Smart home stuff is unfairly maligned. You just need a few basic rules and some hobby time.
Don’t buy wifi stuff.
If it needs its own dedicated app, don’t buy it.
Don’t buy smart appliances. If you want to smart up something expensive, get a cheap smart outlet or a cheap sensor that does the job.
Use an open source platform like Home Assistant, not Google or Alexa or whatever.
When you find something it can’t do that you want it to do, write some Python code and make it open source. You’ll get so much love from the community for the simplest things. Also the occasional person that angrily wants to know why your free thing doesn’t support his hyper specific use case but you can safely ignore that.
Can you recommend brands that sell smart devices that fulfill those requirements? Home assistant sounds like a fun hobby to get into but I’m wary of spending 99% of the time in web searches for what to buy instead of hours in web searches for tinkering.
It’s easier to shop for protocols and standards instead of brands. If you get a Zigbee dongle from Sonoff or SMLight and set it up with Home Assistant, 99% of devices marketed as Zigbee will work and you’ll know for a fact they don’t have Internet access and can’t really do anything that would be bad for your network security because that’s just not how the Zigbee standard works. This is where I would recommend starting.
If you plan on getting a lot of things, or think you might eventually, I would recommend getting both Zigbee and Zwave. There’s also Thread now but I don’t have much experience there yet. These are the standards that smart devices can use, with low power, to communicate without needing direct wifi access or anything. Each has their drawbacks in terms of how many devices you can use and their range. Again, this recommendation is only if you plan on going big at some point, but if you get zwave devices where you can, and focus on Zigbee for things like lighting, you’ll be able to blend the standards together and have less chance of running into interference or device limit problems. But here I’m talking about when you get over around 50 devices, if you don’t plan on doing that then it’s not really a concern.
When it comes to research, I would recommend reserving research time for the devices that have to be wifi. If you want cameras, for example, you’ll want to make sure you pick good ones that can be blocked from external access and properly secured. If you want to control a garage door or an appliance or something big like that, there’s much easier and cheaper ways than getting a smart appliance.
Home assistant is the shit. I’ve got lighting automations based on time of day and via motion sensors within specific timeframes.
Many sensors. Motion, climate, humidity, you name it.
Home theater automations. If I want to watch something, I tell voice assistant (Siri in this case) “turn on home theater.” It turns on the TV, receiver, and Apple TV, and uses the receiver’s API to switch the input to the media input. When I hit play on a video it turns off the living room lights, and if I pause or stop the video it turns them back on.
It has monitoring for all my thermostat sensors, solar, batteries, keeps track of my fridge and freezer temperatures, list goes on.
It also fully supports zigbee antennas and Bluetooth devices over Wi-Fi with simple esp32 Bluetooth extender configs. HAOS is just an outstanding piece of software.
Smart home stuff is unfairly maligned. You just need a few basic rules and some hobby time.
Can you recommend brands that sell smart devices that fulfill those requirements? Home assistant sounds like a fun hobby to get into but I’m wary of spending 99% of the time in web searches for what to buy instead of hours in web searches for tinkering.
It’s easier to shop for protocols and standards instead of brands. If you get a Zigbee dongle from Sonoff or SMLight and set it up with Home Assistant, 99% of devices marketed as Zigbee will work and you’ll know for a fact they don’t have Internet access and can’t really do anything that would be bad for your network security because that’s just not how the Zigbee standard works. This is where I would recommend starting.
If you plan on getting a lot of things, or think you might eventually, I would recommend getting both Zigbee and Zwave. There’s also Thread now but I don’t have much experience there yet. These are the standards that smart devices can use, with low power, to communicate without needing direct wifi access or anything. Each has their drawbacks in terms of how many devices you can use and their range. Again, this recommendation is only if you plan on going big at some point, but if you get zwave devices where you can, and focus on Zigbee for things like lighting, you’ll be able to blend the standards together and have less chance of running into interference or device limit problems. But here I’m talking about when you get over around 50 devices, if you don’t plan on doing that then it’s not really a concern.
When it comes to research, I would recommend reserving research time for the devices that have to be wifi. If you want cameras, for example, you’ll want to make sure you pick good ones that can be blocked from external access and properly secured. If you want to control a garage door or an appliance or something big like that, there’s much easier and cheaper ways than getting a smart appliance.
This is super helpful, thanks!
Home assistant is the shit. I’ve got lighting automations based on time of day and via motion sensors within specific timeframes.
Many sensors. Motion, climate, humidity, you name it.
Home theater automations. If I want to watch something, I tell voice assistant (Siri in this case) “turn on home theater.” It turns on the TV, receiver, and Apple TV, and uses the receiver’s API to switch the input to the media input. When I hit play on a video it turns off the living room lights, and if I pause or stop the video it turns them back on.
It has monitoring for all my thermostat sensors, solar, batteries, keeps track of my fridge and freezer temperatures, list goes on.
It also fully supports zigbee antennas and Bluetooth devices over Wi-Fi with simple esp32 Bluetooth extender configs. HAOS is just an outstanding piece of software.
I got a motion sensor set up to blink inside lights instead of a door bell. I now know every time there’s a cat or bird on the porch…
There’s so much you can do. If I wanted to I could even make it monitor my Steam Deck’s battery.