What kind/brand of devices do you recommend and where do your source them? Things like smart outlets, bulbs, sensors, etc.

I have a hard time sourcing gear because it’s all either locked to Amazon/Google or requires the manufacturer’s cloud services and their dedicated app.

I’m looking for devices that can work completely offline and only communicate with my HA/MQTT or at least a local base station that can bridge to HA.

For the last few years, I’ve been buying bulbs/outlets from AliExpress with Tasmota pre-flashed. Before that, I was ordering them from Amazon and re-flashing them, but that was always a crapshoot as not all of them were compatible with tuya-convert. They’re also ridiculously difficult to disassemble to flash manually.

Anybody willing to share some tips to source some new devices?

Edit: I’ve also built a few custom sensors with ESP8266 and ESP-Home but they’re not particularly pretty.

Edit 2: Thanks everyone! I think I’m going to look into some Zigbee devices and bridges. That sounds like the most “open” way to expand my smart home gear.

  • ABoxOfNeurons@lemmy.oneEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    I use a lot of Aquara Zigbee sensors with a USB bridge on my HA server. It works well, and is stupid cheap.

    • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOPEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      I’ve read Zigbee is fairly open, but wasn’t sure if that was universally true or only with certain brands, etc.

      • ABoxOfNeurons@lemmy.oneEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        It’s an open standard, and you can talk to any Zigbee with any Zigbee USB tranceiver.

        It’s also mesh-based. I use Hue bulbs as repeaters, but any Zigbee device that is plugged in to a wall should work.

        • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOPEnglish
          0·
          2 years ago

          That sounds exactly what I want. I will definitely be looking into a Zigbee hub.

          Any problematic Zigbee hubs I should watch out for? Or just look for one that’s explicitly supported by HA?

            • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOPEnglish
              0·
              2 years ago

              Awesome, thanks. That’s a great starting point.

              Also, it’ll be nice to free up some wifi spectrum. My devices are all on an isolated 2.4 GHz network and that band gets quite noisy.

                • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOPEnglish
                  0·
                  2 years ago

                  Yeah, that’s probably the direction I’m going to start looking. Pretty much every device I run uses MQTT to communicate with HA, including some custom buttons I keep around the house.

                  The only sticking point is going to be reconfiguring my HA server to speak to a USB device. It’s currently Dockerized, and I’ve got little experience passing through USB devices that aren’t serial adapters. Not a deal breaker, but definitely a speedbump.

      • keyez@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        I also recommend athom they’re the only plugs (ESPHome) I’ve found that immediately import upon WiFi connection and still work for on/off and simple metrics in HA when blocked to the outside internet. Only downside is they can’t seem to connect to hidden SSIDs but I haven’t seen them pinging or reaching out to anywhere else.