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.
It works but the manufacturers' implementations may be a bit wonky at times. Still it's cool not to have devices on the wifi, and zigbee2mqtt is just great.
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.
He's talking about Shelly.cloud, it's a great manufacturer with cool devices, most of them are easy to flash with Tasmota or ESPHome, but the original firmware is good too, and can be set to work 100% offline.
For contact sensors, I've got like 20 of the Linkind door and window sensors. They're Zigbee, and super responsive. I've basically built my own alarm system with them and HA. At ~$10 (USD) each, they were quite a bit cheaper than the comparable Aqara sensors.
My lighting is all Lutron, which has local control. Then for other devices I use Zigbee, and cameras are all on BlueIris. Audio is Russound. Local control is a red line I won't cross, if it requires some kind of cloud connectivity to work, chances are I won't buy it.
Local control is a red line I won’t cross, if it requires some kind of cloud connectivity to work, chances are I won’t buy it.
Agreed.
Cameras are next on the list, but one thing at a time. These periodic expansions/refreshes get expensive really quickly, so I'm trying to temper my desire to gut and replace everything at once. lol
Yeah, your edit definitely got it. Looking back in time, if I knew what I know now when I bought all my devices, I would’ve gone exclusively zigbee. Faster, extremely reliable and they expand and remap to each other automatically. I’ve slowly started replacing my non zigbee stuff with em.
Zwave always works for me - but costs more.
ZigBee is the bulk of my devices. If possible, I avoid tuya stuff but some solutions are only tuya (switches without neutral wires come to mind.)