zigbee2mqtt VS homegui

Have you considered Zigbee2mqtt[0]? You'd be running an extra program, but the docs are really good, it's pretty lightweight, and MQTT is incredibly easy to talk to from python or basically anything else.

[0] - https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/

For Zigbee, I can recommend using the Zigbee2MQTT (https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/) integration instead of HomeAssistant's built-in ZHA system. It might be a bit more complex to set up, but it's very powerful and works fantastically. (User "simon42" on YouTube has some good videos about the topic, but they're in German.)

This is definitely better than many of the alternatives but still not perfect. With Zigbee etc you end up locked into one or more of the ecosystems, not to mention some manufacturers implementing it in a way that has weird quirks (see [1]). With esphome you have a limited choice of devices (would love to see more), but you also usually end up locked into keeping a 2.4GHz WPA2 AP for your devices (and you miss out on mesh, but also the problems when it doesn't work...)

1: https://github.com/Koenkk/zigbee2mqtt/issues/16717

I can recommend this: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/

You can keep your Hue bulbs and devices but threw away the app, hub, and need to work with hue as an institution at all.

I got a $30 USB zigbee stick to replace the hub. works great!

It looks like it uses zigbee? If you have a server you could run zigbee2mqtt. You'd also need a zigbee dongle / adapter.

\also posted on the z2m* github device discussion board

If you want to use HA on your phone, you would need to install it on the pi, along with either ZHA or Zigbee2MQTT for the Zigbee network interface. Debian alone won't be able to interface with most of your smart devices.

I still haven't understood if the devices will change the path using the better route or not (since I've just tested a bTicino switch K4003C and it keeps using the worst path with 1 or 0 signal quality over a near Ikea repeater with a signal quality of 50).

FWIW, I had similar experiences twice:

First with IKEA when they changed the lights on-power-up behavior on upgrade. This resulted in a hub becoming a 25 euro cc2531 stick on raspberry pi + Zigbee2mqtt and HomeBridge for integration with HomeKit.

And the past February Apple decided my Apple TV 3 was not good enough for being a home hub, and botched the entire home in the process, while I was away.

So now the whole HomeKit nonsense is out and instead there is a lightweight Rust app with a simple text file config doing both the orchestration and providing the light html UI.

https://github.com/ayourtch/homegui - in case anybody finds it useful.

As a bonus the users in the household praise the new system being much more responsive..

I am missing “turn all the lights off when last person leaves”, and full editing the colors via GUI, but not enough to bother to implement it :-)

I started with a similar path a few years ago - IKEA smart home gear. The controller went away fairly quickly. I stayed for a long time on raspberry pi + Zigbee stick from DeConz + Apple home integration using homebridge.io.

Deconz felt a bit bloated/buggy, so I switched to using a cheap USB stick from aliexpress, and using zigbee2mqtt, which turned out to be a pretty good combination.

Unfortunately Apple decided (while I was on a business trip) that Apple TV 3 was no longer good enough as a home hub, so all of my soft switches stopped working...

As a result in a couple of days I wrote a quick MVP replacement in Rust, which has been working very nice for me, and the "user" (significant other) feedback was that it is now much more reliable and responsive.

Putting it here in case anyone finds it useful.

https://github.com/ayourtch/homegui