zigbee2mqtt VS Node RED

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).

Good question.

I expect that we're moving into a phase of AIs talking to AIs, and initially it'll be wasteful (because it'll be mostly English), but eventually, they'll derive their own language and seamlessly upgrade protocols when they determine they're talking to an AI. No clue how that will come about or what that language will look like, but honestly, it's kind of exciting.

Really interesting to think about how they might handle context, as well. Even though we have much bigger context windows (and they'll only get larger), context management is still a resource-management issue, which we'll probably continue to refine, as well. Imagine different strategies for managing both what is brought into the context of each request, as well as what form it could take (level of detail, additional references or commentary on it, etc). Things could get really unreadable even in English, and still be very interpretable for an LLM.

W.r.t. the graph-oriented interfaces, are you thinking something like Node-RED [1]? I'm seeing more and more people mention having LLMs produce non-text or structured outputs, like JSON, UI, and other things. Easy to imagine an LLM that wires together various open-source platforms, on-demand. Something like Node-RED for pipelines/functions, some UI tools for visualization/interactivity, other platforms for messaging, etc...

[1] https://nodered.org/

I skipped to chapter 9 in the article ("Clogged"), and it looked like Pipes failed because it didn't have a large enough team or a well-defined mission. As a result they couldn't offer a super robust product that would lure in enterprise users. "You could not purchase some number of guaranteed-to-work Pipes calls per month" is the quote from the article.

The reason I think that interesting is because that's the model these days for everything from AI tokens to Monday.com seats. It makes me feel like Pipes was before its time.

That said I've been collecting different "business glue" products that are similar to Pipes. To me, like you say, they aren't as interesting, exciting and intuitive as Pipes was, but maybe it just takes a little more digging. I tried to focus on open source tools but some aren't.

- n8n io: https://n8n.io/integrations/mondaycom/

- Node-RED: https://nodered.org/ (just read about this one in this thread)

- trigger dev: trigger.dev

- automatisch.io: https://automatisch.io/docs/

- Activepieces: https://www.activepieces.com/docs/getting-started/introducti...

- Huginn: https://github.com/huginn/huginn

- budibase: https://budibase.com/

- windmill: https://www.windmill.dev/

- tooljet: https://www.tooljet.com/workflows

- Bracket: https://www.usebracket.com/pricing (just SalesForce <-> PostgreSQL)

- Zapier: zapier.com/

Anyway I hope some of these are fun!

Source: https://github.com/node-red/node-red

I believe Node-RED (https://nodered.org/) the way to go. It's just an NPM package to install and you can run it how ever you wish (even on Windows). It has a friendly and helpful community with even the main developers tirelessly answering even beginner level questions. In fact the community forum its THE friendliest forum I've ever been a member of by a large margin. Node-RED's development is supported by the JS Foundation and it's completely free and open source. It's widely used in the industrial automation industry and even integrated by some PLC manufacturers such as Siemens.

Does anyone know if their are plans to implement something like this (or if there are already custom nodes out there). I'd like to experiment with things like looping and incrementing values (like a for loop) for a Ksampler for example. It's only an example though, so I am not looking for a ksampler specific solution; just a generic way to have a variable (e.g. Seed value), run some nodes that use that value, increment the value, and then loop back to the beginning until some sort of condition is met. Node-Red (an event driven node based programming language) has this functionality so it could defintely work in a node based environment such as ComfyUI (see here).