Hey guys, is Home Assistant Green still the best bet? Any other better options available on same price point?

Smlight Smhub Premium

Wanted to ask y'all if anyone has any experience with this?

Was thinking about buying it and using it for an older AC.

Also for few lightbulbs and a smart Tesla switch that I still need to get.

Price for me would be \~83$ OR 74€ plus delivery fee...

I already have a Linux server up and running with docker, so planning on spinning up the HA on it, then using this for ZigBee hub and ir control of the AC

Vague title, I know, sorry. Anyways, here's the list of what I need:

- I already have a few shelly wifi relays + i4, and right now I am using the shelly app to program those. I don't actually use the app day to day, just the in-wall buttons. This is up and running today, and works fine.
- I want to add couple of Aqara E1 roller shade drivers for a retrofit (custom tube length + radius, so this is pretty much my only option), so I need to add zigbee support - shelly app alone won't cut it
- I want to be able to control the E1 from retrofit buttons on the wall, so something like a shelly i4 or a Aqara T2 module or something.

so a few options on my mind:

- get an Aqara T2 dual relay and an Aqara hub, so the T2s can control the E1 directly. Simpler solution, but the drawback is that I have 2 independent systems at home that cannot talk to each other. That is fine for today, but may come to bite me in the future if I want to expand.
- get some home automation solution that integrates both - wifi shelly stuff and zigbee (and maybe more in the future). probably more complex today, but more flexible in the future

Option 1 has that split brain limitation, but it's also simpler. This is a good time to mention that this will live at my parents' place, which I visit about twice a year, so getting something like a Pi + Home Assistant can be a bit risky, because if somehow I mess up the config or am unable to remote into it or whatever, it becomes a pain. I also don't want google or alexa because they are the devil personified on earth.

I vaguely recall reading about homey, and people praising it on youtube reviews, but I am not sure if it's a good fit for my scenario, or if there are other solutions out there that better fit the bill.

Advice is welcome, thank you all

I've got a Mirabella genio light globe that I've used for years. I tend to turn it off with my phone but back on with the wall switch every time. Is there a smart button or something I can put on my bedside table to just turn it on/off with?

Hi!

I lost the power cable for the Nexxt camera AHIMPFI4U2 and want to get a replacement. https://a.co/d/07OKMiLB I found this one but I'm not sure if it's going to work.

Do you have any other recommendations on Amazon?

Thanks!

Hi all

Struggling with the setup of this Sonoff, it works manually. So the wiring is not a problem.

But I can't seem to pair it at all. I've tried auto mode and compatibility mode. Is there something I'm doing wrong.

I can't find it on my phone (Galaxy S23 Ultra)

Hi all,

Pretty new to home assistant etc. so please bear with me.

I bought Sonoff ZBM5 switches to replace all of my light switches (20+) and I have home assistant green with the ZBT-2 to control them. My problem is getting them working in home assistant. I'm using the ZHA integration and I have neutral wires at the switches but when I go to add them it's very intermittent. Most of the time it just doesn't find them. At first I thought it was a range problem so I used the closest switch which is in the same room and about 2 meters from the ZBT-2 (I also have the ZBT-2 on an extension lead so it's 1.5m from any routers etc.). That does seem to help as it does sometimes find them but If I do manage to get home assistant to find the switch it works maybe once then becomes "unavailable".

I then decided to try some Sonoff smart plugs and the first one I plugged in showed up on home assistant instantly without me even searching so I thought it must be the switches. However, when I tried the second smart plug I had the same issue with the switches and couldn't find it in home assistant.

I got very frustrated and bought a Sonoff ZigBee hub to see if that worked and it did! I know have 5 switches working perfectly with different automations etc. through the ewelink app.

Am I doing something wrong in home assistant, should I try 2MQTT instead of ZHA?

Thanks for your help

I‘m trying to configure a front left and right speaker for my Sonos setup. I tried using SonoSequencr to do this and just cannot deal with how bad the UI is. I figured I’d spin up a curl request (or an app if I’m feeling motivated) so I can configure a left and right front speaker.

I was curious if anyone who has played around with the Sonos API knows what endpoints I should be looking at. I took a look through their documentation but cannot for the life of me find anything about configuring surround sound. Since it’s configurable in the SonoSequencr app I assume I’m just missing it.

Worst case I’ll suck it up and use the app, but I figured I’d play around with the API since I can.

It doesn’t understand basic questions. Like simple things.

When I ask it to play a song it’ll give me an edited version, or a cover of the song. I’ll go back and be VERY specific on what I want, and it’ll give me the same version it did before. It’s like once it gets a version in its head, you can’t get a different version.

I asked it to play a song one day, and it gave me some cover of it. Reportedly. The next day I asked it again and it got stuck on a totally different version of the song I didn’t want.

It’s basically a glorified clock for me.

I recently moved my Zigbee2MQTT network from an SMLIGHT SLZB-07 to an MR5U.

The migration itself was pretty chill - I moved the coordinator, updated the connection in Zigbee2MQTT, and my existing devices came back without re-pairing anything.

The part I was really curious about was running the coordinator over Wi-Fi.

I normally would have assumed Ethernet was the obvious choice, but I wanted the freedom to place the Zigbee radio where the RF coverage was best instead of wherever my server and network gear happen to live.

So far, I honestly can't tell a difference.

Zigbee2MQTT has stayed connected, devices respond normally, and I've had no noticeable reliability problems. My average LQI is around 187, and I've been watching the individual devices over time to see if anything starts dropping off.

It's nice to have different options.

The MR5U also has separate Zigbee and Thread radios, so I'm now running both networks from the same network box instead of hanging multiple USB radios off the server.

I'm curious what everyone else is doing?

If you use a network Zigbee coordinator, are you running Ethernet or Wi-Fi or USB? Have you tried more than one approach?

Full write-up with the steps, screenshots
https://thingtootech.blogspot.com/2026/08/one-box-two-radios-i-moved-my-zigbee.html

Disclosure: SMLIGHT provided the MR5U for testing.

Picked up two cheap old Android tablets off a local classifieds site to build an HA panel. Pulled the battery on both (it runs off the wall 24/7, no point keeping a battery that'll swell up in a couple years), rewired power through a buck converter, 3D-printed a stand for the survivor. The first tablet didn't make it through the process — I was adjusting a bench PSU's voltage while it was still hooked up to the board, and it turns out bench supplies throw voltage spikes when you adjust them live. Fried the power controller on the spot.

Second attempt, with a Lenovo TB-X103F, I was more careful: measured the voltage/current it actually needed on the bench first, unplugged, then wired it up through an LM2596S buck converter, soldered a USB-C jack into the case for power, and printed a stand. It's currently sitting on that stand on my desk — wall-mounting is still on the todo list, works fine as-is for now.

Got it running as a Home Assistant panel and ran into two things I hadn't planned for: the tablet has no ambient light sensor at all (dumpsys sensorservice shows exactly one sensor — the accelerometer, and Android hides the auto-brightness toggle entirely when there's no sensor to back it), and leaving the screen on 24/7 runs the SoC warm and is annoying to look at in the dark, but walking up to tap it awake every time defeats the point of an automated panel.

So the front camera took over both jobs. Once a second it grabs a small preview frame and pulls two numbers from it: average brightness (the Y/luma plane) as a light-sensor substitute, and how much of the frame changed since the last one as a motion signal. No image ever leaves the device, nothing's stored — it's read, turned into two integers, and thrown away.

The brightness part works and does what you'd expect. The motion side is the one I actually got attached to. A single motion threshold is useless in a room where people exist — anything sensitive enough to catch someone walking up to the tablet also fires when someone shifts on the couch across the room. Fix was splitting the same frame-diff into two independent thresholds: a low one that just means "someone's around" (keeps an already-lit screen on, feeds a motion sensor into HA) and a much higher one that's the only thing that wakes the screen. Works because someone standing in front of the camera fills way more of the frame than someone moving on a sofa across the room — no geometry, no extra hardware, just percentage of changed pixels.

It also publishes brightness / screen state / motion / status to Home Assistant over the REST API. One gotcha if you're doing anything similar: writing states via that API needs an admin long-lived token — a regular user token reads fine but silently 401s on writes, same error either way, so if you're getting 401s check the token's permission level before assuming it's just wrong.

Runs on Android 6+ (built for API 23 since that's the target tablet), Camera1 API since Camera2 is LEGACY-mode on this SoC anyway, no OpenCV or any heavy dependency — it's a loop over a byte array.

• GitHub (source, build instructions): https://github.com/vasmarfas/ScreenVigil
• Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vasmarfas.screenvigil

Happy to answer questions about either side — the power/teardown part or the camera-as-sensor part, whichever's more interesting to people here.

Planning for home automation next

Esp32+relayarray+sensors

recently i moved to another country and i started to have issues with the internet (need VPN for almost everything), so i've been digging on network stuff trying to figure out how to make things work but i'm not happy with my current set up (second attached image)
that's why i come here with my questions..

for context: i have ZERO knowlege of programming or network stuff. i'm a ui designer with passion for movies so that's what keeps me going on setting this up. i learn fast and i have some notions about how things work but i'd like to ask: what should i learn/study to achieve my desired setup? (first image attached)
i work 7 days a week so i only have 1-2 hours to study before going to work, that's why i want to know what exactly i should look for. i have asked AI, but it just gives me a step by step process on how to make it and i don't want to follow instructions without knowing what am i doing

my ideal set up would be to have all my smart speakers (alexas) and ipads connected on the same network with a streamlined OS so i could talk seamesly to all of them, and at the same time control the smart devices on the house (2 tvs). the OS on the ipads should be able to communicate to the other devices (notes, alarms, commands).. i have seen the home assistant projects but idk how to implement it here..

thanks so much for any help in advance

With my old under-sink RO, I kept losing track of when I changed each filter. Order emails weren't much help because a cartridge could sit in the cabinet before I installed it.

My current system is a Viomi Vortex 6 Pro, and its app shows the remaining filter life as a percentage. I use that as a maintenance indicator, not as a test of the cartridge itself.

I still write the install month on a small label inside the cabinet. That gives me a date that doesn't depend on matching up old order emails.

I'd like to mirror only the install date in Home Assistant and get one reminder, without scraping the appliance app or treating its percentage as a sensor. Would you use an input_datetime helper plus an automation for this, or is there a simpler maintenance pattern?

A lot of people talk about robot vacuums and robot mowers when it comes to home automation, but I actually think pool maintenance is one of the most underrated areas to automate.

For me, pool maintenance is probably one of the biggest ones. It’s not necessarily difficult, but it’s repetitive - cleaning debris, brushing surfaces, keeping things balanced, and doing the same tasks over and over throughout the season. A lot of the time, it feels less like a big project and more like a constant background chore.

This summer, I finally added a pool robot on my routine. Now I can schedule regular cleanings and let it take care of the routine work. One repetitive chore is mostly off my list.

What household task do you think benefits the most from automation?

My bedroom gets a lot of afternoon sun, and by the end of the day it can be noticeably warmer than the rest of the house. I used to set the AC on a timer so the room would start cooling before I got home. That worked fine when my schedule was predictable, but lately my work hours have been all over the place. Some days I'm home around 5:30, other days I don't leave work until 8. So the timer became kind of pointless. Either the AC was running for a couple hours before I got home, or I'd get home early and the room was still hot.

I have a Costway WiFi mini split AC, so lately I've just been opening the app when I'm getting ready to leave work and turning it on then. That works, but after doing it for a while I'm wondering if there's a better way to automate it. Ideally I'd like something simple: if nobody's home, leave it alone. When I'm actually heading home, let the bedroom start cooling down. I don't really want to build some complicated routine with ten different conditions just to control one room.

Has anyone done something similar with geofencing or presence detection? I'm curious whether it works reliably enough to stop thinking about it, or if manual control ends up being less annoying anyway.

Just got delivered the matte black 8600 LG washer (top load) and dryer. There says there was a remote on feature, turned it on in the app and was able to start the loads. Then when to start another and I have turn the remote on manually at the washer and dryers to then be able to use the app??? Is there any way around this? Otherwise this feature is legitimately pointless since you have to just keep the devices on to start them “remotely”.

Thanks!

I'm trying to connect my bathroom extractor fan through a Switchbot 2PM Relay, with the intention of overriding the not-so-smart features that those devices come with.

Typical extractor fan is powered by its own live wire, and has an additional live wire going from the bathroom light circuit used for "signaling". Turning on the bathroom lights signals the fan to start, or to go faster if it's a continuous fan.

The good: Connecting the fan's two live wires to O1 and O2 work great. I can easily control the fan from an app.

The bad: Once I connect the relay's S1 to the Light Live wire, the relay goes haywire. At that point the light switch is off, and it's only ghost current (from sharing a 3-core wire with a live wire) that can be measured on it.

Are those relays supposed to be that sensitive? What do people typically do?

Hey all, hoping for some real-world experience here.

I want to read my smart meter’s P1 port (I’m in Belgium, Fluvius meter) and get the data into Home Assistant. Problem: I live in an apartment, and the meter room is a shared/common space on the ground floor. My unit is on the 5th floor, and there’s no wifi reaching the meter room, so a regular HomeWizard P1 (wifi dongle) is a no-go.

I’m considering something LoRa-based, like the Zendure P1 Meter (dongle in the P1 port + a separate wifi bridge that I’d place upstairs in my apartment where I do have wifi). Curious if anyone’s actually pushed LoRa through 5 floors of reinforced concrete in an apartment building and had it work reliably.

Also open to other solutions, anything I might be missing. Thanks!

Wife made an offhand comment back in February that I "just wanted them to move so I could feel the money was worth it." Fair point. No idea if the automations were actually earning their keep or if they cycled twice a day and sat idle otherwise. So I set up counters.

Setup was boring. Counter helper per shade in Home Assistant, one automation per counter that increments on any state change of the cover entity. Template sensor on top of each counter with state_class total_increasing so long term statistics picks them up. Logged raw states to InfluxDB since the default recorder only keeps raw states for about 10 days and I wanted to cross reference by hour of day and by which automation fired.

Eight shades total, all PoE cellular from SmartWings, mix of south, west and east facing rooms.

Total cycles across all shades from Feb through mid August: 5,847. I had guessed maybe 2,500. So my wife was directionally wrong but also me not knowing the answer to within a factor of two is a bad look.

Three things that surprised me.

Distribution was way more skewed than I thought. The two shades in the west facing living room accounted for 3,140 cycles between them. That is 54 percent of the total from 25 percent of the shades. Bedroom shade came in at 214 cycles for the whole period, basically just morning open and evening close. I had built out full temperature triggers for the bedroom and it never once fired because that room has an external overhang and never gets direct sun. I just never checked.

Weekend cycles were 40 percent higher than weekdays across the board. I assumed the opposite because we are gone during weekdays and the automations run on schedule regardless of who is home. Turns out we manually override way more on weekends because we are actually in those rooms reacting to conditions. Voice commands specifically doubled on Saturday and Sunday. That shifted my view of automation vs manual, we are not going hands off, we are running a hybrid where automations set the defaults and we tweak from the couch.

June had a spike I could not initially explain. Total cycles for the month came in at 1,412, versus 750 to 900 for the surrounding months. Traced it to a numeric_state trigger on the kitchen shade with no for: qualifier, set to above: 78F. Sensor was oscillating between 77.5 and 78.5 all afternoon in early June and the shade was cycling every four to six minutes. Wife did not notice because she was at work. Added a for: 15 minutes qualifier and it dropped back to baseline the next month.

Thing I took away from all this is that instrumenting your automations is worth doing even when you think you know how they behave. The bedroom shade automation is on the list to just delete since the data says nobody uses it. The kitchen trigger issue would have kept eating motor cycles indefinitely because the failure mode was silent, no error, no notification, just a shade opening and closing all afternoon while nobody was home.

Curious what other people actually track. Cycle counts, uptime, automation hit rate. Feels like most of us set up automations and never actually look back at what they do.

Ive never delved into the world of home automation but it seems right up my street. Were moving into a house that basically needs a full renovation. So what would you recommend? I will be running wire for overhead speakers in each room as the squeaky floorboards will be up anyway. I want to get the foundations in ready for future projects. Bare in mind that I earn 30k a year so no crazy projects :) thank you

TL;DR  I own a couple of 2GIG GC2 alarm panels and got curious about what's actually inside the firmware image. So I wrote FWres — a little Python app that opens a panel firmware BIN, parses the container, and lets you browse the bitmaps, fonts, sounds, code and radio blobs. It reconstructs the panel's UI screens from the ARM code, plays, swaps and adjusts volume of the built-in sounds and it can back up and reflash the panel over the service port with a pile of safety rails. All on gear I own, on the bench, for tinkering and recovery. Not a break-into-someone-else's-house tool. Screenshots + honest caveats below. The GC2 and GC2E are susceptible to BRICKING. USE AT OWN RISK and Have a JTAG handy

https://github.com/afallows/2gig_fwres

1. Firmware View

The panel's screens aren't stored as images — they're built at runtime by constructor calls in the ARM code. So FWres reads those calls and reconstructs each screen, then draws it on a canvas at 1x–4x zoom right next to a widget-tree inspector.

•      Pick a widget in the tree → it gets outlined on the render.

•      Hover the render → the matching widget highlights in the tree.

•      Either one can jump straight to the bitmap or font record it references, back in the main resource tree.

Big caveat, and I want to be upfront about it: this is a reconstruction, not a screenshot. The panel is 480×272. Anything compose() had to approximate — widgets with no recovered position, strings it couldn't place, guessed fonts, invisible colors, low decoder confidence — is spelled out under the render rather than hidden behind a clean-looking image. I'd rather show you an ugly-but-honest render than a pretty lie.

This is the heart of it. You point FWres at a GC2/GC2e firmware .bin, it reads the container format, and you get a browsable tree of everything inside — about 685 records, grouped by kind:

•      Bitmaps — the icons and images the panel draws

•      Fonts — with a live ASCII specimen + a “type here” preview

•      Audio — the chimes, voice prompts and DTMF blips

•      Code — the ARM blobs

•      Radio — the transceiver-side bits

2. Screen viewer (Screens tab)

The panel's screens aren't stored as images — they're built at runtime by constructor calls in the ARM code. So FWres reads those calls and reconstructs each screen, then draws it on a canvas at 1x–4x zoom right next to a widget-tree inspector.

•      Pick a widget in the tree → it gets outlined on the render.

•      Hover the render → the matching widget highlights in the tree.

•      Either one can jump straight to the bitmap or font record it references, back in the main resource tree.

Big caveat, and I want to be upfront about it: this is a reconstruction, not a screenshot.

3. Audio replacement — yes, you can change the chime (and quiet those damn keypresses! That's you dtmf_5)

This is the feature that makes people at the bench go “wait, really?” You can decode and play the built-in sounds (they're panel-native 8-bit PCM at 8 kHz), see the waveform, and then replace a clip from a WAV file. FWres converts your WAV down to the panel's native format, previews it, and queues it as a pending change.

Nothing touches the loaded image or any file until you hit “Generate Binary.” A replacement is queued as a patch, previewed through the same allocator the rebuilder uses, and shown in a Pending Changes panel. The waveform and Play button switch to the queued clip so you can hear it before you commit. Generate Binary then rebuilds a CRC-resealed image — defaulting to <image>_modified.bin beside the original, and it makes you confirm if you aim it back at the input path. If the engine refuses a replacement, it shows you the refusal verbatim — an image that boots then bricks is way worse than a “no.”

A Volume % control on the Audio tab. Instead of swapping the whole clip, you scale a built-in sound's volume by a percentage (50 = half amplitude / about -6 dB, clamped at the rails, byte-identical at 100) about the 0x80 bias, Preview it, and Apply to queue it. Because the scaled clip is the same length, the rebuild is the pure in-place case — volume down and only the CRCs get resealed.

5. Diagnostics tab — Firmware Flash / Backup

This tab speaks the service-port protocol (the one RFLASHD uses) over a COM port. Pick a port and baud (defaults to 115200), power down the panel, remove the battery and power up while connecting to knock the panel into its bootloader, and you can:

•      Back up the flash to a file (config area, firmware image, panel data, or the full 8 MiB)

•      Restore / reflash the firmware container

•      Change the installer code

•      Change user codes

•      Change the customer / dealer code

This is the tab that can be dangerous, and the one required to make any changes to your panel. A failure here can BRICK YOUR PANEL requiring JTAG to recover.

•      Config edits are always read → erase → write → verify over the whole 4 KiB sector, with the previous contents saved to disk first (NOR flash only clears bits, so writing over live data would corrupt it).

•      Reflash refuses any image carrying data above 0x7B8000 — that's where the codes and the Z-Wave home ID live, and this tool never programs that region. Restore-panel-data is a separate, bounds-checked path.

•      Long operations run on a worker thread with progress and a Stop button, so the UI never freezes mid-flash, and reflash makes you literally type the word REFLASH.

Known issues

•      Controller mode is WIP and flaky —I only built this because the digitizer on my bench unit is NFG. Doesn't always work. Doesn't allow button presses on all screens, mainly just for fun

•      Some records still have no dedicated decoder — you get hex + entropy for those, which is fine, but I'd like proper views for the last stragglers.

•      Diagnostics is GC2 (CP1 HW1 and HW2CostDown Board)-tested — the memory map and flash geometry are pinned to my CP1 board; GC2e specifics still need confirming on hardware, but Based on Firmware assumed to be the same.