Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io
I have a combination of Lidl and ikea bulbs. The Lidl have lasted a couple of years, and are a bit ropey, plus you can’t get them when you want them (in the UK at least).
The ikea bulbs have been better, so far, and you can get hold of them a lot easier.
Both are connnected via a sonoff usb dongle and zha.
Hey there, I've got the same Zigbee dongle in HA through Zigbee2mqtt and it runs flawlessly.
Zigbee by design is fully local and can't phone home, and everything that uses Zigbee will be able to pair directly with your dongle without using the Hue hub. Check Zigbee2mqtt docs to ensure compatibility of the items you're planning to buy, but almost all of them should work.
I've got Hue and Ikea bulbs along with other Zigbee switches working perfectly. If Hue is too pricey, check Ikea Tradfri or any other recommended by Zigbee2mqtt docs.
Thanks for the advice, I'll look at the docs.
How's your RAM usage for HA? The pi I have is only 2gb, already runs pihole but I can buy another/run HA on my server, but if I don't need to, then I won't.
I ran HA on a pi 3 and then upgraded to a NUC with a Celeron using 4gb of RAM mostly because I used Plex at that time and needed better transcoding.
You can try running HAOS supervised on your Pi. Running supervised will let you run addons within HA such as pihole, Zigbee2mqtt, Mosquitto, Node-RED and others. After that, you can verify if you actually need to upgrade your hardware. You'll probably be fine with that amount of RAM.
When you switched from pi3 to NUC , did you notice any performance improvements? I'm asking because I run my setup on a rpi3 and it mostly works ok, but the latency is sometimes high, so I'm wondering if upgrading the host will improve things.
I didn't, but because the pi already worked fine and didn't have many addons running. I have since introduced tailscale, diyhue, frigate without a tpu, etc and the nuc has been rock solid (even with 4gb of RAM and a Celeron J3455).
I think it comes down to what addons you run and what type of storage you use (if you're using an SD card on your pi, you might want to boot from an SSD instead). Also if your zigbee dongle is old like the Nortek one, you might see improvements in responsiveness when upgrading to a zigbee 3.0 stick.
I have a newer ZigBee 3.0 dongle and run a few add-ons, but nothing big - z2m, nodered, mosquito is all I use. I will upgrade anyway, but I'm not in a hurry, it works fine, apart from an occasional delay in switching, which might be network related.