Although, we’ve recently hit pause on our smart home development, a lot has happened in terms of the devices we’ve incorporated into our lives. There were also some small updates to our home Raspberry Pi server, so let me bring you up to speed!
Home Assistant and ZHA
Last time I’ve only just got and installed Zigbee USB dongle to our Raspberry Pi hub and managed to test it with 1 switch. Since then, we’ve got a lot more devices across the entire house and in the same time we are far away of being done with it.
So, as for now we’ve installed:
- 7 light switches
- 4 in-wall sockets
- 6 plug-in sockets
- 2 led drivers
- 3 remotes
- 1 smoke alarm
- 2 light bulbs
That accounts for maybe half of the house, but all the easy things are done and the rest of them requires either a jackhammer or a chisel. The reason is we have double sockets in single electrical boxes and there is simply no Zigbee hardware like that. We are still missing about 15-20 sockets and some 3-way light switches for the hallway.
We also had to get rid of the Ikea Tradfri gatewey. That’s because it’s also been using Zigbee and it was competing with ZHA for radio frequency and made it unstable. Fortunately, all the Ikea stuff could be easily switched to ZHA and now everything is in one place.
The Zigbee network with that many more devices is now far more reliable and we didn’t really have any issues with it.
Matter over Thread
Since we are Apple ecosystem, we’ve been obviously using some HomeKit exclusive devices. There are two items that are modern enough to get Thread and Thread over Matter update.
First one, Eve Energy socket supports Thread over Matter and the second one, Eve Thermo (the updated one, with a display) works with Thread only. Unfortunately, our 2 remaining Thermos are to old.
I’ve had some problems getting Home Assistant to work with Matter server I’ve set up on Raspberry Pi, but it has finally worked. That was simply a compatibility issue between Home Assistant and Matter server versions. After updating both to the latest, it worked just fine.
I’ve encountered another issue when adding the devices to Home Assistant, but I’ve finally discovered Apple TV and Home Assistant must be on the same network (ours is heavily segmented) to do so.
Since then, we’ve only had one problem with it. We had to cut the power to the apartment and after we put the fuses back up the devices had to be re-added to Home Assistant manually.
Our first smart appliance!
We’ve been forced to buy a new washing machine, as our old faithful’s pump has been making weird noises and giving up on actually pumping. It has been with us longer than we’re being married, so it has served us well.
The new device we’ve bought is from Miele, a German brand. It’s on the pricey side, but this brings some advantages with it.
First of all, it is extremely quiet. That’s because it is heavy as hell. It weighs 70kg, which makes it twice as much as the old one, brute-force damping the vibrations. I’m glad I didn’t have to drag it to the 3rd floor myself.
It’s in fact so quiet, you can forget it’s even running, so it’s very useful it can connect to WiFi and notify you it’s done. I’m usually not a fan of devices like that, because it requires internet connection for the smart part to work, but it also does provide semi-useful information, like water and energy consumption. Also, I didn’t know I’m going to like it, but it has an automatic cleaning detergent dosing system. You just shove containers of it in and forget about it until it notifies you it’s empty.
The final part is it has a system of two pumps and filters and that’s exactly what has failed in the old washing machine. We hope for extra reliability here.
It uses it’s own app for control, but there is also a HACS plugin for Home Assistant and that’s what we also have configured. You have to jump through some hoops to get there, like creating a developer account at Miele, get an API key but you only do that once and in the end there are no issues with it.
Rogue TV…
A big disappointment has been an LG TV WebOS update. Since the last major version, it has been “calling home” a lot. And by calling home I mean constantly connecting to the internet and many tracking servers, despite not having a reason to do so.
I am logging every DNS query on the network, and I have realized it’s done 1/6th of all 3 million queries in a month. A TV we don’t use in any smart way. On the top of that, it has on it’s own reinstalled a Netflix app I’ve removed and started connecting to Netflix spyware as well. I have decided to cut it from the Internet on the firewall and it has sent it’s operating system haywire.
Some of the menus are unusable, but fortunately, it turns on and off automatically with Apple TV and all the sources switching is done on a Denon receiver, so we’re good.
Home Lab improvements
Finally, our home server on Raspberry Pi has been upgraded with a HAT with M.2 NVMe drive. Previously, we’ve had an SD card failed twice but after switching entirely to a superior storage fixed the issue. The tiny computer has been rock solid ever since.
I’ve tried to replace Plex with Jellyfin media server, but the experience has been spotty at best, having issues with sound to image sync and poor subtitles support, so we are sticking to the former.
There also has been an obvious addition of already mentioned Matter server, so we can use HomeKit devices with Home Assistant, including it’s automations.
I’ve deployed a docker container with OpenSpeedTest, so we can now test internal network speed on our devices. I’ve also dabbled in Netdata service, but I don’t like their freemium/premium tiers balance and NextCloud, but for this I haven’t really found a good use in the household.
Keep calm and carry on!
All in all, I’m quite satisfied with the current state of our smart home. It’s there, running in the background and we don’t really have to do a lot with it, which is the desired outcome.
CasaOS, which I use to manage all the services has been running well, but I feel like the developers have since focused more on their x86 only ZimaOS, dedicated for the devices they sell. Hopefully they don’t abandon their original project, as it has been very pleasant and easy to use.
There are still a lot of things to do in Zigbee space, but I guess I will take that really slow, as it’s going to get more messy and painful with all the chiselling, drilling and electrical works required. I’m in the same time excited and not really looking forward to it… But hey, that’s life! No one said it’s gonna be all easy!
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