Home Automation done the open source way.

Live Better with Home Assistant

Or: What I learned from the Gigaset-Deseaster

To make things short - Gigaset, a former Siemens company, had a smart home product line. While super proprietary, I thought the price to be ok and the features were enough for me. Then, Gigaset went into bankrupcy and the insolvency lawyers failed all Gigaset Smart Home customers. Instead of finding a solution to continue to operate the devices, the proprietary software went into some software grave, the central proprietary server ceased to be and all (all) Gigaset Smart Home devices went for the lack of documentation and access to the devices into the hell of electrical waste. No access to the data anymore, no access to any APIs.

Alas, I have brand new Gigaset Smart Home devices which I can now throw away. Thanks, Gigaset management, thanks insolvency lawyers.

Going again into the trap of using a proprietary solution was no option, neither did I want to use again a cloud service which depends on some company like Gigaset Communications to not go bankrupt.

A friend of mine pointed me towards Home Assistant. Home Assistant is an open source smart home solution which you can run without any cloud services.

You can purchase a ready-to-run device for around a 100€ though you have to add an antenna for around 50€. With a total of 150€ you have a powerful smart home controller.

Then come the sensors. In my "trial setup" I went into all kinds of different manufacturers. To summarize my learnings:
Like in the good old Linux days, cheap devices seem to integrate better than expensive stuff. That might be due to the fact that poor developers can afford them or that the low-margin producers have no budget for fancy "improvements" or "interpretations" of the Zigbee standard.

I made good experiences with the Sonoff Zigbee products.

The more expensive fire and heat sensors from frient behave very strange when it comes to integrating them with the HA, but do work well once you trust the process.

Most of the devices in my appartment are however from IKEA. Ikea started with a proprietary way of doing smart home devices under the TRÅDFRI labeled product line. You can link Home Assistant to TRÅDFRI and access all the devices that way.

But even better: The new smart home devices from IKEA use the Zigbee standard - and that integrates directly with the Home Assistant and the Zigbee2MQTT add-on.

Products I use are the smart plugs called TRÅDFRI (which I found in the shop but not on the website) and the smarter plugs called INSPELNING who tell you as well how much power is flowing through.

The VALLHORN motion and luminosity sensor works well, as does the PARASOLL door and window sensor.

As an additional benefit, the IKEA devices use AAA batteries and IKEA has great prices on rechargeable AAA batteries..I'll let you know in a year how those made it.

So - what can you do with all that?

Switch lights on and off automatically
Monitor power consumption
Control the state of your windows (ever had a roof window open and rain came in?)
Create your own alarm solution
Make sure devices charge but do not overcharge, extending the lifetime of the batteries
You can integrate external data sources and create your own smart home "panel", using an old android tablet with Fully Kiosk
Or you can, as seen in the header of this post, flash an Ulanzi TC001 smart watch with AWTRIX 3 and use it to send you smart notifications with MQTT

Home Assistant comes with a huge number of integrations and add-ons, giving you plenty of options to create truly smart (and fun) solutions while being manageable for an interested person - the community contains a lot of information and is sufficient to get along. Some things require learning, others work out of the box.

But whatever you do - it's yours.