This very nearly identical to what I ran for my first year with Home Assistant. Ultimately for me, the fight with Add-Ons as Marcel mentioned here, and the lack of the Supervisor convinced me switch things up and run it as a full VM. However, what you have is a perfectly good solution as long as you don't mind manually configuring any Add-on you may want in the future - most likely as a separate container that talks to the HA container. For you I am sure this will be easy, but it may not be for all of your viewers.
Not sure what's the problem, but you can passthrougb docket control socket into HA container, so it can run other add-ons containers. (for the record, I'm not aware how HA is implemented)
Why? If you use containers it is supposed you know how containers work and if you understand how a container works there zero issues using the add on. 🤷🏿♀️
How about running Kubernetes on your little Zima SBC? You could taint the node and add it to your home lab cluster. Use tolerations and node affinity to get Home Assistant to run on the your the SBC. You can mange all of your home lab and home automation with a single control plane and a single set of tools. You can add labels the Pod or Deployment to have it protected by Traefik.
Great video. Just my 2 cts on zigbee2mqtt and zigbee stick you use. I've struggled a lot when I tried to use zigbee2mqtt since it seems that it need exclusive access to the stick. Since I've connected it before using Zigbee integration, there was a conflict. I solved by using another zigbee stick on the same Pi. Hope this help (or perhaps, I did something wrong... 😅) !
This video is like you're SHOUTING AT ME OVER THE MUSIC that doesn't need to exist. This is not an entertainment video, just say the things without the music.
Welcome aboard the HA system. I have been running it for many years. 1st on a pi, then as a VM on Proxmox and finally on HA Blue hardware. When I switched to running HA on the HA Blue hardware, I also decided to run all the add-ons as LXC/VM on Proxmox. I have to maintain them on my own, but I have better control. Never regretted in choosing HA as the platform.
Oh, my dear Christian... you are in for a wonderful journey. Just look at some of the dashboards built by others in the community. 3d floorplans with lights reflected in the 3d floorplan, tablet dashboards, and so much more.
Hell yeah! After a while when your zigbee network grows, you are gonna find out that the Conbee 2 is gonna be out of its depth, and you need to go to a more "dedicated" stick. Device support is also alot better in Zigbee2mqtt. I too went with the conbee and ZHA (even tried Deconz) and found out after 5-6 months adding sensors to everything that my network was just too large for the conbee to handle. Switched to a CC2652P based stick, went with zigbee2mqtt and life has been so much better. I have HUE,Ikea,Aquara, Osram, Sonoff, TuYa, Xiami devices, all playing along in perfect harmony!
Been using Home Assistant for 3 years now (started out with a raspberry pi) and now have the full HA OS version running on my home lab server running in a proxmox VM. I use a zigbee/z-wave USB gateway and have over 150 smart home devices connected to it. I have built a lot of my own sensors using the ESPHome integration and ESP32 boards. Home Assistant is the best home automation platform (IMO) out there. Welcome to HA's community. It's another black hole to dive into much like the home lab one we all know and love.
Welcome to the never-ending rabbit hole of automating your home! I'm honestly kinda shocked you weren't already running Home Assistant. It's the swiss army knife of smart homes and almost a rite of passage for homelabbers.
As a HA and IoT noob: thanks so much for going through your setup and delving into some terminology too. This needs to be the number one video for people just starting out and wanting to understand the fundamentals
Nice take Christian, but honestly some poor choices you made, first of all ZHA - zigbee2mqtt is so much better (and is easily supported by HA via addon, or docker image and you like docker :D), also the coordinator usb stick, much better with greater range and much, much lower price is sonoff zigbee dongle. But anyways, screw vendor locked zigbee :D
What's also very important is choose you Zigbee Channel wisely i.e. use 21. This is because if you choose the lower channels you end up with crappy WLan or if you use DECT than you also have problems. This is beacuse they all use 2.4 Ghz. Also do not plugin the stick directly in the computer but use an usb2/3 extension cable because of USB port interference. Next steps I suggest is get Power Plugs so that you have repeaters in the network as well as meassuting usage. Also get a P1 port Electricity meter connection. This all can than be hooked up in the Energy Dashboard.
Thanks for this video! After watching I have one question, you removed the Hue bridge and replaced it with a Zigbee gateway do you then still receive updates for your light bulbs and other Hue accessoires?
Hi there, To Christian and the community, I have a question: I will also start IoT this summer to modernize my heating system. I'll use Home Assistant too that will run in a docker container on a physical Linux host. But this server is in a rack in my cellar and I would like to know if there is out there a good POE powered hub that I could put somewhere else in my house to create the connectivity. I'm not completely fixed about Zigbee, Z-Wave or Matter because I own nothing for the moment but if there is something that can do several of them. If you also have some good valves that works without any cloud connection, I'll appreciate a lot! Great video, as usual! 😉👌
Thanks for sharing this video. In the IoT world serious number of things needs to be changed and we need some kind of standards, since we have seen that companies go bankrupt or change the features of their cloud product on the fly after it has been sold to the customer. So I'm thinking about the following points which a reliable smart home product has to accomplish with. - It must use open standards, such as zigbee for cummunication. - It must have it's own local API and it must be able to use locally. - The software or firmware must be opensource. - The schematics of the product needs to be open and accessible - The product must be repairable Maybe I;m missing some points, but this is what I think now about. If should be good if these points are also clearly visible for the customer before buying the smart home product.
Just to clearify: You have an Server running Home Assistent in your network and maybe some sensors. Sensors are dump so the data from them can only be pulled by a gateway like ConBee2 which need the appropiate support of the software link like Zigbee2MQTT which depends on the device itself? How about zigbee sensors for example. Do they also need a gateway? It would make sense cause they are also dump by default right? Second question: What about the range. If you want to have one sensor really far away from the gateway how can it connect and how can it pull the data?
I've been thinking of making the switch to z-wave or zigbee or any of the other dedicated systems. But I already have a lot of my house fitted with TP-Link's Kasa switches, plugs, and lights. Maybe a better option is to just get a dedicated AP for my IoT devices? Anyone else with a bunch of wifi devices? What's your solution?
I started with Smart-Lights from Aldi, they were quite cheap, but for better use I've got a Hue-Bridge from a Find of mine. After that, I used IKEA Lamps and off brand switches and dials and so on… Now the days, I have a Turing-Pi with CM4 equipped where i run docker and pass-through the USB to it along with an octoprint, so the pi is not bored :) because my pi is encased in a server rack i used another zigbee-connector which has an Antenna which I extended to the front of my Rack with an KeyLock adapter. That worked really fine and is for me the best Way... Long story short, I love HASS and, sure, the docker version is incapable of all things out of the box, but most things you could add with some minor config tweaking, like HACS what is a really useful plugin but on docker not out of the box possible...
Holyyyyyy.. same as me as well. Recently I just bought a new house, my very first own house and finally I can work on something. Let's do this together!
Would love to see your take on the voice assistant side of things. My reliance on Alexa and the lackluster HA integration options are the biggest impediment to me going all in with HA. Also controlling RF devices would be cool.
RF control is possible using something like a Broadlink RM4 Pro, which is a combined IR/RF blaster that integrates with HA. I hesitate to say it pairs "nicely," as setting it up initially can be more of a pain than the official app, but once you do get them set up it works well enough.
Perfect that you're jumping into this. I've just set up a k8s cluster, bought a sonoff zigbee dongle that can have the firmware upgraded to support matter and started looking into homeassisstant.
„Wer sich mit Funk auskennt, legt Kabel!“ - Konfuzius, 700 v. Chr. The only thing you need for 30 Switching lights, 16 Dimmers, 4 RGBWW Strips, 20 Shutters & Blinds, Weather (Wind, Rain, Temperature), Heat Pump Status, PV Power Generation… … is a KNX Interface and a few YAML files. My house is 1 device with 205 Entities. HomeAssistant and KNX. That is truely all you need.
Maybe zigbee works if you have many devices acting as zigbee routers (ZR's) but I found zigbee battery powered devices (ZED's) have very short range and frequently go offline. So OK if you have lots of powered zigbee devices (therefore lots of ZR's) relaying the signal to the coordinator (ZC) otherwise wifi more reliable.
This is not really something that I have time for but will do if necessary. But when matter starts rolling out on more devices that work will have been a little unnecessary, right? Right now a have only wiser products and their hub. But I want a couple of other zigbee products. Wiser will get matter soon enough, so will that make it possible for me to add the zigbee-switch into the wiser app?
Question. If I wanted to ditch the vendor bridges, in homes of better automations and dashboards what happens to device firmware updates. I’m wondering what the update process would be for Phillips Hue, Aqara or other vendors. Will I still have to use their apps to update? Do t some devices update via their vendor hubs/bridges?
Ciao Christian, I need your help! I want to securely forward my home assistant (and nextcloud) using traefik and cloudflare as you did in your videos but I dont know how to do it, I have no problem with docker and other when in local lan, but I have always fear of exposing services to internet in the right and secure way. Could you help me?
Whats your alternative? I dont see enough discussion on this issue, I am on the verge of ditching all Zigbee. I find it highly unreliable, which is sad since I have 99% of my place converted over to zigbee via ha. I have a couple of repeaters, still unreliable. I feel like given I have great wifi, a wifi solution will be best for me - but that has its own issues since I have no neutral at the light switches, options are limited.
@@calhta indeed. I also had many issues wqith the conbee. Switched to a Sonoff Stick + Z2M and no issues at als. Also you need to set Wifi and Zigbee channels correctly so they don't interfere.
Wow, let me tell you I started with this idea for some easy setup smart home gadgets. So I just used with Alexa and some Wyze camera and switches. I got some more items so then I got me a smart things hub more items got me a Hubitat I was like you know what I need to just do home assistant so here I am I just downloaded Home assistant VM on extra mac mini running Ubuntu, first week let’s see
i use HA (Proxmox VM) ZigBee with Sonoff Devices and flashing custom Firmware Tasmota on it. Tasmota can do so much. all devices connected via lan and wifi localy without cloud crap :)
Hi Christian, thank you for your videos, they're much appreciated! I'm buying a house and I'm going to fully dive into automation as I renovate from scratch. I really loved this video but I couldn't help visualizing my home assistant Raspberry Pi controlling my roller shutter at the other end of the house: the ZigBee gateway USB stick cannot work as It will be too far away from the device. Is there anything I can do about it? Thanks
hi Christian, welcome to Home Assistant world. There is only ONE but BIG "problem" with HA: it never FINISHES ;-) I am there already for few years, including support to Nabucasa (the company behind HA) and truly believe it is THE BEST OPEN SOURCE project in the world (ok, maybe just after.... Linux itself). Please enjoy. But if you have home lab already spare yourself the "beginners" problem: go directly to HA in VM - you will understand why it is way better once you HA has (like mine) ... hundreds of devices connected there.
Oh, great!! Another series on smart homes / Homeassistant... 😂 Just kidding. Looking forward to what you come up with! HA is something I've started playing with many times but never fully committed. Hopefully soon I can get back into it.
Yeah, journey ahead for sure. I started tinkering with home assistant last year on an old Zotac EeePC (Amd E350, 6 GB ram, ssd), then I replaced it to a passive zbox ci331, 16 gigs of ram, N5xxx cpu. It runs portainer, home assistant, node red, db for the home assistant and plenty of room to tinker whatever I want. I use a usb sonoff zigbee bridge, and I control a lot of different stuff from ikea zigbee bulbs and switches, irobot smart vacuum, yeelight bulbs, sonoff door and temperature sensors, to a dozen shelly smart plugs. Sometimes I have funky issues with zigbee devices, some turns unavailable, meanwhile the wifi devices are rock solid. So most of my bulbs are wifi, and the switches and termometers are zigbee. Nowadays I buy mostly smart devices and integrate them to home assistant. The latest is a Xiaomi Tower Fan. Amazing that I can automate depending if anyone is at home, the temperature is over a level, etc. Next item will be an Aquara presence sensor. Lots of fun ahead!
Christian, I really like your videos, thanks for all the work you put into it! Just one warning: I think you should be a bit more aware of exposing personal info, like showing the map in this video with the location of your house (hopefully that was just a random IP location somewhere). Cheers!
you should make a video showing your complete smart home setup and how/why its connected like that. I, and im sure many others would love to see. Thanks :D
Finally, you're getting into the topic, too. This has been on my mind for a long time and I have already set up a large system - among others Home Assistant, Raspberrymatic, Philips etc.. However, I have another question about it. How did you build your subnets in sophos and how did you build the rules exactly without limiting the functions? That would be very interesting as well. Otherwise, I'm really looking forward to the next videos on the subject!
You did not talk about accessing HA from the internet. You'd either need nabu casa, which is like 6.5/month or you'd need to punch a hole on your router with port forwarding that comes with its own security risks.
FYI, installing Home Assistant on its own dedicated hardware or in a VM will allow you to install the full Home Assistant OS which will come with additional features such as the HA Supervisor.
It is not recommended to insert your dongle directly into your computer. You will get to much interference. Use a short extension cable to put a little distance between the dongle and the computer.
Can you update the firmware of devices connected through ZHA? Normally this is accomplished with the manufacturer software (app). Great content, thank you!
One of the organizing principles of HA is "Local Control". Since HA is communicating directly with the devices (in most cases), you can put them all on an IoT vlan, or firewall them off from the internet. Maybe this helps.
@@kennethroseGermany requires that every owner of a website or offering content on the web has to publish an imprint. Some of that is so that you can be properly addressed in case there are legal problems. Not having an imprint can be fined heavily, so you'll also easily find my address on the net.
Welcome to the club, your in for a treat. As your just getting into it, would recommend some others who might help - @paulhibbert @SmartHomeSolver @MarkWattTech
