HomeAssistant things without relying on anything wireless

[manikyath]

first things first - i've no idea if this is in the right place, i suppose hobby electroncis makes the most sense to put this under.

 

the short of the question is this: i have a need for a smart home ecosystem (or lack thereof) that fits a specific set of preferences.

to add - for the sake of this thread, ignore any need for specific wiring in the wall. essentially assume that anything that might be present will be scrapped, and anything necessary can be added.

 

now, given this situation i'm hoping for a few things to come together:

- i want brightness control on the lights, and ideally also color temp. RGB is unnecessary, but the ability to have it is a bonus.

- there should be light switches in every room, that can control the lights in that room even in the case the HomeAssistant system is unavailable.

- all of this should tie into homeassistant for advanced control past what the light switches can do, but at least have some form of "failover" mode if homeassistant decides to pack up.

- i dont want anything to be wireless, this means no wifi, no zigbee antennas, no nothing.

- likewise, i want nothing to rely on cloud connectivity.

- for the sake of simplifying the electrical permit, i'd greatly prefer the lights to be on "safety voltage", which is anything below 50 volts.

 

i'd greatly prefer a commercial solution, again, because of permit stuff. but so far i havent been able to find anything that doesnt rely on wireless that isnt some unobtanium enterprise piece of halo tier equipment. if all else fails i've got plans to build my own stuff using a raspberry pi and/or arduiono/esp32 stuff. if anyone has recommendations for lights that can be controlled by voltage, that's welcomed too for this case.

 

there isnt exactly a clear view yet for exactly how many lights and stuff, but this is a crude idea:

- 8 rooms where lights on/off is sufficient.

- 2 rooms where color temp and brightness control is important.

- 1 room that might have several light points that ideally can be set to a number of different profiles.

 

none of the rooms really need multiple switches to operate while homeassistant is unavailable, but having at least one switch in each room is a necessity.

[Kilrah]

...good luck? 

 

For DIY look into ESPHome, you can run it on ESP boards with Ethernet (WT32-ETH01, Liligo T-ETH-PoE etc), it ties perfectly into home assistant since it's made by the same people, and can also implement a ton of logic onboard/communicate directly between devices if HA is unavailable. Could have one little box in each room that's wired with Ethernet (and possibly PoE powered) that handles that room's things.

[manikyath]

5 hours ago, Kilrah said:

 

For DIY look into ESPHome, you can run it on ESP boards with Ethernet

you know.. it never occurred to me that i could use ESPHome with boards that have ethernet...

[Kilrah]

Yeah it works great...

Made these a while ago, it's one T-ETH-PoE Ethernet board running ESPHome and one WT32-SC01Plus running the LVGL touch UI (drawback of Ethernet boards is there are few GPIOs left)... ESPHome one powers everything, subscribes to HA values and sends them over uart, the 4 buttons just control 4 GPIOs cause I was in such a hurry I didn't have time to look into writing a serial parser in ESPHome but you can.

Really cool to just plug the Ethernet cable and have it all up in 1 second, no slow Pi to boot...

 

 

[manikyath]

11 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Yeah it works great...

Made these a while ago, it's one T-ETH-PoE Ethernet board running ESPHome and one WT32-SC01Plus running the LVGL touch UI (drawback of Ethernet boards is there are few GPIOs left)... ESPHome one powers everything, subscribes to HA values and sends them over uart, the 4 buttons just control 4 GPIOs cause I was in such a hurry I didn't have time to look into writing a serial parser in ESPHome but you can.

Really cool to just plug the Ethernet cable and have it all up in 1 second, no slow Pi to boot...

this sounds like a great solution for the "on/off" rooms, i dont suppose you know about some voltage control lights for the other rooms?

[Kilrah]

16 minutes ago, manikyath said:

i dont suppose you know about some voltage control lights for the other rooms?

These have been piquing my interest lately:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001614814078.html

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005069644213.html

 

First could be driven with 2 mosfets, 2nd is fully addressable i.e. can adjust color temp by section... haven't looked whether there are tailored integrations yet

[Heats with Nvidia]

Maybe you should look into Dali controlled lighting. Thats the only "smart" lighting solution i have used so far that was not for the entertainment industry.

[manikyath]

5 hours ago, Heats with Nvidia said:

Maybe you should look into Dali controlled lighting. Thats the only "smart" lighting solution i have used so far that was not for the entertainment industry.

that essentially looks like what i was looking for.. and with some irony the first hit on google was a lighting website i've visited before.. they just keep that stuff well hidden from their categories apparently...

[Heats with Nvidia]

1 hour ago, manikyath said:

that essentially looks like what i was looking for.. and with some irony the first hit on google was a lighting website i've visited before.. they just keep that stuff well hidden from their categories apparently...

I am glad, i could help. I didn`t do a lot with it, but it seems to be a quite down to earth industrial standard. But its not flashy and wireless enough, to be good for everything they want to sell you for the home.

 

It has no required internet connection, no subscription etc... So it must be trash.

[manikyath]

2 minutes ago, Heats with Nvidia said:

It has no required internet connection, no subscription etc... So it must be trash.

this sums up my hatred for most smart home stuff so well