Hello, i am a newbie in creating a smart home. I have researched a bit and planned the following stack just by reading and hopefully to get some suggestion to see if the following combinations would actually work
Goal
I am planning the main control to be Home Assistant, Homekit a nice to have, not necessary. I was looking at hubs (Aqara, Xiaomi, Ikea, Homepod) but a comment from r/aqara suggests that ComBee II is potentially a better solution
Components that i think might work
- Home Assistant + ComBee II: as the brain power
- Light bulbs: ikea rgb and aqara white/cream colour
- sensor: aqara
- curtain driver: aqara
- smart socket/plug: ikea and aqara
Components not sure how to integrate
- Mijia sensors + display: This is a bluetooth device that works as sensor but i am just going display those information it catches
- Aqara door bell: not sure if this is a zigbee 3 device or not
- Other bluetooth device
- Xiaomi vacuum: not sure what protocol but isn’t the biggest matter
- Unsure which brand is good for security cams
questions
- Any idea if the above makes sense in practice?
- Any experience on the few items that I wasn’t sure of?
Another vote for the Sonoff zigbee stick shared earlier. Be aware that there’s two versions (different chips) and I believe the most stable one is the Texas Instruments one so this is what you probably want to get.
I really like my Ikea bulbs and Home Assistant can deal with them in full. Nice things about the bulbs is that they are routers in their mesh network, so as long as I have a bulb close I am able to add zigbee devices.
All my zigbee devices are either Aqara or Ikea and all have been rock solid, the only one that gave me a bit of trouble was an Aqara TVOC Air Quaility sensor which stopped sending data once since I configured it, I updated the firmware and have had no trouble since.