Advice: starting from scratch

Digital Lounge General Discussion
1

Just getting started. I haven’t purchased anything yet but have some old stuff. If you have experience and we’re starting from scratch, what would you do? I’ve been planning to to Thread/Matter but it seems maybe a little immature still. Everything with * needs to be purchased and open to suggestions. Here is the loose plan:

Raspberry pi, already several sitting in drawer. HA

*HA ZBT-2

*Inovella dimmer switches, a bunch all around the house.

*MM wave occupancy sensor, temp, humidity in a very small bathroom. Control light day/night brightness customizations or maybe just led strip as night light. No fan in there so it would be cool to yell “open the window” on high humidity.. Not sure how to get all of this in minimalist package and be able to sense through glass door.

*Onvis matter over thread smart plug (3ea)

*Water leak detectors for under dish washer, kitchen sink, and hot water heater

*Would love a DC fan controller

*FP300 occupancy sensors main house areas

Other stuff I have or planned:

*Ubiquity cloud gateway max ( I have an edge POE router and POE switch but house I’m going to isn’t wired considering using)

Ubiquity AC pro access points (3ea) old but have.

*Ubiquity G4 PRO doorbell (Non POE)

*Ubiquity G6 Instant (2ea)

Powered blinds, don’t remember what they are right now

Sonos a bit of everything

Samsung smart tvs Q60-old

Roborock (not matter unfortunately)

Nest thermostat 4th gen and temp sensor 2nd gen

I know thats a mess.

2

Sounds like you have a similar setup to what we have. We have Ubiquiti networking equipment and a smattering of smart devices. We’ve committed to Matter over Thread and have seen it mature quite a bit in the last couple years. Matter over Thread has seen greater adoption as I see fewer Zigbee and Zwave devices (definititely still a lot out there).

If I had to do it again, I’d probably chose Matter over Thread again. Yes, Inovelli doesn’t have a White Presence sensor, but they’ve hinted pretty strong at it and I would be surprised if they didn’t announce the project in the next few months.

Other than that, if you plan on staying in the house for a while, it’d probably be worth running more ethernet. You’ll need some for the access points anyway. Also we’ve hard wired our old Apple TV 4k which I think has helped our Thread network stability.

You’ve got a lot of great thinking and you’ll love Inovelli switches!

3

Thanks for the reply and input. I’ll stick with plan for thread. We used this house as a rental for the past 15 years. We are now rehabbing house and plan to move in for a few years. I had the entire house wired with Ethernet. We just painted everything and during that process I had all Ethernet, phone, alarm, and fire gangs dry walled in. I figured wireless was good enough now and I prefer clean walls. Oops.

4

Maybe, but I wouldn’t hang my hat on that… It’s not in their 2026 Roadmap, and I don’t think that was just an oversight. I expect they’ll eventually chew on it, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for anytime soon.

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5

I have a pretty extensive Home Assistant setup and its great if you know how to handle their YAML programming (UI for automations has improved massively over time, but there are still some things that just require YAML), but Home Assistant does require some time to maintain.

If I were in the “starting from scratch” category, and didn’t want to invest the time to learn all the ins-and-outs of Home Assistant, or just don’t have the patience to deal with Home Assistant, I would give serious consideration to Homey. I tried it out a while back and, for me, given that I already know Home Assistant well, I did not make a change to Homey, but if starting from scratch, I probably would choose it. At $400 it is not cheap, but you are paying for a good product which may require less time to maintain than Home Assistant but still comes with powerful automation features.

I also view Homey and Home Assistant as having the only two credible Matter implementations in that they both support the Mode Select feature for setting device options, allow setting of device attributes, and provide for button press detection (all 3 of these features are implemented in Inovelli White series products).

For comparison, I’ve tried out Homey, Home Assistant, iOS, Google Home, SmartThings, and Hubitat and would only recommend Homey or Home Assistant.

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6

I have a house full of zigbee running on Hubitat having just completed a major upgrade to my HA system from an older UPB environment (~160 devices). The Blue Collection is by far Inovelli’s strongest and the zigbee protocol itself is superior to others (especially when it comes to device include/exclude).

Ubiquity is a solid choice; DM pro and AC Pros are quite good. I have these myself. I’m waiting for matter to become more mainstream, more reliable and with a more extensive device catalog.

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