this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
643 points (99.2% liked)
Technology
58142 readers
4095 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Put home assistant on a raspberry pi, plug a Zigbee dongle to it, and start connecting smart gadgets to it. Or better yet buy a home assistant Green. You can check the home assistant docs to see if a smart device requires cloud connectivity to work — in general if it connects through Zigbee (or ZWave or Matter) then you’re good, but if it connects through WiFi then it probably is cloud based.
https://www.home-assistant.io/
https://www.seeedstudio.com/Home-Assistant-Green-p-5792.html
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/
Can confirm. I run Home Assistant and Rhasspy with Sengled bulbs and none of transmits info. The devices themselves aren't generally the issue, it's the hub that operates them that would be collecting and sending the info. Remove that, and you don't have to worry.
wow so Rhasspy is local voice assistant! do you have microphones places throughout your pad or do you go to a website first to speak or what?
You can use microphones wherever with HA and Rhasspy. Rhasspy is just the local voice and intent recognition portion, and HA executes the commands. This means you can have one Rpi in your place managing devices, and then have many different microphone-attached Rpi all over your house forwarding voice recognition intents to do whatever you want it to do. Whatever the mic is attached to will send to the HA instance and tell it what to do. No cloud.
Why do I need a RaspberryPi? I can't use my regular Linux PC? What is a Zigbee dongle and why is it mandatory? What do I do if he device is cloud based?
You can use your regular PC if you want, but having an always-on server (the pi) makes it more convenient to use from, say, your phone.
Zigbee is a popular wireless communication protocol used by iot devices. Without the dongle you won't have any way to talk to them.
If it's cloud based, buy something else that isn't.
Your Zigbee light switches won’t do anything unless the machine running Home Assistant is on. Being able to control your lights while the computer isn’t running is really convenient.