The Smart Home thread

Yep! :slight_smile: They’re sold out currently unfortunately. BCC and bol.com still offer them for like 2€ extra though, so I might as well buy one there… Just hoping for the price to drop by a few euro’s on Friday.

Good morning folks just remembered this thread and i wish to ask some questions about it.
I have seen some of your setups. What i should bear in mind? Or i could “copycat” some ideas?

Is there something related to the intelligent home and AC which is a must here in Spain?

What you would like to add to the list or there is something new in your setups?

I am looking to improve my house so this thread could be really helpful.

My domotica level house is 0 . :wink:
Let s change it soon at least this is the idea

( sorry for necroposting but it is cool thread deserve more intentions)

Nest google seems discontinued. Damn.

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Sadly I don’t have a lot of time on my hands currently to write an in-depth reply, but lately I’ve been using a lot of Shelly products in automating most of our home. I’ve used pretty much all of their products and so far they’ve been awesome, mainly because you can simply hook them up to the existing switches and you can take full control without having to use their cloud solution. They have solutions for pretty much everything I wanted (LED lights, LED strips, mechanical ventilation, etc.). Can definitely recommend them.

I think the Nest brand is discontinued, but the products are not. They’re just called Google Nest nowadays…

https://shelly.cloud/

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Make sure it’s compatible with home assistant (spin up a VM or Pi). I have expanded mine to some niche suppliers (i.e. Tado for TRVs, Senisbo for Aircon), I just make sure there is a stable plugin for HA and away I go.

I tend to stick to things that are supported in smartlife too… At the moment my smart home looks like this:

|Type|Manufacturers|
|—|—|—|
|Plugs / Light Strips / HA Zigbee|Sonoff|
|Lights / Buttons / PIR|Hue|
|Heating|Tado|
|TV Remote|Logitech|
|Button / H&T / PIR|Shelly|
|Cameras|Eufy|
|Cameras|MotionEye|
|Buttons|Flic / Zigbee|
|PIR|ESPHome|
|Christmas Lights / Bulbs|Tuya|
|Automation|SmartBot|
|Ambilight|Govee|
|AirCon|Sensibo|

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I have Philips Hue lights. I do have one special thing which is a smart plug connected to my espresso machine.

When I tell Google that it’s “coffee time”, it turns on the plug and starts making espresso.

The trick was finding a “dumb” espresso machine that starts brewing as soon as it receives power.

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I am currently using Zigbee lights from Osram, Ikea and Innr for lighting. I have an Ikea remote Control and a Friends of Hue wall switch from Bush-Jäger. My Thermostats are from Fritz!Dect.
It is all controlled via HomeAssistant, where I have some information on the State of Charge from my car via the Renault integration, or our Solar Production via the Fronius integration. The Rademacher Blinds from my parents also can be controlled there, but I think I need to change the integration a bit, to also allow Rademacher lights to be controlled.
I am also currently experimenting with WLED, but I am running into some weird flickering issue, which I need to sort out.

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I’ve been pleased with the price/performance of the IKEA tradfri range. Especially their £7 button. Has the usual on/off functionality but also exposes hold functions that can be used to either change brightness or other functions (I have hold functions set to activate scenes rather than dim). They’re also magnetic.

If anyone’s looking for a cheap alternative to something like the official Philips hue wall button I’d say they’re difficult to beat.

I don’t use the IKEA gateway, I have a ZigBee receiver and use ZigBee to MQTT on home assistant to manage all my devices, so that’s an additional cost, but it’s basically a requirement if you want to really get into home assistant in my opinion.

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I recently bought one flat and I am playing around with setting up automation.

Currently already implemented :

  • 5x Hue Light bulbs 1600 lumen RGB
  • 2x Gu10 RGB Light bulbs
  • 1x Hue Simuru panel RGB (60x60)
  • 2x Hue RGB outside wall lamps (for balcony)
  • 5x Sonoff Dual R3 (curtains control)
  • 3x Sonoff Mini (With hue integration for kitchen, dressing, and bathroom lights)
  • 2x MyStorm Wi-Fi Switch, for washing machine monitoring (so I know when it’s finished).
  • A few Nest Hubs and minis around.
  • Nuki (Door unlocker, Door sensor, Door Opener)
  • HomeAssistant with a Zigbee Stick and MQTT and a few other addons
  • 7x Sonoff thermometer

Plans :

  • 1x Sonoff Mini for the other bathroom
  • 5x Nest Thermometer for the floor heating
  • 2-3 new Simuru panels
  • Global power monitoring
  • and a few others things I don’t remember that I planned.
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I use a switchbot bot on my coffee machine, it presses the start button :slight_smile:

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Any news?

Actually, got a bit lazy, everything is on Auto Now.

Works quite well, except when the wifi goes down.
did you have any specific questions ? :grin:

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Any advice for a boiler? Smart boiler if exists such a term :slight_smile:

I use Tado for my boiler and radiators :slight_smile: I’ve had it for just over a year or so I believe, and we love it

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I use a normal boiler with a huge heating resistance inside. To make it smarter, I removed the outside control mechanism and added a smart plug with Tasmota. Then I automated it to turn off automatically after 2 hours, while the turn on is done by Alexa every evening when electricity is cheaper.

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I finally tested Jellyfin. People tend to use a Raspberry Pi 4, but I went lower: NanoPi Neo. This really tiny bad boy with DietPi and Zram Configured can actually run Jellyfin server.

To protect the MicroSD card I stored everything on an attached HDD, and because such USB device requires power I used a better MicroUSB charger at 2.1A. To make things even spicier one could also install Deluge from DietPi repository (be careful not to share the download directory, instead move the content onto directories used by Jellyfin libraries after download completes, because incomplete files could cause issues when attempting to view them).

All in all it works, not for transcoding, but for simple direct access within local network. I use a projector with Android and Kodi app with Jellyfin addon installed and connected to Jellyfin through local WiFi, as I am trying to avoid transcoding on NanoPi Neo.

The only downside is the library update as it is a bit slow when it is generating metadata, but it works.

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