Nico's blog

Simplifying my Home Automation setup

It's been a while since I wrote about Home Automation, so here we go!

The Problem

My setup for a few years now has been:

• Domoticz running on a Raspberry Pi,
• a RFXcom receiver,
• a PiziGate for Zigbee,
• an Aeotec Z-Stick Gen5 USB stick for ZWave.

I was pondering removing one of the Z* setup to simplify configuration, but always ended up not doing it.

Recently, I upgraded Domoticz, and this broke the Zigate plugin I was using, as well as the Zwave integration I had.

I could have spent some time fixing it, but instead I decided to:

• get rid of the Zwave part:
  • Zwave devices are more expensive,
  • Zigbee works well,
  • I couldn't backup the configuration of my Aeotec stick (this required a Windows machine).
• replace the aging PiziGate I had:
  • initially I wanted to go for a PiziGate+, which allows managing more devices,
  • however folks on the Domoticz forum advised me not to do that, and go for a TI or Silicon Labs "Coordinator"

What I did

I bought a SONOFF Zigbee USB stick, as it is well supported by ZigbeeForDomoticz (the new name of the ZiGate plugin), as it now supports more than the ZiGate.

I reinstalled the plugin by following the clear instructions, and it's all good now.

What's left to do

• I have added some of the Zigbee devices I had, to validate that everything works fine.
• I now need to finish adding the rest of the devices,
• and also order some new Zigbee devices to replace my Zwave ones (which I'll be selling to compensate that expense ^^).
• I'll keep my RFXcom, as it works seamlessly and I have no reason to replace it, but eventually as my 433 MHz sensors die, I'll replace them by their Zigbee counterparts.

Tags: Automation