What is your smart home control setup and why is it the best way to go?
I currently feel like I have a mess of services and would love to tidy it up one day. I currently use 2 Aqara Hubs, Home Assistant, Alexa and Smartthings to control all my automations. Am I doing this all wrong and what would you change?
I’m doing something similar, but have a lot more devices.
For a long time I went with Alexa. I wanted to get more eggs in one basket though, because Alexa doesn’t work with everything, and I really wanted desktop web access.
I also have a Samsung SmartThings hub, although I no longer use it as much. A number of other proprietary hubs (Hue, Lutron, X-Sense, and one or two others), and one Aqara Hub M3. Even though I only have 2 Aqara P2 sensors, I want to start using Matter more, and the Aqara environment seems to be leading in that respect.
At this point, home assistant is my main control center. I self-host in a VM, and sync to nabu.casa.
I agree that Aqara is leading the way on all things matter. I like being able to bark orders at Alexa for somethings. I am also trying to figure out cool ways to automate those things too so I don’t have to tell Alexa to do anything because of the automations in place.
What is VM? Sorry
I was talking to a friend this past weekend about his smart home and he said he created multiple networks on his router so that he could have all his Computers/Phones on one network and all his IOT’s and Devices on another. I thought it was a great idea as a separator considering I have over 200 devices on my wifi. What do you think?
VM = Virtual Machine (e.g. VMware, Hyper-V, Virtual Box, etc.) rather than using a dedicated host to run it, like a RasPi or HA Green/Yellow/etc.
Separating networks is generally a good idea, or at least subnetting them. I haven’t gotten around to subnetting, as I’d have to start assigning static IPs to everything. My current router only allows for a “guest” network, and doesn’t allow punching through for anything (like MQTT for Opera GX). Many routers let you create several discrete SSID’s. Just one of those things on the list of things to do.