this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Smart Homes

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For the discussion of smart homes, home automation and the like. Because of the instance it will tend to have a more UK flavour but everyone is welcome.

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What's your smart home set-up? (feddit.uk)
submitted 2 years ago by Emperor@feddit.uk to c/smarthomes@feddit.uk
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As we're trending, I thought I'd lean into it and see what everyone is using.

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[–] JohnSmith@feddit.uk 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Here are the main components of my system, which has become a bit of a collection over the years:

  • Home Assistant on RPi
  • zwave USB stick
  • a number of lights, switches and multi sensors on the zwave network
  • A cluster of four RPis for various scheduled and transient tasks (data ETL, solar energy forecast model training and forecast generation, house battery and EV charge planning and execution, scraping and processing council bin collection schedule)
  • two RPis handling motorised curtains and cooling fans in home cinema
  • three ESP2866s running ESPHome controlling relays for switching sauna, floor heating and water immersion heating on/off
  • ten ESP32s running WLED controlling LED strips inside and out
[–] Mex@feddit.uk 3 points 2 years ago

I had so many issues with tasmota on esp8266s that I moved away from WiFi as far as I could. the devices i kept and moved to ESPHome have been much more stable.

[–] Emperor@feddit.uk 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

You are doing a lot of interesting things there - are you using some of the RPis with your solar panels? Not having any, it's not an angle I'd investigated but it's a potentially interesting one.

[–] JohnSmith@feddit.uk 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I’m using the RPis in a few roles in relation to the solar panels. I collect daily solar production data from the inverter. The data is energy produced per hour. I also collect from Met Office model weather forecast data for our home location. This data is also per hour and I’m using 10+ parameters the forecast model provides. I learn every night a GP Regression model from the solar and weather forecast data. Learning every night ensures I always use the lates data available in the model. The GPR model allows me to estimate solar production tomorrow given a Met Office model forecast. I then use this estimate in various ways in decision-making, for example how much to use cheap electricity overnight to charge house and car batteries, i.e. how much headroom to leave in the batteries so that I’m unlikely to waste excess solar energy.

[–] Emperor@feddit.uk 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Fascinating. I suppose one day they'll offer something like this as a ready-rolled package as it's useful to know here in the UK where the sunlight can be pretty variable.

[–] JohnSmith@feddit.uk 2 points 2 years ago

For a very brief moment I considered turning my experience in home energy management into a business. Then I woke up and realised I’d be facing either house retrofitting or new build business, and all the companies involved in those. Nope.

[–] stonewall@feddit.org 2 points 2 months ago

I started a few years ago with Telekom smart home (our ISP in Germany is having their own smart home devices) because I got a good deal as an employee there. Soon I found out that it‘s quite limited because it‘s made for the normal consumer who don’t want to know too much about technical stuff, so I switched to Home Assistant which is now running on a Raspberry Pi. At the moment I run various light systems (IKEA, Philipps and some other no names) in it, have a weather station in it, my LG tv is fully controlled via smart phone/laptop now, and I just start to install Shelly’s on all of our blinds because: why not? In my old flat I also had the radiators in my smart home system but now with floor heating it‘s a little bit more complicated but I am looking forward to solve this with some ESP32 boards in a far future 😄. And the doors have at the moment sensors to see if they are open or not, I also want to get more for the windows to get a whole overview again after I lost have of my sensors with the moving to the new flat. And Roborock and Bambulab are also integrated in Homeassistant 😄 Last but not least: the raspberry pi is running AdGuard and Bitwarden (both with a fallback on my miniserver + backups on a NAS) which is playing nicely together with OPNSense. It‘s not a lot but I am quite happy with it and my wife as well.

[–] Mex@feddit.uk 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

I think this covers the basics.

  • Home assistant running under proxmox on an ancient hp micro server
  • ZZH zigbee gateway stick
  • Xiaomi/Aqara light switches, with one more switch than circuit going to switch to act as a button for lamps
  • Ikea
    • Bulbs for lamps
    • undercounter strips with zigbee for office mood lights
  • Nest hubs for music + 4 room house amp system
  • Tado for heating
[–] Emperor@feddit.uk 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

ZZH zigbee gateway stick

Is that your recommendation for a ZigBee dongle to cut out the hub?

[–] Mex@feddit.uk 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

It's the one I use, I would recommend a ZZH-P if they ever get released! Failing that I have heard good things about the sonoff stick.

[–] Emperor@feddit.uk 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

There's two Sonoff sticks on Amazon both look identical but they have different specs:

ZBDongle-P:

  • USB 3.0
  • Pre-flashed with Z-Stack 3.x.0 coordinator firmware
  • Base on TI CC2652P + CP2102N

ZBDongle-E:

  • USB
  • Pre-flashed with Zigbee coordinator firmware based on EZNet 6.10.3 out of box
  • Base on EFR32MG21 + CH9102F

The first seems the right one but they're even.yhe same price!

[–] Mex@feddit.uk 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I'll have to take a look, these were not available when I was shopping. I have used the TI CC based chipset before. Looks like the -E varient is preferred now. https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/zha/

[–] Emperor@feddit.uk 2 points 2 years ago

Thanks for that - they do include both E and P under discovery section it that does indeed seems to be their preference.

[–] Emperor@feddit.uk 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

So doing some homework I found this, which suggests:

  • ZBDongle-P - Zigbee2MQTT and ZHA
  • ZBDongle-E - Matter and ZHA, Zigbee2MQTT still experimental

Apparently, the former is the Dongle Plus, while the latter is the Dongle Plus V2. So, despite the letters, the -E is the newer one.

All of which means, the -E seems the best option for me.

[–] Mkengine@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have problems finding any information at all about this, could you link a website to see what it is and the current status?

[–] Mex@feddit.uk 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not sure if zzh is on sale at the moment, what are you trying to achieve?

[–] Mkengine@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago

Just trying find a webpage with information, I can only find a page for zzh CC2652R and only a GitHub issue about the zzh-p which is apparently CC2652P? You seem to follow the release progress, so where could I read about it?