Internet Of Things / IoT / Connected Home / Smart Houses

True.
It's all a bit shit isn't it?

If I could turn back time, I would probably my have gone down the lightwave rf route, not Hue. Move the brains to the switches. Not the bulbs.

BTW, I have no idea if LWRF does all of the above adequately or not.

There is https://getden.co.uk/ which are nice smart switches, that importantly change the physical state when you use them via smart controls.

Only issue (with the Hive bulbs at least) is that they default to 100% when doing that.

Hue bulbs now have a power-on setting in the hue app.

[Edit] Just seen that this was already mentioned

Anyone running home assistant and want to have a play with zigbee2mqtt?

I forgot I had ordered a zigbee sniffer and cc debugger to try setting it up, and it arrived after I had lost interest in trying to make my home smarter.

I think they were like £20 each shipped from China, but whoever wants them can have them for £30 collected from se5.

Just fitted this Osram Smart+ Outdoor Lantern which is ZigBee certified product.

I don't understand how all this stuff work.

Here is the list of the other stuff:

• hub for Hive and Hive and the Hive App.
  
• hub for Neos and all the Neos Home Alarm kit and the Neos App.
  
• Panasonic smart TV.
  
• Google Home Mini.
  
• Samsung S10 phone with "SmartThings".
  
• Virgin Media Router 200MB
  
  

Nothing seems compatible 🤷🏻‍♂️🤷🏻‍♂️🤷🏻‍♂️

Looks like I need yet another hub...

Please dumb it down for me, why is nothing inter compatible?

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When you have johnny5 on your driveway how the fuck can’t you get your smart home to work? He should be able to activate it.

Lol, my solution was to get rid of it all til there was a single hub solution (or more specifically just buy stuff than can be controlled by home assistant).

You've got 2 solutions for your new light:
Get a raspberry pi, learn and use home assistant
Get a Samsung smartthings hub

Please dumb it down for me, why is nothing inter compatible

Because they are proprietary based technologies, using different protocols to communicate.

Thanks for the clarification - looks like I need a 3rd hub to go next to my massive Virgin Media router. Plugs and wires everywhere, a royal pain!

why is nothing inter compatible?

The business models for a lot of the hardware providers require dominance... i.e. they want to get you hooked on a couple of things so that you MUST buy the other things from them.

Only the central hubs don't have this problem (Alexa, Google, Siri)... but they have different issues (Invasive privacy issues, whole family on the Google ecosystem, Apple content tax).

Ultimately: Choose 1 or 2 core providers that you trust (i.e. Hue + Nest) and stick to just buying stuff from them and defer buying other stuff unless it's absolutely needed (which none of this stuff is, it's all a luxury).

I will look into getting an extension when I remortgage so might bite the bullet and go all in with one system that does it all.

So far, all the smart stuff I have came from either the forum, eBay or my home insurance (Neos from Aviva) so I've had very decent prices, far from RRPs. So really, I should have researched twice and bought once. Shouldn't complain...

There's quite a lot of non-proprietary stuff out there (mainly zigbee and z-wave I think). The issues I found were that a lot of it is quite pricey (a lot is individual components rather than stuff trying to tempt you into their ecosystem) and that the interfaces/instructions were basic at best.

The cheaper stuff in particular seemed to require firmware flashing, work to get integrated into HomeAssistant (or a really shit app otherwise), etc

Really laughed at this

Also LOLd

Is there any cogent reason to buy the Aurora hub instead of the SmartThings one?

The Aurora one works with only other Aurora products where as the SmartThings one appears to be much more inclusive. When I spoke with Aurora they claimed the SmartThings hub was not as good at scheduling and scene setting as theirs but I can’t find anything to back this up.

Problem with all these hubs is if your internet connection goes down, or their cloud service has a hiccup, they become expensive paperweights until connected to the cloud again.

I hope to have a couple of Zigbee switches to turn things off, and hope where possible to use zigbee compatible lamps and bulbs, as they can then be controlled locally.

Have just set up SmartThings hub, one AOne Smart dimmer switch and an old LIFX lamp as a trial. Scenes and automations were relatively simple to set up. Though the LIFX appears a little laggy as the SmartThings app has to communicate with LIFX.

8x GU10 Hue bulbs for £80 at Argos https://www.argos.co.uk/product/8860493?

Seems considerably cheaper than normal.

The gu10s are always on amazon cheap too - they were giving 3 away free (or close..) with any other hue product not too long ago

They are the ones that just dim not change colour temperature though.

Had a bit of a tinker with my hass.io setup again this eve having not touched it for a while.

It has been flawlessly running for the past month with just the flashed sonoff RF bridge, pushing notifications via pushover when someone rings the doorbell (cheap wireless doorbell that emits RF) or opens the front door (cheap RF door sensor) while both me and the missus are out, prompting me to check my blink camera. The RF bridge has enabled the construction of a smart security system quite cheaply, although it's not something I would ever use to replace an actual fitted alarm system.

It's also now got the pihole add-on running flawlessly, which I originally had running on a separate pi alongside openVPN before realising my router has openVPN built in.

I had taken delivery of a cc debugger and a zigbee sniffer a few weeks ago, which took so long I had actually forgotten that I had ordered, and put off doing anything with them as it all looked a bit complicated. I had a few minutes to spare this evening so decided to have a go at setting it up, and actually it turned out to be infinitely easier than I had built up in my head, so now it's set up and ready to go. I just need to get a hold of a single zigbee device (bulb or sensor) to test linking them up.

Anyone have any experience, actual or anecdotal, of the Lightwave RF thermostat system? They have some pretty massive discounts on their website at the moment and I need a new thermostat sometime soon.

Google Home down to £69. Google Mini at £29 from Google Store at the moment.

I really rate the free Google home mini that I got. I was a bit sceptical about my data being harvested etc but being able to get weather and music, set timers, listen to podcasts etc whilst doing other things is amazing. Have all my data you like, I'm not that interesting.

Can get codes for 'free' home minis on ebay for <£10 at the moment too...