Heyho,
as I will soon move into my first “own” apartment (have lived in shared apartments so far), I would like to set up some smart home devices. Primarily lights, but I am open to other ideas.
Looking into the topic I noticed that basically all cloudless setups need a server - often they use a Raspberry Pie, a low energy protocol - like Zigbee or Thread, and a managing software like Home Assistant or openHAB.
Currently, I think about using the Raspberry Pie 5 (should also be helpful for other projects such as Immich) together with some kind of USB to connect to the Thread network (guess there is something similar like conbee2 for Zigbee) and openHAB as the software for greater customization. While openHAB is probably overkill, as a computer scientist I think I might enjoy the greater customization options.
So my question: Are there any good tutorials for this setup? While I knew of Zigbee before this project, I wasn’t aware of Thread and am just looking into it. I don’t feel comfortable yet to double down on it without learning more on possible ways to connect Thread to openHAB on a Raspberry Pie.
Thanks in advance!
Alright: For now I have bought:
- Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2, Zigbee 3.0/Thread/Matter USB-Adapter
- Soyo MiniPC M4
Instead of choosing openHAB, I will start with Home Assistant. While some people argued that they use Zigbee without issues, I still feel like Matter/Thread is the more interesting standard. Given that you can only use one standard with a ZBT-2, I will try to find all my devices in the Matter/Thread ecosystem.
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There are two things in my house I don’t “play” with: internet connectivity and core home functions (lights, locks, garage doors, etc). That doesn’t mean I don’t self host anything or then, but I always start from a mindset of “must work”.
I run HA on a Yellow (functionally an RPi 5 with radios and storage interface built in). My lights are either Hue running as plain Zigbee devices, or Zigbee switches. I don’t necessarily want more customization with home automation, I want stable, extensible, and easy to use day today. HA checks all those boxes easily. I’ve not done much looking into OpenHAB, but I would caution against going with something for home automation just because it’s more customizable. Sure, it’s great to have an automation routine that turns on your lights when you get home, it’s less great to have an integration that misbehaves and now you cannot turn off a light, or lock your door, or turn down the volume on your music, etc. Be sure to know what you want to accomplish before you buy devices, build automations, and always build things with a manual backup operation option.
Home assistant is a beast, not sure openhab can actually match it today. Unless you already have a pi5 and a SSD (avoid micro sd card), you could consider a mini pc with n150 (or n100) processor. It doesn’t consume much power (close to pi5) and it will be more powerful and more Ram which will be useful for immich.
Start with zigbee first, much more mature than thread. I don’t personaly use thread but i believe some zigbee dongle also can deal with thread at the same time.
About the setup. If mini pc, you can use proxmox so you will be able to create a VM for home assistant and another one for immich.
Do you have any concrete mini pc in mind? Most I can find are considerably more expensive than the pi.
Pis are excellent mini computers. Unfortunately, their long term reliability isn’t quite there. When I used one, I was getting a couple of lock up crashes a year. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s just enough to be REALLY frustrating to the (less technical) wife. The tipping point is when it goes from “nice to have” to “expected”.
I acquired a 2nd hand NUC, and it’s been bomb proof for a few years now.
My experience with a Pi4B has been rock solid and plenty fast for what I’ve tried so far, at low power consumption.
While I had problems in the beginning, it was all from the micro-SD card. People here will recommend staying away but I’ve had no problems since buying an “extreme” card. Well, starting to hit the size limit now - I can no longer kick off multiple concurrent updates because limited free space available on, I think, 16G card. Get bigger
A pi5 with 1gb ram will always be cheaper but that’s not enough ram for your usecase, search n150 at Aliexpress, you can often find some mini pc for around 150-160€ on sale with n150, 12gb lpddr5 (or 16gb ddr4 sodim) and 500gb SSD. https://a.aliexpress.com/_EQ5k2Uu This one was 153€ couple of days ago. Thay are other Chinese brand like soyo, beelink, bmax that have similar hardware. They are not as good as NUC, but they do the job for way cheaper.
If you’re starting with ha, don’t feel confined to only one.
IMPORTANT: a local area mesh is not just a low powered way of connecting devices but is inherently local-only. Highly recommended
The more common local area meshes include
- Zigbee - open standard, lots of inexpensive sensors
- Z-Wave - devices need to pay for certification but are more standard. I found more smart switches using this in my area
- Thread - the new standard. Same frequency as Zigbee but IPv6 based. Slowly rolling out.
The new Matter/Thread standard has support of the major players (Apple, Google, Amazon) so seems like the way to go for the future, but products are slow to roll out so you can’t count on it yet
Personally I found the strengths of each compelling so quickly added all three of the above to my ha setup. Ha is fine with it so why limit yourself
I follow the principle that devices must work “as expected” for my users, automation adds capabilities but does not replace them. This comes together with a focus on smart switches
- can be used interactively just like any switch
- continue to work as expected even if ha is down
- typically act as routers to strengthen your local area mesh. I have switches acting as routers for Zigbee, zwave, and Thread, so all my local area meshes are solid everywhere
- then I can automate
I’m using the HomeAssistant Blue. Amazing device you can no longer get but can build something similar. I’m slowly working on integrating HomeAssistant into an old house I’m fixing up while I live in it. I build many of my own sensors and controllers using ESP32’S and ESP8266’s. They run on wifi and use a bit more power but I can build a single box that costs me about 30 bucks and will cover multiple zigbee devices so don’t discount the use of wifi. The ESPHome Bluetooth proxy paired with the Bermuda BLE Triangulation is another plus for ESP32’s for tracking as you can use a phone with Bluetooth low energy setup in the HomeAssistant app or you can use the android ble trackers.
I’ve been integrating some zigbee devices lately and ones like the Sonoff ZBMINIR2’S are really nice to have since they can turn any dumb switch into a smart one. This will be less useful in an apartment but something to keep in mind. For zigbee sensors I use a vibration sensor on my front door and have some moisture sensors that will be paired with a zigbee faucet valve for automatically watering my garden this year. I have a couple zigbee rgb bulbs and they seem fine as well.
Another project to look into is WLED is truly amazing for RGB strips and strings.b
For the thread/matter vs zigbee stuff there is a ton of information out there. They use different frequencies (zigbee overlaps with wifi thread/matter doesn’t.) Thread/matter utilizes IPv6 and can provide internet access while zigbee does not. Zigbee has been around longer and is very stable and mature thread/matter is newer and aiming for higher bandwidth an better interoperability.
Just to throw a wrench into the works there is also Z-wave
https://lemmy.world/c/homeassistant is a good place to get more help and info on HomeAssistant as well as directly on the HomeAssistant site.
Hi! I recently started with home automation myself. Despite already having a home server, I decided to get a dedicated Raspberry Pi 5 4GB to run home assistant by itself. OpenHAB should work just as well on the RPi5.
I’ve got Zigbee and Matter over Thread connectivity using 2x Aeotec Zi-Stick dongles, one flashed with OpenThread firmware, instructions on their forum. It was not the best solution to use the same dongle for both protocols as it’s recognized with the same device name in Home Assistant and I had to use my Linux skills to work around that. You can easily get 2 zigbee dongles from different brands, check ahead which ones provide an easy OpenThread flashing solution. I think the Sonoff dongle is another one of these.
I use Home Assistant (running on Yellow) with ZigBee, Matter/Thread and Z-Wave. If I had to start today, I’d get a Pi 4/5 and Home Assistant ZBT-2. I would not run anything else on the Pi. Let HA OS take it over to ensure smooth updates. Then I’d add ZWA-2 if I need Z-Wave. Not you’d need 2x ZBT-2 if you want both ZigBee and Matter/Thread.
