Comment by hypfer 18 hours ago
The good thing is that at least for a somewhat technical crowd, there is absolutely no need to buy into any of this, as there have been proper solutions available since at least 2018.
Just buy Hue, maybe Aqara sensors, use zigbee2mqtt with Home Assistant and be happy while observing the shitshow that is this market from a safe distance.
Are the ikea zigbee devices going to stop being sold? Massive shame if so, they are extremely reliable and easy to use.
IKEA's whole smart home ecosystem is presently being overhauled from Zigbee to Thread/Matter, with a product availability gap in the meantime.
https://www.ikea.com/global/en/newsroom/retail/the-new-smart...
Oooh, thank you for sharing! New product lineup looks interesting, but I echo other concerns here about it thread maybe eventually requiring internet.
What gap though? Our local IKEA has plenty of lights, smart plugs, etc. available still.
Personally, I find their contact sensors (the tall-ish thin ones) to be quite unreliable. I live in a modest home with plenty of zigbee devices as repeaters nearby and the contact sensors often stop reporting at random. I’ll pop it off the door, click repair on my coordinator and then hit the reset switch on the sensor; back online.
I like them because they can use rechargeable AAA batteries but if I still have to touch them every few weeks to repair, I’d rather switch to a different brand that is more reliable and uses less ideal battery formats.
That said, the newish Inspelling plugs in the EU market are fantastic. They report reliably, can handle larger loads, and cost about €10. For that price, it’s hard to complain that they are a bit larger than other options.
Easiest way is to put HAOS (Home Assistant OS) on a Raspberry Pi, Home Assistant Green, or some NUC:
https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/
Then get a coordinator recommended for zigbee2mqtt:
https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/guide/adapters/
Then install and start the following add-ons in Home Assistant:
- Mosquitto - zigbee2mqtt: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/guide/installation/03_ha_addon.ht... - MQTT
And that's pretty much it, you can add devices through the MQTT add-on page. They will also become available as entities in the rest of Home Assistant, and you can make graphs, dashboards, actions, etc.
You can also run + install zigbee2mqtt and Mosquitto on a Linux machine, but HAOS give you more of an integrated solution with dashboards, graphs, backups, cloud access, etc.
> Just buy Hue, maybe Aqara sensors, use zigbee2mqtt with Home Assistant and be happy while observing the shitshow that is this market from a safe distance.
The only worry is if manufacturers stop developing Zigbee products. Ikea for example made cheap and good Zigbee devices but they've said they're moving away from Zigbee.
Oh cool it's not just me doing exactly this.
Sticking to pure zigbee devices with zigbee2mqtt and slae.sh's excellent USB coordinator. A couple weeks ago I bought a bunch of spare IKEA zigbee devices before they go out of stock. Around 2030 I'll take a look if thread/matter is anywhere near mature and has settled.