2017 review — Home Assistant lands, cheap Zigbee opens

2017 done. Time for the year-end pattern.

Scoring the 2016 forecast

Eight predictions for 2017:

5/8 with one partial = ~64%. My worst year so far. Two of the three misses were Apple-timing-related (HomePod) or Samsung-timing (SmartThings v2). The Wink prediction was too aggressive.

The big call I got right: Home Assistant is the unifier. Eight months in, HA is more capable than SmartThings + Hue + Lutron combined, runs locally, and is configurable in version-controlled YAML.

What got added to the house this year

• Raspberry Pi 3 + microSD + Aeotec Z-Stick Gen5 + Conbee II (March-September). The HA stack.
• 6× Aqara door/window sensors (November). Total contact-sensor count: 6 (up from 2 last year).
• 1× Aqara human-body sensor (November). Hallway upstairs.
• 2× Aqara wall plugs (November). Zigbee router function + small-load switching.
• 1× Aqara vibration sensor (December). Dryer "load done" detector.
• 2× iPhone X with HA Companion App (November). Phone-based presence detection, GPS + iBeacon-equivalent room-level via the app.
• 3× IKEA TRÅDFRI bulbs (April). Closet and laundry — cheap Zigbee bulbs.
• A Reolink RLC-410 PoE camera (Dec 2016, set up properly this March). Backyard, RTSP into Synology Surveillance Station.

What works at year-end

• HA is the brain. All security automations, all sensor-driven logic, all dashboards — HA. Latency < 1 second across the board (local).
• Aqara sensors at scale. $10 door sensors mean I have one on every exterior door + several interior priority locations. Six are running, three more on the way.
• The Companion App + iBeacon presence. Phone GPS for "home / not home"; iBeacons placed in specific rooms for "which room am I in." The room-presence side is new this month and changes what's possible for automations.

What still doesn't

• HA dashboards. The default Lovelace UI is functional but ugly. I want to build a wall-mounted dashboard for the kitchen. Project for 2018.
• The Reolink camera in HA. RTSP works for recording in Surveillance Station; I can't easily display the live feed in HA without ffmpeg gymnastics. Coming.
• Apple HomePod's nonexistence. Pushed to 2018. The HomeKit gap continues.
• Multi-protocol single-hub. Three radios in the closet (Z-Wave, Zigbee via Conbee, Hue Zigbee via the Hue bridge). Wish I could collapse these into one.

Forecast for 2018

1. HA's Lovelace UI gets a real overhaul. (Confidence: 80%)

The dashboard is the weakest part of HA today. The community knows it. Lovelace as a customizable UI layer is supposed to ship in 2018. Major improvement expected.

2. Apple finally ships HomePod. (Confidence: 95%)

It's been promised twice. 2018 is the year — or the project gets quietly killed. I'd bet ships, but mediocre.

3. Water leak + smoke detector integrations land in HA. (Confidence: 90%)

I already have the Aeotec Water Leak. Going to add a Z-Wave smoke detector this year (probably the First Alert ZCOMBO). Automations: water leak → automatic main-water shutoff (need a Z-Wave water valve too) + push notification + lights to red. Smoke → call 911? Probably not 911; just notification + lights to red.

4. The Conbee/deCONZ → Zigbee2MQTT migration. (Confidence: 70%)

deCONZ works but Z2M's community + device support is bigger. Going to migrate the Aqara devices to Z2M. Expect a weekend project.

5. Wink finally folds. (Confidence: 50%)

Three years of bad cloud reliability + the parent company (Quirky) bankruptcy + Flex Capital ownership. Wink is a deadbeat in slow motion. 2018 might be the year.

6. Cameras enter HA. (Confidence: 75%)

I have one PoE camera. Going to add more (front porch, side yard). The ffmpeg + RTSP integration in HA is improving; should be usable by mid-2018. NVR side: Synology works but I want Frigate-class local object detection when that ships (rumored).

7. iBeacon + room-level presence becomes the default. (Confidence: 65%)

The iBeacon experiment this month is good. Going to deploy beacons in every major room and add presence automations like "Luke walks into kitchen + after sunset → kitchen lights warm".

8. A real dashboard hanging on a wall. (Confidence: 70%)

A tablet (probably an old iPad mini) mounted in the kitchen running a fullscreen Lovelace dashboard. Building it this winter.

What I'm buying in 2018

• Z-Wave water valve (Zooz ZAC36 or equivalent) + water leak sensors on every floor.
• First Alert ZCOMBO smoke + CO detector (Z-Wave).
• Front-porch PoE camera + side-yard PoE camera.
• Old iPad mini (refurb) as kitchen wall dashboard.
• Maybe an Apple HomePod if reviews are kind.

What's next

May 2018: a post on building the first Lovelace dashboard. Should arrive after the new HA UI lands.