What are the current options for non-propietary/multivendor lighting control? I want to be able to control it from my phone when on the house LAN without cloud involvement - no alexa, homekit, whatever.
Iāve used hubitat and home assistant. The latter will require a VPN of some sort.
Home assistant seems to be the answer at the moment. It can run in a container on a server or a pi (like the home assistant yellow board I set up). It uses āintetgrationsā to communicate with devices, zigbee and zwave are the two primary standards for mesh/low power devices, and integrations exist for a bunch of other local or cloud based smart devices too. It will only require a VPN is you want remote control.
Iāve got zigbee going with some dimmers, switched outlets (with power monitoring!) and small coin cell powered buttons to act as remotes. Itās been easy to set up and enables some really neat automation.
1 Like
If you want easy setup, Hubitat is the way to go. All local unless the device being controlled goes thru the cloud - some do that still.
Home assistant is very good. And very complicated. And needs frequent attention.
Both are accessible remotely with either a VPN ( I use Zerotier ) or in the case of Hubitat, the company offers a remote solution for a monthly fee.
The good news is that if you want to start easy and work up to Home Assistant, hubitat makes a great radio for Home Assistant. There is a mechanism for allowing HA to access the devices connected to Hubitat. So you wouldnāt have to start over if you begin with Hubitat.
It depends what you mean. Thereās basically a sliding scale of proprietaryness and jank.
If youāre talking lights, Iāve tried a few solutions, the only one Iāve used that actually worked the way it was supposed to was Phillips Hue, which is very locked down but does control the lights locally, if youāre using zigbee switches, your phone etc is through the cloud.
Matter over thread products are multivendor interoperable and controlled locally, but theyāre pretty new and in my experience still pretty janky. @jsnowfreedman and I have both been struggling with the nanonleaf bulbs and strips being intermittently non-responsive. You also sometimes still have to use vendor apps to do things like update firmware and not all features are there yet (i.e. automatically adjusting color temperature based on time of day, or managing codes on smart locks).
Home assistant works well, but isnāt necessarily local depending on how the integration with whatever products you pick works. zwave, zigbee, and thread radios will be local but wifi stuff may not be. Support is much more DIY and spotty than something like Google home or Apple home.
Basic Hubitat remote access is free. Home Assistant requires a subscription service or you have to do your own thing like a VPN.
Sure, if remote access was a requirement. If you donāt need remote access then you donāt need to pay a subscription or set up a VPN.
The premise of the post is local-only control without cloud involvementā¦
1 Like
Iām also interested in options on Richās original question specific to lighting options. Iāve used HomeAssistant for about a decade and have used Insteon for over 20 years. I probably have 30 or so Insteon devices in my home, all lighting. Iām looking for a replacement for them. I am strongly in the āonly local controlā camp because there have been too many instances where cloud based solutions have either become forced subscription, closed up shop, or simply refused to support older devices forcing users to throw out devices. This is saying nothing about the security implications of these products and services. These issues are a lot less likely to impact solutions that are based on local only control.
1 Like
Still had lots of super old X10 devices in a box somewhere. Not sure they are even worthy of a trip to the freebie shelf.