Hi! I am running Umbrel on a Raspberry Pi 4 and I have “Home Assistant” installed in it, I oly have some smart lights connected to it. I would like to integrate a Thermostat with HA. But I am a bit overwhelmed with the different types of connections (Z-wave, Zigbee, Wifi, …)
Do you guys have any kind of recommendation, what connection is better? I would like to keep it local (or connecting remotely via Tailscale) but I would like to avoid any cloud or third-party server solution.
What thermostat hardware can I buy?
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I’ve recently started with home assistant on a pi as well. Today I have 2 zigbee relay for my lights from Sonoff, 2 zigbee fire alarms, 1 wifi plug from Shelly and 3 Ikea remotes working on Matter over Thread.
Basically, any protocol you want to support other than wifi and Bluetooth will need a dedicated radio device. Luckily they are all pretty well supposed with home assistant. I have 2 Aeotec Zi-stick, one for Zigbee, the other flashed with OpenThread firmware (that’s for Matter over Thread, it wasn’t a good idea to buy twice the same device, I had to work around this issue). I don’t have Z-wave devices today, as I noticed they tend to be more expensive that the zigbee equipment. The new IKEA smart devices are very competitive in terms of price, they all work on Matter over Thread protocol.
In the end, you don’t need to choose. You can support all these protocols on the same raspberry pi. It’s just a matter of adding the corresponding radio and integration in home assistant.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters HA Home Assistant automation software ~ High Availability IP Internet Protocol MQTT Message Queue Telemetry Transport point-to-point networking RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SBC Single-Board Computer Zigbee Wireless mesh network for low-power devices
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 13 acronyms.
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I’m currently using a Meross thermostat as it was relatively cheap: https://shop.meross.com/collections/smart-thermostat/products/matter-smart-thermostat-mts300ma
Currently using the meross_lan (https://github.com/krahabb/meross_lan) integration to make it work because my LAN doesn’t support Matter.
Finally I am buying a Meross MTS215BMA with Matter. But what I don’t know is if I will need any antena for Threads to connect to my RPi with home assistant? or maybe this thermostat works with Matter over wifi. Do you guys think if I go with smart devices connected via Matter (I have seen most Ikea smart home devices support it), do I need a Threads hub/antena? If so, any recomendation?
That thermostat should work over WiFi and not use Thread so as long as your network supports Matter, you should be good. If it doesn’t support Matter, you can use the meross_lan integration.
