The Jimmerness - Adventures in Home Automation

Setting up an alarm system is fairly intrinsic to a lot of Home Assistant implementations. If you're looking at ADT, Simplisafe...other options, you get their system and their controls - and you pay a monthly subscription for the good stuff. Home ownership, you get a discount on your home insurance if you have a security system that hits a third-party reporting service. Home Assistant doesn't get you there until you add something like Noonlight. Noonlight will be a future addition - this is already a long process. Materials: Door Sensors (I used Ecolink Zwave Plus [DWZWAVE2.5-ECO], $30 for each set of sensors - so $60 for front/back door) A Z-Wave USB for Home Assistant (I used Nortek HUSBZB-1, $50) Speakers (I used some early-model Sonos speakers) Probably a tablet to act as a disarm/arm location (I used Amazon Fire 7 (2019) $50 on Amazon) - you can also use any phone with the HA app, or any computer. Steps to get it working: Get your door sensors connected to your Z-Wave coor...

Purchased online for $50, the Nortek Z-Wave/Zigbee USB dongle seems like the easy way to add Z-Wave and Zigbee functionality to Home Assistant.  What is Z-Wave? It uses radio wave frequencies to connect to each other, in the 800-900 MHz range. This means it's not going to interfere/be interfered with, from your wi-fi network (running either on 2.4 or 5GHz). The Z-Wave devices can (but not all do) repeat signals, creating a Z-Wave mesh. It's limited to 232 devices, which is plenty for my purposes, but allegedly opening up to more as time goes on. What is Zigbee? It is similar, but uses the 2.4GHz range. Zigbee devices can also create a mesh, but due to a multitude of different implementations, one Zigbee device may not link to another brand's Zigbee device. Zigbee send messages faster, and can have 65,000 devices on the network...which seems like overkill. To Choose, or Not to Choose Rather than pick one, and be limited to one type of device - the USB dongle seems like a fai...