Internet Of Things / IoT / Connected Home / Smart Houses

Are there any cheaper alternatives to the Hue motion sensors that are just plug and play with the Hue bridge?

I know there's options with Home Assistant, etc but I'd prefer to just keep it simple at the moment.

For the price, and the configurability within the Hue app, and the fact that the battery lasts ages and it all plays nicely together... just buy the Hue one.

You can get cheaper... I tried one too. But debugging and configuring was oddly difficult and I ended up buying the Hue ones to remove the mystery and hassle.

That said... apparently this is compatible https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/tradfri-wireless-motion-sensor-white-70429913/ but I'm not sure if you also need the Ikea bridge to be able to configure it, etc.

I /think/ that they can be setup without the IKEA hub, but that you can't update their firmware without it. The Reddit Tradfri bit is pretty good on this sort of thing, lots of people playing with bits there

I'm currently looking for a cheap Samsung Hub, and trying to work out if I want V2 or V3.

Cheers, that's what a google had made me think.

I've got one of the tradfri bulbs that is meant to work with Hue and that didn't play dice so I'm a little wary of those ones.

I had the Tradfri motion sensors working nicely with my hue setup, but I did have to buy a tradfri hub to update their firmware. This was probably about a year ago.

Happy to lend out my hub if anyone wants to try it out.

Just found an unopened shelly 1 in my box of fun while going through what i need to put on ebay as i make my house fully dumb again.

I bought it with great intentions of making my ceiling lamps switchable by both standard wall switch and remotely, but just never got around to it.

I see they're €14.70 with standard shipping to the UK, which is about £12.50. If anyone wants to collect it from camberwell its theirs for £10, or the equivalent in cans of craft beers!

I've got a bunch of sensors, bulbs, smart plugs etc in my house and wanted to link them together in an open source sort of way. I've got a raspberry pi i use as a mobile VPN device but I'm a bit unsure what other building blocks I need. My door sensors use Zigbee which (I guess) means I need a USB stick to plug in to access the state but any idea on software stack? I've seen mozilla-iot running before but not sure what the various pros and cons are to that or other implementations.

Help!

Home Assistant would be my first suggestion for this.
https://www.home-assistant.io/hassio/

It's not entirely simple to set up but not overly complicated.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/01/ring-doorbell-app-packed-third-party-trackers

Finally got around to setting up Home Assistant on my Pi. I'd like to set up alerts on iOS if doors/windows are opened when I'm not home. Is that something doable in the interface or should I be on the commandline?

Is there a lightweight way I could relay from some spotlights to a plug powered 12v LED strip? I'm guessing this could be done with home assistant and Sonoff, I'm hoping there's an easier way though.

Phase 1 of getting my ancient air-conditioning online: complete.

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I have no idea what you're doing 😂

Next level shit!
Please don't electorate yourself or burn the house down. Watching with interest.

My air-conditioning system is so old that no modern thermostat is compatible with it. The control panel is a just a bunch of mains-voltage switches that turn the various parts on and off.

So I've been designing a PCB that just replaces the physical switches with a bunch of relays, controlled by an ESP8266 or similar. But it's taken me three years to get to this point because I lack the electronics expertise to not set something on fire, or blow it up!

Ultimately, I stumbled across a company in Norfolk that makes exactly what I've been trying to design, but with all the fancy stuff like snubbers for inductive loads, etc. So I bought one a couple of weeks ago and I've been working on the software since then.

At this point, I can control all functions from my phone when I'm on the local network (you can see part of the interface in one of the photos), but the next steps are a Google Assistant integration and some extra features like humidity triggering, auto-off when no one is in the house, etc.

Nerd rep. <3

Thanks man. I'm not chatting with fossasat, but it's been a lot of fun and immensely satisfying!

That's old news. I've moved on to passive radar now

I applaud your efforts here.

So I currently have a few google home(s) of various shapes and sizes around the house. Also a few smart bulbs.

What I'd really like however is some sensors that set the lights to go on. Not knowing anything about this can I just buy a sensor or will I need a hub?

Just for simple things such as coming home and lights going on. Also one on the gate so we know when its been opened.

These are the bulbs I currently have;

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B082XRD6RM/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&th=1

An IFTTT routine may do that using your phone to know you are in the house. If the lamps are supported.

A sensor would need to be on the gate to know it's been opened.

A Phillips Hue/Samsung Smarthings hub system will do that all for you.

Do the smart things only work with specific bulbs? Or since the bulbs are through Google home could I connect the smartt things hub through that with the sensors.

Sorry this is all a bit confusing!

Smarthings supports quite a bit of kit on its own but it can trigger the Google Home routines as well. Have a look at Samsung to see if it supports the lamps (bulbs go in the ground).

@7ven and @Stonehedge - how did your thermometers work out in the end?

(looking into wifi thermometers to be able to check the temperature in one indoor room and the shed)

Pretty good overall. ESP32 and ESP8266 were mostly stable although I found that my ESP8266 had better battery consumption although that could be down to the fact I bought high end ESP8266 but used cheapo ESP32.

In terms of sensors, I found that DHT22 was mostly reliable but occasionally gave null readings but the DS18B20 was rock solid. The DHT22 did not like exposure to humidity which is an issue for a humidity sensor.

I'm prototyping for a glaciology project rather than home monitoring so ultimately I think we are going to use neither the vanilla ESP32 nor the ESP8266 but go with a Heltec Cubecell for the Lorawan capability. Everything has come to a halt at the moment due to the plague though. Heltec documentation sucks balls and not in a good way.

tldr: esp8266 with DS18B20 for inside home use imho.