Administrator StereoNET Posted March 26 Administrator Posted March 26 I've had a Z-wave based system for 5-6 years now that has been slowly failing, and Vera has been discontinued. Z-wave seems dead in the water now and Matter/Thread/Zigbee seems to be where's it at. I've had a HA Green in the cupboard for about a year so finally fired it up, replaced a ton of Z-wave inline relays with Zigbee smart plugs, and got HA in a basic format up and running quickly. Loving what I am seeing so far, and so many native integrations. Looks to have a solid future. One thing I am trying to find now is some sort of handheld type remote that can work with HA. I have an unfolded circle remote I haven't programmed yet, so going to look into if there is an integration for that. Any HA users here?
Administrator StereoNET Posted March 27 Author Administrator Posted March 27 Leaving this here for my own future reference - but it may also help others that are looking for a HA-based Logitech replacement.
GaryT Posted April 2 Posted April 2 I converted my control system over to HA+NodeRed and a bit of zigbee after using proprietary wifi+app based automation for years, and setting up some RTI systems in the past for clients and knowing how much of a pain (and expense) companies like that make it for hobbyists. My main TV and Music room is fully automated from a Sofabaton X1S, after trying half a dozen other affordable remotes (probably totally more in cost than one "good" remote), which at first i through was mediocre but then I found a way to implement custom local IP control and connect the remote into Homeassistant for effectively infinite control options. It's a bit more work to configure since I had to do some engineering to figure out how to connect into various APIs that had no native integration with HA and process commands with logical flows in NodeRed then plug that back into HA for control, but I have it doing everything I need, and haven't found anything I cant make it do yet. Although I wish it had a reverse API so I could send data back to the screen to display music/movie info or room temperature et, or a small touchscreen to be able to put a number pad on screen when needed. I use it to select activities for the room which sequence power and input selection for multiple devices, using a mix of direct IP control, IR emitters, air con, bluetooth for a miniPC music player and zigbee control for lighting and power outlets. I also found a handy IP command in for my LG OLED that blacks the screen without turning the TV off, so I also have that set up to a spare button on all video activities, so when I leave the room with something paused or when just listening to music coming from something that needs the TV on I can blank the screen to save the Oled and reduce distractions, when I press the button again it comes back instantly. My setup is slightly more complicated than average, since I have a mix of video and audio sources local to the room and in a rack in the garage on a video matrix, but now I can sit down and select what i want to do and everything just happens automatically. lights dim, AC sets to quiet mode, etc etc. Eventually I want to have every room controlled similarly (8 TVs in the house, but usually only 3 or 4 in use at once), but for now all other rooms are using custom programmed one-for-all remotes that have custom macros with IR codes in them that control the video matrix. with a bit more work I plan to have intelligent source selection, for example, if someone in the guest room selects "Watch Apps" it should round robin to the next free Nvidia Shield on the matrix instead of needing to be hard-coded to a dedicated guest box, or having two users on the same Foxtel box without them realising it and changing the channel on each-other. I have this programmed on a small scale for testing and just need to select the appropriate remotes to implement it. Just waiting to see if Sofabaton release their next gen remote soon, which is supposed to add an independently selectable emitter on the handset and a configurable touchscreen, while being similar in form factor to the X1s.
Administrator StereoNET Posted April 3 Author Administrator Posted April 3 Well done @GaryT - I can appreciate the amount of work that has gone into that! Sounds like you've got a good understanding of HA, which I have been very late to the party with. We're using some Sofabatons also, but I haven't yet attempted to do any integration with those. I did just demo the AVA remote, and it looks like that will do some integrations, along with running native Android apps. So I will be playing further with that soon. Glad there's some other experienced users here, and I might have some questions soon as I delve deeper
GaryT Posted April 3 Posted April 3 A big upgrade to making HA more powerful and configurable is to install Node-Red in the Add-Ons, then HACS (third party integrations repository) there you can find the Node-Red Companion plugin which lets you directly control entities and devices in HA, create things like custom buttons and elements for HA dashboards, and link them all together with logical visual flows to reduce the amount of scripting and YAML file editing required for more advanced control or sequencing. 1
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