February 16, 2024

The extra stuff about Home Assistant

My last post was my first in a long time and I'd forgotten how hard they are to write. After a couple of days, I got sick of looking at it and just chopped out a whole bunch of detail and posted it. Here's a quick follow-up with some bits I left out.

Zigbee vs Z-Wave


A visualisation of my Zigbee networkA visualisation of my Z-Wave network
Visualisations of my Zigbee (left) and Z-Wave (right) networks.

Zigbee and Z-Wave are low-power, mesh networking protocols aimed at home automation. I lean more toward Zigbee. As mentioned in the article, I started out with several Philips Hue devices (bulbs and motion sensors), which use Zigbee under the hood, and that's probably the main reason why I have more Zigbee devices (38) than Z-Wave (seven), but not the only reason.

Z-Wave has some advantages over Zigbee. It doesn't use the same radio spectrum as WiFi, so it's less susceptible to interference. The certification process is stricter: Z-Wave devices are much more likely to Just Work™ in my experience than the average Zigbee gadget.

But on the downside, Z-Wave devices are lot more expensive and there are fewer options to choose from. Also, the Z-Wave protocol is more power-hungry than Zigbee. My one Z-Wave motion sensor in the kitchen goes through its odd-ball CR123A battery every few months, while my Zigbee devices can last two years on their plain double-As.

So, I voted with my wallet. Yes, the average Aliexpress impulse buy is a gamble, but I can afford to try out more devices. I was considering getting rid of Z-Wave, but its been so reliable for what I use it for (mostly smart plugs with energy monitoring) that I'll probably keep it. I'm encouraged that Nabu Casa, the company behind Home Assistant, has joined the Z-Wave Alliance.

Home Assistant Community Store

Even though I use docker to run Home Assistant, I can still install the (very unofficial, unsupported) Home Assistant Community Store (HACS) and add third-party plugins. I use a handful of these. I mentioned Node-RED in the last post and that requires a plugin, but I also use a few others that have made my life simpler.

One that I added last summer is Adaptive Lighting. This adjusts the brightness and temperature of my lights based on the elevation of the sun. My automations used to have lots of code for adjusting the lights depending on the time of day. With Adaptive Lighting, those automations got a lot simpler. I just turn on the light and let the plugin figure out how brightly.

Another very useful addition is Tuya Local. The ceiling fan in our bedroom uses the Tuya App, which is a popular cloud-based App for many Chinese devices, but I've found its cloud services to be very unreliable.

I used to have a bunch of Tuya-controlled smart plugs, for example, that were extremely flaky, mostly because Tuya insists on serving me from data centres in Poland, about a thousand miles from London. But the fan was exactly what we wanted, so we gave Tuya another shot.

It was still terrible. The fan frequently wouldn't turn on or wouldn't turn off. The Tuya Local code talks directly to the fan, bypassing the long trip to Poland. We've had a few niggles at first, but it's been trouble-free for almost a year now.

Philips Hue

I mentioned in the previous post that, if I had to do it over again, I might have tried smart switches for the lighting, instead of smart bulbs. But I still really like my Philips Hue bulbs. I like being able to control the colour, temperature and brightness (now via Adaptive Lighting) and the quality is quite good: the light looks nice and all of them are still working.

The Hue bulbs, especially the full-colour ones, cost the earth, though. I can't afford them. Only some of my bulbs are full-colour ones, and the rest are what are called "White ambiance". I've tried various other Zigbee bulbs, such as those from Ikea, but they just aren't as good.

If I could get over my fear of fiddling with light switches (gangs and such!), I might try a hybrid solution. The switches would turn on/off the smart bulbs, but I could still control the brightness.

WLED


A pair of shelves with strip lighting
I'm getting the hang of using strip lighting, such as these on my living room shelves.

Another technology I've incorporated into the home is WLED lighting. These use WiFi, but locally only, and are supported quite well by Home Assistant. My first attempts at creating using strips were quite rudimentary -- bare strips with ESP32 chips hanging off them. But I'm getting the hang of it now. These ones in my living room have proper rails, but they're still using developer board ESP32 chips with clip-on wiring and they're a bit flaky. My next challenge is to get the hang of soldering, which I hope will make them more reliable.

All for now. I'm sure there are bits I'm forgetting, but those are the main extra bits I wanted to mention.

Tags: home-automation