Home automation
December 15, 2024 — December 29, 2024
Upon persuading the gizmos in your home to talk to one another.
See also home networks.
I feel like this should be easy, but my experience of using Apple and Amazon devices has been that they never do what I want. Also, there are standards wars between various proprietary apps, and the whole thing looks like a security nightmare.
1 Dongles for Bluetooth, Zigbee, Thread, etc.
2 Home Assistant
A DIY controller/hub option: Home Assistant. Turn a little Raspberry Pi into a home automation hub.
The rule of thumb seems to be that Zigbee has the most support for generic hubs, followed by Matter.
3 Lighting
How they get you.
3.1 Incoming
- Welcome to WLED - WLED Project A fast and feature-rich implementation of an ESP8266/ESP32 webserver to control NeoPixel (WS2812B, WS2811, SK6812) LEDs or also SPI-based chipsets like the WS2801 and APA102!
4 Thread and Matter
- nRF Util - Nordic Semiconductor Infocenter
- nRF5 SDK downloads (If you find yourself doing this and you are not a developer of IoT technology, this is a red flag, I think)
- Create an RCP USB dongle | Golioth Thread Demo (Lazy mode firmware)
5 Normal doors
TBC
6 Garage doors
7 Meross devices
Cheap on Amazon. Can sorta work with HomeKit. Pair using an Apple HomeKit device, then integrate as a “HomeKit device”
8 Tuya devices
If you must use these and don’t like their suspicious cloud-based app, you can try to use them locally.
- PlusPlus-ua/ha_tuya_ble: Home Assistant support for Tuya BLE devices (Bluetooth only)
- tuya-local/DEVICES.md at main · make-all/tuya-local (friendly)
- rospogrigio/localtuya: local handling for Tuya devices (broad)
It seems like they will still report back to their corporate masters over your WiFi though.