Home Assistant Integration

Wishlist Maybe Later
,
852

Just to update this Wishlist, I pushed Wyze REALLY hard for Home Assistant Integration during the last AMA. It was the second most voted-on question in the AMA but despite my strong hardball question, I’m afraid the news is not very positive:

They said in a separate post that they intend for the “Year of the Camera” to continue into 2024 and that next year will have a huge focus on AI:

I don’t disagree with most of what was said above. I agree that AI is going to play a major part in the smart home in the coming years. However, you can have the absolute BEST AI in the world, but if it is 100% cloud-dependent, can’t be used with other devices (no integration with things like Home Assistant) and can only use your ecosystem, but your ecosystem is no longer expanding the smart home, just camera expansion, then it won’t matter if you have the best AI in the world if it lacks any of the other stuff critical for a really good smart home.

I still look forward to what Wyze does with their “AI 2.0,” and more, but I think they will come to regret not fully supporting Home Assistant sooner and not building out their smart home ecosystem more. There are only so many cameras a person needs, but people will always need general smart home expansion. An AI that is basically just limited to cameras will be hobbled when it comes to people’s smart home automation needs. I suspect that it will get to the point where they’ll have to add Home Assistant support if they really want to compete to “win the smart home.”

Time will tell. They said they are “happy to look into more” so you never know…Anyway, just wanted to update people that I did ask about Home Assistant in the latest AMA, and did as great a job as I could in the question to point out why they should change their stance. I don’t think it will happen any time soon still. Thought some of you following this thread would appreciate an update on the latest info though. :+1:

5 Likes
853

@carverofchoice thanks for the feedback on the AMA. It was smarmy of WyzeDC to try to undercut Wyze competitive Home Assistant integrations as

A true statement on the surface, but we all know what you intended. I’m very happy with my Amcrest/Dahua, Reolink, Yi, Ubiquiti integrations where I can take meaningful action based on device feedback.

As you say:

When I setup my first WyzeCam V1 in early 2018 it was for occasional monitoring (cars in the driveway?, garage door close? who’s at the door?, etc.) Now it’s all about the “automatons”. One product-line ecosystem will never be adequate, but one automation integration system is mandatory.
[e.g. Reolink camera detects a car entering the driveway after sunset, turns on exterior lights. No internet connection required.] I have a dog’s breakfast of IoT devices all “unified” by Hme Assistant.

I didn’t even mention Frigate, as if I want to wait for Wyze AI improvements.

I understand most Wyze customers want a low cost, easy to integrate mono-culture environment but even those customers seem to be frustrated by heavy handed subscription lock-ins. Alienating your leading-edge customers and alienating your target customers doesn’t leave you with too my satisfied customers.

[Full disclosure: I just purchased 2 Wyze CAM OGs to provide eyes into hard to access utility spaces. No automatons required. No event videos required. No subscription. Everything in its place]

2 Likes
854

Has anyone in here successfully paired Wyze Contact sensors to any other 915mHz bridge or Hub through Home Assistant, other than the old v1 Camera Bridge?

I know people have had success taking the old v1 camera bridge and plugging that into Home Assistant instead of a Wyze camera and successfully paired Wyze sensors locally to Home Assistant that way. I am wondering if anyone has ever done that with any other RF bridge/hub, especially one that has better reception coverage.

I have a couple of dozen V1 sensors that I can’t use on Wyze anymore (neither the hub nor the Bridge will complete pairing, even though they aren’t “bricked” or “brown-out” lock-up state status…though I do also have a few v1’s that did get locked up and lose their MAC address too), and I have a dozen or 2 contact sensor v2’s that I’d like to transition to local functionality on Home Assistant instead of cloud dependency through Wyze. I was hoping some other people in this thread had found some good alternatives for doing this with a better 915mHz RF capable bridge.

I love Wyze sensors (the cost, size, battery life, etc), but I’m just ready to transition a bunch of them to local control and Home Assistant use now (Will still keep some critical V2’s monitored on Wyze’s HMS), so I’m hoping to solicit some input from anyone else who may have done this or knows a good option to do this with. Thanks.

2 Likes
855

I use the same Webhook trick in IFTTT to communicate with the Sharptools rules engine. Sharptools works with HA, Smartthings, and Hubitat.

1 Like
856

I don’t know of any. I have 35-40 Simplisafe RF various sensors at 433.92 Mhz that are also useless to me as well.

I’ve just been slowly transitioning to Zigbee Zha (Aqara) so far and testing a half dozen sensors. Motion and entry, tied in with Alarmo. $14 each in packs of 3.

I want local as well, and under my control without monitoring. Although noonlight may integrate with Alarmo using their API. I saw a forked integration from the deprecated konnected.io integration on github that seems active.

The Alarmo hardware keypad is ironically a Ring Zwave keypad. Lol

When the Wyze bulbs I have go down, I guess Its Zigbee there also.

Wyze needs to pay attention, all I need next are Ethernet cables in the attic and Reolink cameras.

857

I also have a few Simplisafe sensors that are nearly useless to me. :slight_smile:

I finally just used a Wyze Bridge for Home Assistant to start converting a lot of my Wyze sensors over to be local sensors on Home Assistant through the 3rd party Wyze Sense integration in HACS. I like that the RF frequency doesn’t cause or suffer from signal interference from all the 2.4Ghz devices. They seem to work really well so far. The downside is that they don’t give off any battery information and once every couple of months or so it seems like a sensor might stop working. Pretty rare.

I have been thinking that I will probably just get Aqara contact sensors from now on for Home Assistant too because of this test showing they are more than twice as good as basically every other sensor they tested (battery life and reliability):

That video convinced me Aqara Contact sensors are definitely the best choice for future purchases for Home Assistant.

But I am happy to use a bunch of my Wyze sensors (which I already had) locally, and put them to good use in tons of places and not worry at all about signal crowding, etc.

That is correct. There are people who use Noonlight on Home Assistant with their own system. I currently just use my Wyze HMS on Home assistant. It still integrates reasonably well (I can change the alarm status, use routines, etc), I just can’t add 3rd party devices, but since I already have Wyze sensors on all my main doors, etc, It works fine for my current needs since the main Wyze integration brings the HMS into Home Assistant. Though I wish there were differences.

I’ve been trying to figure out what other bulbs to get. I think I want something like Zigbee, but it’s so hard to decide on which ones to get. For now, my Wyze ones have worked really well in Home Assistant. They surprisingly even connect locally, so they function WAY FASTER on Home Assistant than going through Wyze rules. I’ve actually been rather impressed. But I’d like to switch to something that can function without internet and probably something that will use Zigbee or some other protocol besides WiFi (I’d love to use thread, but everything with thread seems to be like 5x the price of Zigbee right now).

Sometime this Spring or summer I am going to integrate my Wyze cams into Scrypted and have some of that passed on to Home Assistant.

It would all be much better if Wyze made their own official Home Assistant Integration though. I did recently talk to one of the senior software devs at Wyze about this, and I will definitely continue to advocate for it, but for now I make decisions based on what CURRENTLY exists, rather than what might be in the future. I think Home Assistant is going to be the main smart home future. It is the second most active open source project in the world. It will be extremely hard for anyone to compete against that in the long term. It is progressing at an insanely fast pace. Wyze should seriously just find a way to make a good local integration that offers a bunch of free stuff and which also adds a bunch of EXTRA value from their AI subscription features that they have. If they do a good integration in the right way, it could pay off big for them and some of their users will still be happy to have their subscriptions for extra features, etc, while those who don’t want subscriptions will still buy their hardware and like them (they were never going to get those people to use their subscriptions anyway, but at least they can expand their hardware and brand).

Anyway, that’s my $0.02. I’ll keep telling all the Wyze employees I talk to why they should really do this. May or may not ever happen, but at least none of them can claim they didn’t hear about it. :joy:

1 Like
858

1 - Most Aqara products are Zigbee and work very well with crazy long battery life (for their sensors and battery powered switches)
2 - Ikea light bulbs are Zigbee, easy to find at your local store and at a very decent price.

Both brands integrate perfectly and natively within Home Assistant (with a ZigBee coordinator) and work locally. No need for a third party integration or hack. Really 2 of my go-to brands for smarthome devices.
I’m done with Wyze.

1 Like
859

Unfortunately I’m too old to wait for maybe later.

My next brain food project is; I purchased an HP Z1 G5, i7-8700, new in box on eBay, I know the seller, although its a 2019ish model for $100 and a used Dell 24" monitor for $30. He has one more listed with 3 hours left.

Finish Alarmo with more aqara sensors, sirens, morion, wet etc. purchases.

The new sections (Grace) in home assistant makes it way easier to fiddle with dashboards and they’ll be building on that this year I’m certain.

By the end of 2025, if I’m still here or able, delete Simplisafe and mark it as a bad decision on my part and just eat the crap cameras, they’ll still do live view without $. For whatever that’s worth. Unless a class action gets filed.

Will be exploring and learning Proxmox Virtual environment and virtual machines. Ubuntu Linux in a VM, home assistant instance 2, frigate and/or scrypted and Reolink hook, Windows maybe etc. experimentation box.

Purchase 1 Reolink IP cam to test as replacements and build from there. Using the PC as an NVR. These ecosystems drive me bonkers. I understand though why they do it. $.

Even so, I’ll probably still have some Wyze stuck to my windows.

860

Yes! These are actually toward the top of my list to check out. Though, I admit that I have 2 major concerns with them.

  1. They are only like 800 Lumens and Wyze spoiled me with getting used to 1100 Lumens. That’s a big drop.
  2. Distance to the store and limitation of online ordering.
    • Unfortunately, my “local” Ikea is 45 miles away, so I don’t go very often. I was going to order them online, but I read an article saying Ikea doesn’t allow shipping smart home stuff unless you also buy some kind of large furniture with it. I am not completely sure how accurate that is, but we do plan to buy a new bed frame for my teenager soon, so I will probably do it then. In addition to the bulbs, I also want to try out some of those new Ikea sensors (contact, motion, and temperature sensors). But what if I don’t like them? Maybe I should only order a few to start with, and then what if I need/want more to keep my house consistent or replace them later? This limitation might be a deal breaker :sob: I’m probably still going to get some anyway. I have heard good things about them. I’m glad to hear you like them too.

I currently have a couple dozen Aqara smart buttons all around my house controlling Wyze bulbs, etc. I love them. Sure would be nice if Wyze officially supported Home Assistant so I could just use their awesome brighter and cheaper bulbs more reliably instead of relying on a 3rd party integration.

I’m excited for this. Not excited to rebuild all my established dashboards, but I’m glad for the updates anyway.

I just barely installed Proxmox on a mini-PC. I want to install docker and portainer on it to handle most of my containers, but will use proxmox for virtual machines. I was originally planning to run Frigate, but another user convinced me that I should check out Scrypted first now. Apparently it also does a ton of detections, etc. but it is more resource efficient and runs better in a lot of ways and seems to be more accurate. It will integrate with Home Assistant, and it now natively integrates with Wyze Cameras to pull a local RTSP stream, which is a big benefit. Some people have even switched to using just Scrypted instead of Home Assistant at all since it can do a lot of the same things and there was no need for a second layer. I can’t see myself going that far. I love Home Assistant too much, but it’s worth trying it out.

I will probably also try out a Reolink and TP-Link Tapo cam sometime this year. I already have cams from 5 different companies. I like trying them all out, even if Wyze is my primary camera company. I think it is still smart to have redundancy in critical areas, such as for when there is an AWS outage or whatever.

I saw Home Assistant / Nabu Casa actually saying something on their website somewhere that they encourage companies to reach out to them about integrations and saying something along the lines of how they will even HELP them do the integration. With that kind of offer, how can a tech company not at least look into it, particularly when ALL your competitors have at least some kind of integration now.

Yeah, I still like Wyze in lots of Ways, but I finally gave up on waiting for them to catch up to API necessities, and they haven’t expanded on the smart home in more than a year now, so I decided that if I wanted to continue improving my smart home, I had to start switching most stuff to Home Assistant while they’re determined to stay focussed on cameras in a closed system. Sad day. I hope they change their mind because there is a ton of potential.

1 Like
861

I think a standard 60 watt incandescent is 800 lumens so that doesn’t bother me personally very much since I only have 4 Wyze bulbs. :laughing:

Its a lot of fun and frustration, I’ve eliminated everything practically in Alexa, Google Home, Samsung modes & routines and Smartthings.

I may even be able to eliminate many of my Tasker profiles and tasks.

I’ve got a kiosk setup with a Fire HD-10 and Fully Kiosk, but have to find a use for it. Maybe when I actually have more automations.:thinking:

1 Like
862

Me too. I already had Alexa and Google speakers all over my house, and had a lot of automations and announcements running through them, but I’ve replaced most of them with Local Home Assistant routines, and I still use the smart speakers for announcements. :slight_smile:

(Although, actually, my Alexa Media Player integration just broke yesterday. Apparently the Home Assistant Beta I installed stopped allowing me to make announcements on the Echo gen 4 speakers I was using, though older Alexa speakers still show up. Grr…Will either have to revert or wait out the fix I guess.)

I also replaced a bunch of Tasker stuff. I do still have a few though. Tasker is really power for phone-specific things that Home Assistant Mobile doesn’t yet support on its own.

I want to set up some small tablets to be dedicated smart home dashboards in certain rooms. I’m not quite at that point yet though.

863

  1. Ikea does have 1100 lumen Tradfri white bulbs:
    Products - IKEA

  2. Indeed I’m afraid Ikea doesn’t ship small items or only starting at a certain shopping cart amount.
    Once in a while I order second hands Ikea bulbs like new on the French equivalent of Craigslist.
    I have a couple of Ikea motion sensors (1st gen with coin batteries) but they’re bulky compared to Aqara.
    TRÅDFRI series - IKEA

If you prefer AAA (rechargeable) batteries over coin batteries, Ikea has just released new contact sensors and motion sensors.

Like every Ikea product, they are quickly supported by Zigbee2MQTT and usable in Home Assistant :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like
864

Oh sweet! The last several times I checked, those new contact sensors weren’t for sale in the USA yet. I was waiting to see that they finally were available here.

Yes, I absolutely do. This is one thing I like about Wyze’s V2 sensors so much and have been sad there aren’t a lot of “good” Zigbee options for this. But with Aqara’s contact sensor lasting so long, I was willing to compromise a little.

I am a little concerned that IKEA’s motion sensors are rated so poorly though. Lots of people saying they have tons of false positives. I’ll still probably at least try one out because it would be so awesome if it works right with the AAA batteries, Zigbee, and sensitivity dial, etc. Anyone tried them?

Thanks, I didn’t realize they had a version with more lumens. That is good. I’ll probably get some. Shame they don’t have color bulbs with that many lumens, though I guess I rarely use color except in a few select instances, so maybe it doesn’t matter too much.

(Reminder for anyone at Wyze reading this conversation, these are good reasons for you to make an integration…some of us like me would be happy to keep using you instead. You have great sensors at a GREAT price, long-range, no signal interference, AAA batteries, etc, and amazing color bulbs at a good price and high lumens…you’d be a huge choice for lots of people if you were compatible).

865

I haven’t tried those new Ikea sensors yet.
The contact sensor looks a bit flaky in HA according to this presentation:

Same for me with color bulbs. I have a few Lifx color bulbs but I don’t use the color feature very often although it can be useful for visual notifications in certain rooms.

1 Like
866

Yes, I’m using the Aqara entry sensor regular models, T1 perhaps, and P1 motion, the zigbee ones.

They work fine and I’m waiting on anything matter for quite a while, plus its probably more expensive initially. Skyconnect is flaky with matter anyhow or so I’ve heard.

2 Likes
867

Matter will be available on motion sensor P1 via OTA.
It’s already on contact sensor P2.

868

I had a bunch of Ikea Bulbs in my cart, ready to order, and I just read some articles recommending not using any Zigbee bulbs that act as repeaters, because it’s too common for someone else to flip a switch off and kill power to the bulbs and then if those bulbs were acting as repeaters, it can ruin your entire smart home to stop working. I do have people in my house who still flip the hard power on bulbs, so since there is no way to disable repeater behavior on a bulb, that could wreak some havoc on my network. That really sucks though. I’m told Sengled Zigbee bulbs were specifically designed not to work as repeaters for this reason. I might try some of those, otherwise I might have to give in to getting a bunch of relays or non-neutral-wire smart switches instead of smart bulbs…but those are all so much more expensive and more difficult to setup though. Sadness. I was seriously seconds away from ordering a bunch of Ikea bulbs and now I’m back to hesitating again. :man_shrugging:

Do you guys have any experience with a good priced non-neutral-wire relay or smart switch that works well for them in Home Assistant? Eventually I’ll need some that can work as 3-way switches too. I think that’s the direction I’m going to have to go though.

So many things to learn. :slight_smile:

869

It’s the first time I read that having a bulb acting as a repeater is bad :thinking:
I didn’t even know a ZigBee bulb could NOT be a repeater.
If you kill the switch, the mesh network is supposed to rebuild itself and find another way to reach devices formerly connected to that repeater (the more repeaters, the better for that matter).
Even though it works differently, if you kill a switch, a wifi bulb will no longer be reachable either.
This is why you should replace your good old switches by smart switches (wired or wireless)
Either you don’t care about dimming and warm/cool whites and you only change your switches and keep your dumb bulbs OR or you go the whole hog with smart switches and smart bulbs.

Once again Aqara has a slew of smart switches models: with 1, 2, 3 rockers, rotary dimmer, wired or not…
Available on Asian websites. Problem is the wired ones all have square boxes at the back which can be an issue with your existing walls.

1 Like
870

Yeah, I read that some people will get a smart switch that supports “smart bulb mode” where it bypasses cutting the power to the bulbs and instead tells them to turn on/off but stay running. That way it can still be setup to run as normally as everyone expects it to work, but you can still change it to allow cutting the power if you ever really need to. I might look into some of those so I can do both because it would be nice to have repeaters everywhere if I can arrange it in a way that people aren’t trying to forcibly turn off the power to the bulbs because they can’t understand how it’s set up. I have had that problem with my Wyze bulbs…a guest (I get a lot of guests) who wants lights off in some room, doesn’t understand what a smart button is or a smart switch, even though the smart button is literally less than an inch from the locked switch, so they will unscrew the lightswitch lock (yes, it is screwed in and locks the light switch in the on-position) just to kill power to the bulbs instead of using the smart button. :man_facepalming: So if I can get a switch with a “smart bulb” setting that doesn’t allow people to turn the power off, that would be a reasonable workaround. :+1:

871

Do you NEED color?

If not, then why waste money on smart lights when a smart switch will do the same with dumb (cheaper) bulbs?

1 Like