Zigbee Home Automation Question
4Hi, how are you?
I had a question about zigbee hubs. I notice the woot has the Echo Plus first generation on sale for 160 US quarters. Would anyone recommend this as a quality (yet cheap) zigbee hub? I hear these hubs are snazzy and what the cool kids use for their home automation needs. My home automation desire is when I open my apartment door the hallway light will go on (assuming said door has a contact sensor). I understand that I could simply flip the light switch but I’d like not to because I’m lazy.
Thoughts (specifically about the 1st gen echo plus as a quality zigbee hub)?
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@sammydog01 I miss Chris.
Short answer: Sure, why not?
Because: http://www.the-ambient.com/guides/zigbee-devices-complete-guide-277
Longer answer: I played around with controlling lights, etc. with the original Echo (registered with Amazon on 6Jan2015, so it’s somewhat elderly) and it worked fine. Then I got bored with it and reverted to manual control, because switches are both less fun and less irritating. And it’s pretty hard to hack a manual light switch, assuming you are into privacy and not having lights accidentally turned on by a passing neighbor.
Added: My original Echo is the one being sold at Woot, and it is still working just fine after 6 years.
@rockblossom thank you and valuable note from the ambient article:
Would you kindly post your best waggle dance to tiktok and post here?
@njfan
I have the Samsung smarthings hub, which has zigbee and zwave. I’ve wanted to move to a system that doesn’t require a connection to the internet to work (for several reasons), but over time I found that I have fewer and fewer home automation devices. I’ve down to just a couple now and it hardly seems worth rebuilding the network.
I would not let Alexa touch my home automation network though.
No no no.
Run home assistant on a raspberry pi, buy one of these: https://www.amazon.com/ZBBridge-Dual-protocol-Supporting-Multi-device-Management/dp/B08BFT44QL and flash it with Tasmota. Then zigbee to your heart’s content.
Bonus because it’s USB powered and communicates with the raspi via wifi, so you can put it on a usb battery pack and move it around for initialization/troubleshooting
I can’t speak to the Echo Plus’ capability as a zigbee hub. However, I can say that over the years, Amazon has certainly built out Alexa’s automation capabilities.
That being said, it’s still nowhere as versitile as Home Assistant, SmartThings or Hubitat.
SmartThings is probably your easiest “it just works” system. However, they’re currently going through some growing pains, transitioning from cloud based execution (aka, lights won’t turn on if your internet is down) to local execution.
Home Assistant is VERY DIY. Aka, if you don’t understand/don’t want to learn what @bigcurmudgeon said about raspberry pi and flashing, you might want to look elsewhere.
Hubitat is kind of in the middle. It’s fully local execution, but also allows for quite a bit of flexibility. The community is not as large as SmartThings or Home Assistant, but it’s growing.
Regardless, $160 seems like a lot to be paying for a hub, when you can get any of the aforementioned ones for a decent bit less, and if you still want an Echo device, pick up a dot or two for cheap.
@smigit2002 True, Home Assistant can need a lot of self support, but honestly in the year or two I’ve been using it, it’s come leaps and bounds. If I started today, it would have a much shallower learning curve than it did when I got into it. There are several active communities online, and very rarely have I run into an issue that isn’t explained in great detail somewhere.
Now, the raspberry pi, flashing third party firmware to different hardware, and chasing oddball zigbee bits on Aliexpress to me is half the fun, but you can go far more commercial with your setup if you want (I’m fairly certain you can buy a box that comes with HA preinstalled now). Many people even integrate with Alexa or Google home, if that’s your flavor. Personally, I chose Home Assistant because I could cut out all the big brother nonsense, and it’s been very rewarding to do so.
@smigit2002
As I recall, that 1st Gen Echo Plus at Woot was priced at $40… or “160 US Quarters”.
My concern would be limiting yourself to zigbee only. If you know for sure what devices you want to use, sure. But if you set up homeassistant, hubitat, smarthings, etc you can support both zigbee and z-wave devices (plus maybe some other things). I have a mix of devices, started using a lot of z-wave smart switches and like them.