I look forward to getting my hands on one of these! Just need to work out where to put it in the house first.

And possibly waiting for a POE version. But that’s a nit-pick.

Is it possible to test this out using a phone or PC? I really like the idea of local voice assist.

I’ve eliminated 2.4GHz wifi in the house for this reason.
The only downside is, I really need to get a couple more WAPs installed.

HA has been dead handy when I occasionally need to use an old device, as I can flip the second radio on from a dashboard.

Don’t forget more length restrictions because the copper can’t keep up.

Yep. Damn Wizards infiltrated the UK commercial media a decade ago, and they never left.

It’s a balance to hit in article sharing communities too.
Too much leniency, and you just end up with people posting DMG articles, and tiny un-sourced blogs with snazzy titles.
Too tough, and you end up spending your entire life justifying why various borderline sources are not suitable.

I use them, and I love them.

They’re banned from the internet, and never complain.
I use both SD cards inside the cameras, and dumps over SFTP.

The general standard of integration with HASS is very good (IR control, alerts, streams, etc.)
If you want to access streams over a VPN, make sure that you configure the IP addresses manually in the app, rather than letting it auto-find (took me a while to work this out).

Doorbell cam: Lovely bit of kit. Button press and person detection hooks in nicely with HASS things.
I really like being able to answer delivery people (and be silly with visitors). 2-way audio works well in the app, I keep meaning to try integrating it with HASS now the latest version has capability baked in.

810A: Decent picture quality, the only fly in the ointment is that it uses H265 for full res, and a lot of open source things don’t officially support it.

510: Good value, and decent quality image. There is a firmware floating around that adds pet detection features too.

Hue bulbs now work on standard zigbee.
I’d have to double check that the newest ones still do, but unless Signify are being complete bell-ends, it should just work.

I switched mine over after I got fed up with that bloody hub requiring an app to do any serious config, and randomly disconnecting.
The response time seems better when using HASS too. Bulbs that are not yet paired can be easily added to the network, ones that have been paired need to be deprogrammed first.

This is how the Hue RGB bulb I have can be controlled in HA:

It’s fair to say that there really isn’t one standard yet for home automation.
You’re likely to end up with multiple radios just due to availability of products.
I started with a zigbee dongle, then got a z-wave one when I started finding products I wanted that only came in z-wave.
Then I got an SDR dongle to use 433MHz (lots of cheap gear uses 433)

I personally haven’t touched thread/matter yet.

The really nice thing about HASS is that if you can get it to talk to HASS…It can be integrated with anything else you integrate with HASS.
For example, I have some cheap zigbee push buttons.
One click toggles the hue bulbs for that room on/off. Two clicks toggles a daylight mode.
Press+Hold toggles a dim yellow mode for night.

Or for another, I have central water heating.
The toggle for heating on/off is a simple smart switch.
This is linked to a virtual thermostat in HASS, which in turn is fed by a simple thermometer that also feeds into HASS.

You can often make really nice integrations by keeping the hardware as simple as possible, then stitching it together with HASS.
Rather than buying one thing for all, and hoping it integrates well.

I’m looking forward to going over to Agile in the near future.
I was under the impression that you had to be electric only, but apparently you can have a standard gas tariff alongside. We just need to work out a few things like “how much could it cost us to make dinner during the peak?”

People apparently rub them with IPA.

I need to have a try of this, as I regularly burn through 2032s.

This is why I did a 180 on getting hives.

Honey is nice, but driving out the bumbles around here would be criminal.

I’ll just re-share mine from last time.
I tend to use the Horizontal Stack. On a mobile device, I just get one stack per line.
And on bigger screens, I get multiple stacks to make use of space.

General “Going out” page:

Internet speedtest page:

I’ll write a quick gist for anyone coming along:

One gas boiler in the house, each room has a smart TRV.
PIR sensor to set room presence, each window has an opening mag sensor. HASS has a general presence sensor set.

Each room’s temperature is targeted based on presence and window status:
For each room, if person is home at all, and has been in the room for 5 mins, and the window is closed, TRV to 19, boiler on if <19.
If the room presence is negative and the window is closed, drop TRV target to 16.
If the window is open, drop the TRV target to 7.

There is a little more detail that that in the article, but that’s the basics.

Awesome work, thankyou for taking the time to do this.

I too love a metal USB stick for the keychain, and my old DTSE9 could do with a refresh!

I can only speak from a UK perspective, but most home ADSL/VDSL/Fibre providers don’t have limits, other than “if your usage is tanking the network, we’ll ask you to knock it off” type clauses.

Most providers are also signed up to an agreement that if your speed drops 50% below the agreed speed on the package on average, they’ll either give you refunds, or let you out of the contract.

The only ones that throttle are the bargain basement operators aimed at people who don’t care, and one otherwise very competent provider that for some unexplainable reason only gives 1TB by default, charging an extra £10 for 10TB.

And I guess there is also a pricing step up to guaranteed bandwidth. For business use, they tend to be things like 1gbits headline, 500mbit guaranteed burst, 100mbit guaranteed sustained.

z-wave may be easier than expected, as I think the devices stay linked to the hardware dongle used. (This is just from memory, mind!). But if you need to change the dongle, perhaps less fun.

imo, it will be a bit of pain to get everything inside HA, but once it’s done, you’ll be inside a platform that is pretty open, and commonly used, with lots of other people (hopefully) posting up solutions to problems before you encounter them!
And because it’s software that will run on pretty much anything, you have the reassurance that even if something crazy happened, you could just reinstall an old version.

If it were me, I’d clear an entire weekend day, power off the old kit, and work away at getting HA controlling everything.

Nice to see NC becoming involved with the board.

I don’t run that much z-wave due to cost, but I’m all for improvements and tighter integration.
Especially since when I do want to spend money, ZW works very well.

Or maybe something like this:

https://www.securemeters.com/uk/product/room-thermostats/hrt4-zw-asr/

The unit with the buttons on is a simple relay, which hass can control to turn things on and off, and use a heating control with a temperature sensor.
But if you hit the button on the front, it also gives 30 minutes of on, which can be handy if the system had issues.

Or you could have a hass controlled relay, but also leave the old controller wired in on a manual switch.
So if there was a failure, you could go back to the old control by manually flipping it over.

It’s only Virgin Media to my knowledge who does this.
Most of the other providers are happy for you to use anything that works properly for VDSL or FTTP.

Most FTTP providers fit an ONT that puts the connection back into an RJ45 ethernet connector.
Then you connect to the provider using PPPOE. Anything past the ONT, you can do whatever you like.

While not strictly a QR code, I always liked that the Dolby Digital data between perforations on a film strip had a tiny Dolby logo at the centre.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound-on-film#/media/File:35mm_film_audio_macro.jpg

You can block or disrupt communications with LEO.
But you’d need the blessing of the country’s government to pump out that much interference continuously.