5 ms·
IMHO - and having messed about with this stuff for years - the best way to go for smart home stuff is only use devices that use MQTT over WiFi. I use Shelly bra
by mattlondon 3y ago
IMHO - and having messed about with this stuff for years - the best way to go for smart home stuff is only use devices that use MQTT over WiFi. I use Shelly branded devices which I've found to be quite good and pretty open.
ZigBee just seems way too unreliable. WiFi devices have - for me at least - been rock solid in terms of reliability, while ZigBee stuff randomly disappears or needs to be relinked all the time (and it is hard to debug when this happens, unlike just pinging an IP on your LAN)
Home assistant et al are typically overkill and another point of unreliability. Just run Mosquitto (MQTT broker) locally and run a local NodeRed instance if you need anything sophisticated in terms of logic.
Since you are using MQTT it is trivial to write your own app for controlling everything from your phone. Use tailscale if you need to do things when off-LAN.
- rcarmo 3y agoThis is the way. That said, I do have a hybrid solution: HomeKit for having a nice UI, Node-RED for a little custom logic, and a Homebridge MQTT plugin to tie it all together. HomeKit is perhaps unique in that the Home app will work just fine without an Internet connection (although you do gain the benefit of remote control if you have an Apple TV or HomePod). Siri is pants, obviously, but good enough to set scenes.
- jhot 3y agoI find both ZigBee and zwave to be rock solid if you have a repeater device near the hub/dongle. You can then make bigger jumps to other devices and the network will be stable. That said, MQTT over WiFi is easy to troubleshoot and won't lock you in to any software or changing rest APIs.
- red-iron-pine 3y agoNeat. I do a lot with RabbitMQ and have MQTT knowledge, so I'll check this out. Would something like Kafka be workable in this space?