simple, just a curl from bash would work. One call to turn on the plug, one to turn it off and one to read the power meter. I put buttons on the web page and it does what I need. There are no dependecies from other services and especially no dependency f…
I don't myself but I know that many use Node-RED[0] for home assistant applications. It comes with thousands of plugins, easy to construct web frontends and it's completely open source.
I believe one can also combine it with Home Assistant, I think there are interfaces.
Learning curve is initial exponential (think of visual Unix pipes) but once understood, there are limitless things that you can do with Node-RED. It's basically a visual programming frontend to NodeJS.
Re: Turtles, a Shelly/Zigbee home automation tool in Elixir
#9I have a couple of Shelly relay switches for various purposes in a separate IoT vlan which is not connected to the cloud. The new Shelly android app not only is worse and barely functional but also pushes you to use the cloud. On top of that, they try to sell some functionality as a subscription Model. On the other hand you don't need the cloud and their http API is super well documented and does everything you would expect. I really prefer Tools like this for products like Shelly, good job!
Re: Turtles, a Shelly/Zigbee home automation tool in Elixir
#10> * Rationally, I might have been better off going with Home Assistant, which has ready-made integrations with Shelly, Zigbee dimmers, and probably thousands of other device types, but I wanted complete control and hackability, and I preferred to spend time building my own system rather than learning and customizing Home Assistant and maybe never getting it to work like I want it to.* This thought was correct. Home A…
I have different opinion on Home Assistant. It's surprisingly heavy compared to alternatives, the YAML configs are insanely overcomplicated, they move too fast with Python versions (phasing out 3.9 when it was still the default on the then stable Debian, etc).
My 2 cents go for Zigbee2MQTT, Mosquitton, and Domoticz. Domoticz has it's problems, but it's been a faithful workhorse for me for the past 6 or more years.