Smart devices

[Tricky Dicky]

I recently changed the manual TRVs on our radiators to the Hive Smart TRVs and what a difference it has made. Previously all the the TRVs were set to the required temperature but if you wanted to increase the temperature it meant manually resetting the TRV to the required temperature. However, if the rest of the system was up to the set temperature simply resetting a single TRV often made no difference at all. The Hive TRVs have heat on demand and working alongside the Hive Active Heating programmable thermostat can actually heat up individual rooms whilst others simply stay at their set temperatures. All this can be done with a short conversation with Alexa.

Richard

[ARW]

Adam

[Brian Gaff (Bed)]

Google are arguably ahead in the AI for the spoken word, but Amazon have the higher market penetration. Brian

[Theo]

I ordered an Aqara temperature/humidity/pressure sensor for a tenner from ebay. It's a tiny thing, barely larger than the coin cell that powers it.

I bit of jiggling with a CC2531 Zigbee stick (the firmware needed reprogramming, which I did with a few wires and a Raspberry Pi Zero W), and I've hooked it up to another Pi running hass.io

Setup was a bit fiddly - had to set up Mosquitto and zigbee2mqtt, for which there are hass.io plugins but needed a user creating for Mosquitto and telling zigbee2mqtt the login details. (It's all covered in the instructions)

Once enabled in the config, pairing is easy - just press the button on the sensor and it gets detected and all the channels set up automatically. All I did was rename it to something sensible, and I get this:

I'm impressed that it works so well wirelessly from inside the fridge, on only a single coin cell which is supposed to last a year.

Looks like it's not a happy fridge though...

Theo

[RJH]

Did you use hass.io to generate that graph? Could you have chosen a longer timeline?

One problem I've found with the Samsung Smarthing hub is that it's not easy to generate that type of thing - whether using their own or third party sensors.

[Theo]

Yes, that's just the 'current status' popup for a particular sensor. There's also a 'history' view where you can select a range of dates to see. For example:

although it only offers to show 1 day/3 days/a week in one go. There might be a way to change that in a setting somewhere, there are lots of plugins.

Theo

[RJH]

Ah right - thanks

[Andy Burns]

Is it showing you the temperature inside someone else's fridge today?

[Theo]

Nope - I'm not using the Xiaomi hub, so the sensors never get anywhere near the internet. They're just on the local Zigbee network, which doesn't have capacity to do much more than send periodic readings. They could send malicious readings but somebody would have to hack them locally to do that.

It's one of the advantages of using Zigbee instead of wifi - all the 'cloud' stuff goes away, the sensors are purely local-only.

Theo

[Andy Burns]

yes, I was pulling your leg

exactly why I've gone for the hubitat, so I can have local z-wave and zigbee devices.

[Roger Hayter]

It would be entirely possible to have an isolated WiFi network, either using VLANs or a separate access point. This might actually simplify the control of some sensors.

[Theo]

Indeed ;)

How do you get on with it? What do you find most useful - and anything you'd like to do but can't?

Theo

[Theo]

Indeed it is. However the business model of a lot of wifi stuff is they're controlled via a cloud app or backend. If you take the internet away, they tend to break.

A sizeable chunk of the Chinese wifi smart home stuff is controlled via an ESP8266 that can be reprogrammed with more sensible firmware, but it's nice for things to be designed out of the box to be local only as they are with Zigbee and Z-wave.

Theo

[Andy Burns]

only arrived today, so far I have it talking to a couple of ikea bulbs (dimmable with variable colour temperature, not full rgb) and google nest eavesdropping device

Seems it won't talk to this ikea remote, so I could have saved £10 by buying just the bare lamp, rather than the lamp+remote kit.

have some xiaomi temp/humidity sensors on the slow boat, plus a usb zigbee sniffer stick.