Home Assistant beginners

Freefaller · Wednesday at 07:57

Bluecube said:
I’m fairly certain that all Hive stuff is Zigbee rather than WiFi which is good. At the moment, everything is sorted out via the Hive hub. Any Hive devices connected to HA have to talk to HA via a cloud connection (as has been mentioned) which may well account for the hefty delay.
If you’re up for experimenting then a Zigbee dongle and Zigbee2MQTT opens up a whole new world of cheap, fast sensors

Thank you this is really useful. A project to look at over the Christmas break.

The1nonly1 · Wednesday at 09:38

Freefaller said:
Thank you this is really useful. A project to look at over the Christmas break.

Hive devices are Zigbee. I have connected a Hive motion sensor directly to HA using Zigbee2MQTT before but I found them to be not the best. They do work but I found the reset time of the motion sensor back to no motion slow. You'd be better looking at a Sonoff or Aqara motion sensor.

Simon42 · Wednesday at 09:46

Freefaller said:
Thank you this is really useful. A project to look at over the Christmas break.

...and although there's nothing bad about using USB Zigbee dongle coordinators, do also consider network connected Zigbee coordinators such as the smlight slzb-06 which has a PoE version as well.

This allows better placing of the device, avoids any USB pass through issues if virtualising and these have a nice web UI for updates and settings (way easier to flash than some USB dongles). Available from Aliexpress for £25 to £30 in about a week.

#Chri5# · Thursday at 14:38

As a newbie, if I wanted to start out monitoring some basics like power, temperature and humidty where is good to start?

I've got a few Tapo P110 plugs which report power use to the app. I've seen there's a Tapo gateway and temp/humidity sensor which I presume would all report into the Tapo app? I've also seen some Govee kit - the H5179 outdoor temperature unit would be good for keeping an eye on the temperature in the greenhouse.

Is there any benefit to running up a VM for Home Assist for requirements this simple?

b0rn2sk8 · Thursday at 14:55

No IMO, just use off the shelf stuff.

Home assistant only comes into its own once you start doing automations based on the data it’s bringing in.

Edit: for example, if my CCTV picks up a person in the back garden, it turns on all the outside lights at the rear of the house.

dlockers · Thursday at 18:11

#Chri5# said:
As a newbie, if I wanted to start out monitoring some basics like power, temperature and humidty where is good to start?

I've got a few Tapo P110 plugs which report power use to the app. I've seen there's a Tapo gateway and temp/humidity sensor which I presume would all report into the Tapo app? I've also seen some Govee kit - the H5179 outdoor temperature unit would be good for keeping an eye on the temperature in the greenhouse.

Is there any benefit to running up a VM for Home Assist for requirements this simple?

I use HA for a similar job. It runs on a mini pc I bought from the members market. I have my p110 plugs reporting consumption - live and for the day. And some govee thermometers that report humidity and temp.

The only glitch is they use Bluetooth - so distance to the HA device is important, otherwise you need to add esp32 modules.