I have been pretty lucky with the Aqara plugs. I have like 8-10 of them at this point and they work really well with homeassistant, giving energy readings and such.
Really nice to see improcements being made to local voice control.
I personally haven't opted for it yet due to the computing reqirements - instead been looking into dedicated offline voice recognition modules, since they use much less power. Downside is that they recognise a mostly predefined set of commands, and are just looking for patterns in speech instead of actually performing voice recognition
Would be interesting to compare the two voice control approaches side by side at some point
I've been eagerly looking forward to the time when I can replay my Echo Dots with a self-hosted solution, but so far I haven't found hardware that I really liked the look and style of.
That is really a missing part of this whole thing. I get that I could build something myself, but I don't want to have the hassle of doing it and keeping it working all the time (because I am able to build it, but not on a "works perfectly all the time" level). I really hope that sometime in the future there is a standard for smart speakers (and screens maybe) that allows me to add them to my cloud service of choice.
My house is old enough that it doesn’t have neutrals, so I’m kinda limited in what I can install. I’ve been using smart plugs by thirdreality and battery powered buttons. No problems with the smart plugs yet.
THIRDREALITY ZigBee Smart Plug 4 Pack with Real-time Energy Monitoring,15A Outlet, Zigbee Repeater,ETL Certified,ZigBee Hub Required,Work with Home Assistant,Compatible Echo Devices and SmartThings https://a.co/d/05vm2VMC
I have installed LEDLUX smart wall socket (around 25€), MOES light switches (around 30€ for a 2-gang switch), both of which are quite easy to install as it replaces what you already have. I have used Sonoff zigbee relays (around 50€ for a pack of 4) as well as Avatto mini zigbee smart switch modules (around 20€, single and 4-gang modules), but it may require some modifications on your current installation
Or go with a zero, plug and play socket, like the Nous A1Z smart socket, around 15€ each. Just plug it onto your wall socket.
Could I trouble you to link a relay you're talking about? Because if it's a naked board that's cool I'll hide it in the wall, but amazon is confused and thinks I mean a switch I think.
The problem with smart light switches is that they sit on the AC path. This means they're capable of starting fires. As a result you might want units that don't have questionable designs or the cheapest relays inside. A proxy for that is being certified by a western certification organization. Something like UL, CSA, ETL, MET, TUF, etc. Both the certification and the grade of components used increase the price of such units. There are some cheaper certified switches too, but personally I wouldn't install something that doesn't carry the name of a North American (I'm in Canada) manufacturer on it. Leviton, Eaton, etc. And those are $50+. 😔
Can't believe no one has mentioned Inovelli yet. Developed with the community, with OTA support in Z2M, they are absolutely fantastic and incredibly flexible!
I like zooz 5 button scene controllers. They are z-wave.
I also like kasa's switches. They are wifi, but being on mains powered I'm not concerned with wifi draining batteries and I have them in a vlan with minimal access.
I was under the impression that WiFi could only handle so many devices connected. 20 years ago if you got more than 10 or 20 some would start getting kicked off. Maybe that was my short router. Is that never an issue with modern routers? Even adding hundreds?
You could have shitty routers. I use unifi access points, make sure I set the channels so I don't have a lot of interference with any nearby wireless networks, and I should be able to handle a few hundred devices at once. You could also have a small DHCP scope that limits the number of devices on the whole network.
I do in-wall relays so that I can use regular, off the shelf switches and it looks like nothing special is there. I like the idea of people not knowing it's smart until I do something from my phone.
I wish, thread just isn't there yet. I currently use Wi-Fi for most of my smart home stuff. I have a really good Wi-Fi setup though and it could support a lot of devices. I have been slowly moving to zigbee though.
I love my Shelly relays. I don't use the stock firmware though. I have them overwritten with ESPhome.
I have heard that you can have full local control with them now and that it's not really necessary to do a custom firmware. I just like having a configuration file that tells me exactly everything that it can do. That and I have a script running that updates all my ESPhome devices automatically.
It makes it so that the direction of the switch doesn't matter. Flipping the switch toggles to the off or on state that it's not currently in. I like to think of it as a three-way switch that you may already have in your house where up doesn't necessarily mean 'on' because there are two switches involved. The relay in the wall is the other switch. So if you have the light on in home assistant but you flip the switch, it'll turn the light off whether it was up or down. I hope I made more sense.
If my wifi goes out my switches function as normal too.
All of the Amcrest "management" I do is within blue iris. I have a ptz IP4M-1041B but do not do any ptz stuff via HA. I use blue iris to send stream/alerts to HA via MQTT. This allows me to do notifications on motion. I would assume if you have location presets setup in BI you could call them from HA but that's a guess.
I messed around with presets (camera location) in blue iris a bit bit didn't have a real use case for it so I am not sure how robust it is.
I block internet access to all Amcrest cameras directly but can still access their local IP. I have access to my cameras again via blue iris which runs on a dedicated windows machine.
I block internet access to all Amcrest cameras directly but can still access their local IP.
Yes, and what kind of management do they provide on their WebUI? Can the camera be 100% operated using the WebUI without blue iris or any other software?
I'm not sure if I've tried doing any PTZ stuff, but all the other settings for sure. The cameras I have all have SD cards so you could manage everything right from the UI and just have it record locally.
They want to connect to the mothership and destroy log files trying to get there.
Thanks for the clarification, my ideia was to run the cameras on an isolated VLAN so, no issues with calling home. I just wanted to make sure they can be operated fully locally.
I know you’re in zigbee, but I’ve tested many different wall switches and IMO Zooz Zwave switches are the best option.
They’re cheap, reliable, and most importantly don’t cause LED lights to flicker like every other brand I’ve tested. They also have replaceable paddles so you can change the color of the paddles. I purchased black paddles and used a sand blaster to make them matte like the rest of the outlets and plates around my apartment.
Inovelli is also great however those switches are overkill for most situations and very pricey.
I use a bunch of Amcrest PoE cameras. None with PTZ though. I run them to a dedicated box running frigatenvr. From there I allow access from Homeassistant with the frigate integration.
IP cameras allow you to access the device via web gui where you can view and configure the camera for your needs. Once I’ve set them up I only ever access them again through frigate.
IP cameras allow you to access the device via web gui where you can view and configure the camera for your needs. Once I’ve set them up I only ever access them again through frigate.
Thanks for the answer. What kind of management do they provide on their WebUI? Can the camera be 100% operated using the WebUI, standalone without anything else? I'm just trying to understand how dependent on external software (be it their apps, cloud or HA) the cameras are.
You can probably find a visual walkthrough of the GUI by searching youtube.
There's a login page. After you authenticate, there's a live view page, a review/recordings page if you are recording to SD card in camera, and a few settings pages.
I'd say you could absolutely access the camera standalone, but at least the cameras I have don't do any detection or notifications. That's where the NVR comes in. I know reolink has cameras that do all of the above including AI detection.
Following your advice I found a video for another model and it seems complete, even motion detection was available on the WebUI. I’m assuming you’re on the exact model I was looking at and it doesn’t have that feature am I right?
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