Hi all,
So I’m in mid-migration away from Alexa to HomeKit at the moment, and got some good advice and things to look at in a recent post here. Am familiar with the existence of Home Assistant which was in the original plan 5 years back, still have a Pi reserved for - but wife and life put that on pause. I know about Homebridge in that it exists. It’s possible I wind up going down one of those paths, or both, but am focusing first on ‘where I want to wind up’ and work from there.
Current setup:
Focusing on main floor only at the moment (second floor is a mother-in-law apartment) which has 3 bedrooms, large open combined entry/living room/dining room connected to an open large-ish open kitchen/eating area o the one side, then a T hallway with guest bath, my office, baby’s room with a jack and Jill full bath connecting those two, then the master bedroom, master bath and a sunroom.
4 HomePod Minis, 2 new, 2 used/refurbs, will probably be adding another 2 over time. For ‘right now’ still leaving Alexa enabled concurrently.
Hue hub with approx 30 bulbs currently including several for ‘driveway’ groups (garage sconces, lamp-post + front door entry). Covers driveway, living room groups, breakfast area in kitchen, master bedroom and my home office.
A few Kasa smart plugs which I’ll probably replace with the pair of Matter/Thread smart plugs I just picked up (Onvis), added a trio of nanoleaf Thread/Matter bulbs and a 3 pack of Eve motion sensors. I have a Schlage Encode Plus en route - I know Schlage will be coming out with a new model for full Matter/Thread support, but door entry is becoming problematic with a new baby, stroller, and occasional need to let a sitter in and out - so at least will run on Thread for better battery life and it is hopefully more robust vs August and the like/not being replaced every 6 months
Moving forward:
Well, I’m still working on basic automations , the most immediate being proper trigger and reset along the lines of these:
- When motion is detected in the Master bath from Eve sensor, and it’s after sunset - turn on lights to 5-10%, then turn off after a few minutes of inactivity. (I did find ‘duration’ buried in eve app properties, but unsure if this will work correctly in Home as of yet.
- When motion is detection in Master bath during daytime and lux < X (haven’t sorted right value yet), turn on at 75% and turn off a few minutes after no motion detected.
- Same pattern as # 1 for breakfast area with subset of kitchen lights for ‘motion triggered night light’ type of behavior.
- Will wind up mostly using proximity access for the home lock, but sitter will wind up with a code. If proximity (arriving home) or code entered and driveway group lights are not on and it’s > sunset (I migrated my schedule for these from Hue but have not confirmed working, basically they should be on at sunset then next hour, otherwise off), then turn on AND turn on some limited set of lights inside at X %.
Not entirely sure as of yet if will need to go to HB or HA/other to allow the relatively flexible automation and conditionals or not?
Rest of plan is right now some additional motion sensors and lights (the two other bathrooms) with similar ‘night entry and exit’ vs daytime entry in dim conditions on/off, one more motion nite-light and smart light set in the other half of the kitchen and a pair of smart dimmable switches to deal with the insider entryway and dining room many-bulb fixtures.
After that, garage door and start to look at blinds. There’s a lot of glass/big windows in this place, which we generally love, but in particular the breakfast room ‘around dinner time near sun-set-ish’ has two tall windows (out of five on that particular wall, all next to each other) with a separate ‘lite’ (another pane of glass) above them that manages to blast me in the face. No immediate plans to put smart blinds on all the glass in the house ($$$$ from what I’ve seen), but at least starting with the ability to drop them partway (none in place right now) like N minutes before sunset or something like that.
On the bathroom and for motion, someone mentioned elsewhere using built-in switch sensors which I suppose could work, but I expect the ‘cone’ isn’t really 180* for detection, in at least the cues bathroom and second bath, you’re entering from ‘behind’ the switch, so I think I’m stuck with motion sensors?
I also have a handful (6+) of Wyze cameras (yeah, I know, but go cheap before big $, and they’ve generally been ok other than phone home/security breaches - like virtually every other out there), a Ring Pro front door camera/bell (pretty solid BF deal year or two back), a Hatch Rest (baby combo light/sound machine), and a $$$ ‘Nanit’ (baby camera that lo and behold, looks like Amazon/Ring bought them out). I wouldn’t mind getting mainly the cameras onto ‘single system’ but not sure it’s possible or not (seems like even ring notifications/Ring API was deprecated), less concerned with Nanit (we have an alternate non-smart camera) and Hatch, but I don’t know what I don’t know at this point RE: what’s possible.
For new devices, am leaning Thread wherever possible (lower power, ‘better Zigbee’), am OK if Matter knowing I may be missing out on some specific capabilities at this point.
Unsure if any of the listed ‘legacy devices’ have a workable path, if I need to ‘think bigger’ and go the home bridge and/or home assistant route for the conditions/automations I want to do or not (or possibly to connect some of the other devices), and of course, any recommendations on the additional sensors, switches and the like are appreciated.
Oh, I guess one more point - wife factor leans on reliability, otherwise switches start getting used. The ability to set bulb brightness in ‘most’ of the house is quite useful due to the baby’s sleep times (even with sound machines, blackout curtains etc.). I’m ok loading up the Pi but reliability trumps recurring fidget time or likelihood of ‘randomly all lights on full blast in middle of the night’ type of behaviors. ;)
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