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Comment by nicolas_t | Hacker News Reader

Slightly out of topic. I'm actually looking into smart home devices for an apartment I have that will be rented half of the year on airbnb when I'm not there. Specifically, I want to be able to control lights, the air conditioner, the heating and rolling shutters remotely.

I mostly want to do thzt because I want to be able to turn off heating and air conditioner remotely, but I would also like to have a master button to turn off all the lights when people live the apartment, a button to turn of lights on a path to the toilets in the bedroom and an alarm that automatically opens the shutters in the morning at the scheduled time (always found that waking up by sunlight is better)

Does anyone here have any recommendation of which devices I can control directly with something like a raspberry pi that's always on? I've read that Z-Wave's specifications avoid the Zigbee specifications pitfall that make them to vendor dependent..

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Zigbee lights are generally not vendor dependent. You can buy Ikea lights and they will interoperate with a Philips hub just fine.

To use a Raspberry Pi as the hub, you can use Home Assistant and a USB or GPIO Zigbee adapter such as the Conbee or Raspbee. Home Assistant generally requires a Pi 3. Automations are all defined within Home Assistant so they do not depend on having homogeneous vendors.

Thanks, so I would also need to use zigbee switches everywhere and use zigbee to turn the lights on and off? Are there any good websites that review zigbee switches to find which ones are decent...

I usually go to Wire Cutter for this but their specific article is not really useful since they don't recommend any pure zigbee switch but only proprietary solutions.

Yes, you would. I am actually working right now on a way to use an ESP8266 or ESP32 as an interface between dumb switches and Home Assistant (via MQTT), but it requires substantial rewiring and, being all DIY, is probably not suited for something that you rent.

For Zigbee switches, depending on your lights it could also be power plugs. Ikea and Philips are again the easy choices if they sell what you want. Depending on where you are based you could also find something that fits in your existing switchboxes.

HomeKit stuff will do that with an Apple TV acting as a hub. Once configured, you can then remote-control stuff from iOS devices connected to the same account or 'family' (once you turn on 'Allow Remote Access'). The list of supported devices isn't huge, but the certification comes with some useful guarantees, like not being dependent on the manufacturer's cloud service to work.

They have a full list of specific supported devices here: https://www.apple.com/ios/home/accessories

The devices on the list that act as hubs also carry that support across to anything else they control; for example, the Philips Hue Bridge lets you treat a lot of Zigbee 3.0 lights/switches as if they were native HomeKit devices.

Having the person renting to me being able to control the lights, air conditioner and rolling shutters sounds awful.

Well, I obviously wouldn't do anything when they are staying in the apartment but once they check out, I would use that to turn off the lights, air conditioner and close the shutters.

My parents have an apartment they rent and it's happened that guests forget to turn off the air conditioner at the end of their stay... It's not cheap to pay for that for multiple days not to mention that it's bad for the environment

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