TheKnarf

Smarthome

I keep playing with smarthome devices. Some seems to increase my quality of life, but often it also leads to extra debugging headache when stuff stops working.

Hub & Protocols

To start with you want to pick a protocol for your smarhome devices, and a hub that supports that protocol.

There are 3 major protocols that exists for smarthome devices:

  • Zigbee

    This is the protocol I went for. This is what IKEA uses for their smart devices, as well as Phillips Hue and a lot of other compaines.

  • Z-Wave

    It's my understanding that this protocol is more common in the US, as I live in Europe I'll stick to Zigbee.

  • Wifi

    Some devices simply uses Wifi, this is a bit annoying. I'd like to avoid this as much as possible. I still own some, but these I bought for other reasons than their smart capabilities, and they just happened to have Wifi built inn.

There are multiple hubs that support Zigbee, each provider got its own (Ikea, Phillips, etc). The neat thing about Zigbee is that you don't need to get an individual smarthub from each of the brands you own, they should all work with eachother, so you can simply get a single smarthub.

I wanted to use a Raspberry PI as my smarthub. My first solution for a few years was getting RaspBee II hat for the Raspberry PI, this worked well for several years until my Raspberry PI was starting to have some hardware failures. SD-Cards never lasts forever and so when upgrading I wanted to get a Raspberry PI that works with a M.2 SSD.

My next smarthub was a Home assistant Yellow. This works with a Raspberry PI Compute module, let's you use a M.2 SSD as boot drive, and have built inn support for Zigbee. This has worked great and is my current smarthub.

Zigbee devices

  • Lighting from IKEA. They are cheap and mostly works well, I currently have one light that have disconnected that I need to reset and reconnect. But most of the time they mostly works.

  • Motion sensor from IKEA. This one is mounted in the hallway and turns on the light automatically in the hallway when I leave or come home. This works like 75% of the time (which is really annoying when it don't).

  • Aqara Temperature and Humidty sensor. Got 3 of them. These worked great at the start when using the RaspBee II hat for the Raspberry PI, but when upgrading to the Home Assistant Yellow I never got them to reconnect. It may just be a dead battery? Or maybe I didn't manage to trigger the reconnect modus correctly. This will be a task for another day.

  • Namron panelovn ZigBee. This one have been great and worked solidly. I love having heating that I can turn on and off remotly when traveling.

I also got some buttons from IKEA that never worked.

Future

  • I'd love to get some air quality sensors connected to my smarthub

  • I got a portable Air conditioning unit that connects over Wifi, but there is no point in connecting that up since I'll have to open a door or window and throw the hose out before turning it on. I'd love a more permanent solution for Air conditioning.

  • Try and change battery / reset / reconnect the devices that currently doesn't work.