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Cake day: October 27th, 2023

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  • I didn’t say pick a brand. I said pick a technology. Some technologies are tied inexplicably to brands but not all. Lightning belongs to Apple. But USB and wifi are multi-vendor technologies. Can you name the brand of USB? no, you buy Logitech and Microsoft and DLink and dozens more brands.

    There are multivendor technologies in home automation. Z-Wave, Zigbee and MQTT/Tasmota are established, to various levels. Matter is a theoretically multivendor tech that is still nascent in the market.


  • go read the wiki ( http://reddit.com/r/HomeAutomation/wiki/index ) to learn about the basic technologies. Do some browsing to see what’s for sale in your market. Pick one tech to be your foundational system (I recommend Z-Wave or Zigbee) that can provide for >80% of your needs. Figure out what your likely runner up is that covers 10-15%, and expect maybe 5% weird gizmos.

    Decide if “suitable for use” is OK or if you need “best in class”. Even in tech, “best in class” winds up with prima donnas that dont play nice. You will find often a company does one thing incredibly well and is a total nightmare to integrate outside their tiny walled garden. Linking multiple walled gardens together becomes a constant pain to keep active. It is often less stressful and more successful to choose “B” products that play nicely over requiring everything be “A+”.

    Now pick a controller than covers your two technologies and top weirdos. You want a primarily local system so look at Homeseer, Hubitat, Homey, Zooz, Fibaro, HomeAssistant, OpenHab and ISY. Decide if you want a pre-built appliance or DIY. Be aware most appliances aren’t great at supporting more than 2 or 3 cameras as video needs a lot of bandwidth and storage. If you plan on multiple cameras you may need something PC based




  • there are hubs/bridges and then there are controllers.

    Every smart device requires a controller because the truth is, none of them are smart. At most you get a timer, which, let’s be honest, was available back in the 60s. It’s the controller that does IF/THEN logic, tying multiple devices together

    Hubs/Bridges let two different technologies talk to each other. Your router is a wifi hub/ethernet bridge you already bought. So you don’t need any bridges to connect Kasa devices. At least as long as your router can handle the number of devices. Many consumer routers are only given enough CPU/RAM to handle maybe two dozen devices.

    So the question you need to ask yourself about Kasa is where is the controller? Who owns that? Who can turn it off? What happens if they do? For most Wifi devices the answer is “in the cloud, owned by the manufacturer, who can turn it off whenever they want and there’s a good chance your switches become dumb switches”.

    Zigbee/ZWave needs a bridge, which is often a USB stick on a PC that acts as a controller or is integrated into a dedicated controller. Every $40 zwave radio is good for 232 devices. Zigbee devices vary but the vast majority are good for 100+ and even the most under-specced Hue hub is good for 50 zigbee bulbs.

    I use HomeSeer running on a mini PC with a zwave usb radio to control my 80+ devices. if Homeseer goes under, I lose remote control until I set up a VPN server. But all my devices will still follow all their programming, I can add new devices, new rules, and let it continue to run for years if I choose.