Honestly I’ve always found the timer on the oven to be convenient enough for me. Maybe I’ll change my opinion once I have it at my disposal - it’s just not one of the things I’m constantly daydreaming about hah.

Oooh hadn’t thought about checking business hours! That would be nice too

Also sitting idly by wanting more people to talk about it! All I want it for is two features:

-converting units of measure hands-free in the kitchen(27 teaspoons to fl oz, as an example) -check the weather for the day on my way out the door.

IMO the inovellis are worth the price. I was in a similar boat - bought into the hue ecosystem (still think they’re worth the premium for how rock solid they’ve been). Plus the home assistant integration is sooo customizable: for all buttons (up, down, and config buttons) you can set an automation for single, double, triple, quadruple, and 5x button press. I have triple press on all light switches turn all lights on that same floor on/off, and quadruple press does all lights in the house (handy for when you’re on way out of the house or going to bed).

Still, can understand if you have way too many switches to make this economical. It’s not a problem to add a system of z-wave devices in the house too, but Ive never had a problem with zigbee and there seems to be more component options. IKEA zigbee devices are a killer value too!

One other option I don’t see mentioned here is wiring a Shelly relay behind your light switches. Your wife would never know they’re there (they install behind the switch in the junction box) and I believe they are very economical.

+1 for inovelli. Now that they’re generally in stock (got mine refurbished at a discount) I would use them across the board in a heartbeat.

You’re probably right. Would be cool to have on z2m, but it’s a pretty minor feature that I don’t think I’d use in reality.

Their ceiling light (T1M) works but you lose some functionality - basically can’t use animations for the ring light. Besides that it’s been solid for me.

Just updated this morning. Fortunately, the only issue I had was needing to add the “adapter: zstack” to the configuration of my z2m addon.

Fortunately everything appears to be very well documented on how to troubleshoot most issues but I’m sure people with older installations with lots of legacy code will struggle more (my zone deployment is only 1 year old for reference).

Unfortunately this will no longer be possible with the mg21 chip used in the blue switches. See Eric’s post linked below:

https://community.inovelli.com/t/zigbee-matter-motion-switch-project-linus-blue-series/10904/439?u=quaffs.cherub_0t

Woah really? I love learning such simple facts - thank you!

My favorite is Kalamata olives and pepperoni, but your post reminded me that fennel and sausage is easily a close second - did not expect to like that flavor combination at all (really just not a fennel fan). Everyone should try it if they get the chance!

I started with ZHA, but moved to Z2M because there was an automation blueprint I needed that was only coded for z2m.

Gotta say, I’m a much bigger fan of the z2m interface. There’s nothing wrong with ZHA but unless something major changes, I don’t see the need to ever switch back.

RatGDO can do this without the need for a magnetic switch. It’s a simple ESP32 board with easy-to-terminate wire terminals. It also lets you control the lights on your opener, see the current status of the door, and even open the door to an exact in-between position (if your door supports it).

You can program your own ESP32 if you like, or buy one from the guy that made it directly for ~$40.

Still - props to you for making your own solution! I know it’s extra satisfying when you can homebrew your own smart home solutions from scratch - just wanted to share another solution for people who don’t have the same skills.

I’ve never dug into this personally but can’t you set certain dashboards to be admin only? That way you can hide those entities on a dashboard only you have access to.

I assume this wouldn’t prevent someone from going into the full list of entities in the settings menu though.

This was a surprisingly well thought out and educational article - thank you! Was expecting a super basic article for the masses, but this had a number of quality suggestions, pros and cons of the different options, and even the authors personal opinion on preference of Z2M in case the reader wanted a real suggestion.

Thanks so much for this!

Only thing I think I noticed that could be corrected is OTA updates are no longer exclusive to Z2M - ZHA recently added this too, though I haven’t tried it yet and don’t see a reason to ever switch back from Z2M.

FYI- I received an email the other day that sonos officially added voice control for Spotify!

Fingers crossed! I know one YouTuber I follow mentioned it in his “2024 predictions” - wasn’t sure if he was pulling ideas out of his butt or if there had been actual commitment to this idea. Your comment gives me hope it’s the latter!

I don’t have an answer for you, but this comment reminds me how badly home assistant needs to add subfolders for organizing and grouping our automations

I never thought I’d be the kind of person to use voice commands, but it is so nice to tell it to turn on the radio while I’m cooking dinner!

I had something similar (although probably unrelated) happen last week. All of a sudden my router went offline and nothing was getting an internet connection. Sonoff coordinator lost connection with all zigbee devices went unavailable at the same time. Tried rebooting my home assistant pc, router, unplugging sonoff antenna, switching Ethernet ports, etc without luck.

Power cycling my Ethernet switches fixed it immediately. No idea why that did the trick. This has never happened before. I’m on Verizon fios if that matters.

Posting here in case it helps someone identify a common thread/root cause for OP and me, because I thought it was bizarre that an Ethernet switch would ever need to be power cycled!