Interesting Troy went full-on wireless for all this. I'll be building a new home soon and am somewhat inclined to run wires to everywhere that little sensors and activators and other devices will go. Mainly for more peace of mind re security, reduced spectrum noise, reliability (and of course power).

I just wish there were more wired product options out there. Love to hear recommendations.

Also, is Ubiquity generally considered more suitable now than OpenWRT/Tomato/Dd-WRT and the like? At present I have a fleet of off-the-shelf routers deployed at various properties with custom bits added to the firmware (for improved monitoring, history, auditing, even periodically speed testing radio links and whatnot).

I read sometime back Ubiquity killed off some of the programmability features and that lent some wariness to my long term plans to switch over to their gear.

An now just wait until Troy discovers https://esphome.io/

Program your IoT devices to function independent of the mothership (HA), use whatever sensor you fancy (as long as it is in the growing https://esphome.io/#sensor-components list), and of course soldering is required.

The Xiaomi stuff is great, I have a lot of Aqara devices around the house.

A nice alternative to the temperature + humidity sensor is this Xiaomi Mijia one which uses BLE instead of Zigbee and has a little screen which shows the temperature as well: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001355746608.html

It's also much cheaper at $3-$4 each instead of ~$11 each. I've been scattering them around and they're great, the display is also nice.

They can easily be added to Home Assistant with a Raspberry Pi or ESP32 ($3-4) using ESPHome: https://esphome.io/components/sensor/xiaomi_ble.html

Why not use hostnames instead of IP addresses? No need to assign static IPs then. I'm using hostnames for all my HA devices.

I’ve found the initial zigbee pairing more and more painful as the number of IoT devices in my house increases. Although normally a one-off at installation, with lots of devices present don’t expect it to work first time.

Occasionally when encountering bugs in various software/hardware combinations i have seen suggested fixes of ‘just re-pair everything to a hub’ which for a full house will take a day and drive you insane.

One additional concern is the environmental impact of the number of cr2302 batteries in use - one for most switches and sensor that aren’t permanently wired in - even with a 1-2 year battery life it adds up to a lot. I think firmware updates in current systems take a big bite out of theoretical battery life spans.

Speaking about network, I would have dedicated few lines to PJON: https://github.com/gioblu/PJON

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I would have thought just using Unifi's DNS server to address each device would have been far simpler.