How many of you use Home Assistant as the brain of your smart home and an Aqara Hub M3 (or other hubs) as the “muscles”?
My setup consists of an HP 600 G2 mini PC running Home Assistant OS, with an Aqara Hub M3 connected through the Matter Server and all its child devices exposed to Home Assistant.
I’ve also managed to export scenes from the M3 to Home Assistant so I can use features such as the doorbell sound and the siren.
In addition, I use a Sonoff Dongle Plus MG24 to connect other Zigbee devices from different brands.
I’d be interested to know if any of you have a similar configuration and how your setup is organized.
I use Home Assistant with the M3 in the same fashion. The M3 pushes any Aqara device over also and it’s off to the races. (unbelievable easy to use).
I did recently discover I could navigate over in the Aqara App to Profile-Connect to Ecosystems-Home Assistant and use the scene and signal sync feature to push over some G5 Pro camera sensors (features) so when the camera detects a Person for example I have a Home Assistant Automation that Announces someone has pulled into my driveway.
I use the same automations to announce when a Person is detected on the North side, South side and rear of my house also.
For the Driveway Camera I only use the “entered the driveway” not the leaving detection feature. Having access to all the cameras sensors is awesome and opens the door for a ton of automation options.
I use Home Assistant as the main Smart Home backend (Brain) for automations and third party integrations. Aqara Hub M3 is connected via Apple Home Integration to Home Assistant and brings some Aqara zigbee devices to Home Assistant. Some other aqara and third party zigbee devices are however connected via zigbee2mqtt
Great, we more or less have the same setup. Personally, I decided to configure everything this way for a few simple reasons:
If Home Assistant goes down, I can use the Aqara app to create automations and quickly restore my smart home.
If the Aqara Hub M3 fails, I can reset the child devices and reconnect them through Zigbee2MQTT.
All my Philips Hue bulbs and LED strips are connected only to the Hue Bridge using the official integration. This means that, in the worst-case scenario, I can still control them using Hue wireless switches or remotes, independently of Aqara and Home Assistant.
In addition, I have two Aqara Camera Hub G3s and two Aqara Camera G100s.
The G3s are connected through the HomeKit integration and go2rtc, while the G100s use RTSP. For the live camera feed on my dashboard, I use Advanced Camera Card. I discovered that this setup allows the G3s to transmit audio as well, something that wasn’t supported when using WebRTC.
My goal was to build a smart home with multiple layers of redundancy across the different systems.
Thanks for sharing your camera insights as well!
I have alle the Aqara cameras connected to apple home as this is the most used front end here. For my use case I’m not sure if it makes any sense to bringe the camera feed into Home Assistant. Bridging to Apple Home via home assistant could result in a bigger delay I’d think
I wouldn’t say I use HA as the brain. I mostly use Apple Home. I certainly don’t like that HA is a single point of failure or that updates sometimes completely screw up my instance.
I am, however using HA to do my power management and it is very good for that.
I’m having issues with getting Matter over Thread to work, but this is because I’m running HA on a VM and using WiFi. I have to run an ethernet cable, and it should be fine then.