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My smart home has been a mess for a while now. Before writing this, it was a combination of a Hue hub and HomeKit, the former I wasn’t too fond of, and the latter I tolerate. But since a few years I want to convert my entire house to Home Assistant: the self-hosted home automation software. And now, with the SkyConnect Connect, a combination of Zigbee and Matter/Thread dongle from Home Assistant, that transition is complete. However, in the process, I broke half the stuff in my house. Nothing works, and I couldn’t be happier.
Home Assistant, for those of you not following the Smart Home geek beat, is the almost universally accepted choice for free and open-source home automation. Unlike Apple’s HomeKit (which requires Apple devices), it can run on single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi, a Docker container, or really any small computer you can install it on. It also lets you dive really deep into the weeds with how exactly you want your home automated. It’s not the most intuitive choice, but it’s not that difficult, and if you’re even mildly paranoid about who has the keys to your smart home (which I am), Home Assistant is one of your better bets.
Aside from the issue of home security, interoperability is one of the bigger issues with home automation. Out of the box, tons of smart home gadgets haven’t played well together historically (I’m looking at you, Philips Hue). That’s gotten a lot better over the years, especially with HomeKit and Google Home, but Home Assistant has always excelled at this because it has a very active community of nerds who want all their weird toys to play nice in very specific ways. If you have a switch that you want to use with another device, someone has most likely spent a lot of time configuring it and putting that information online as a blueprint.
You may also be aware of Matter, the new home automation standard that aims to make many of these issues a lot easier. If you are not aware of Matter and Thread, I highly recommend The edgeits own explanation. The rollout is still in the works and there aren’t that many devices out in the wild just yet, but if all goes according to plan (big if) then there should be much less headaches in the future.
I wanted to get rid of that hub and get everything working in one little ecosystem
I had briefly experimented a few years ago with running Home Assistant as a Docker container on my NAS (my little network device that I use to store movies). I was very impressed with how well it was able to communicate, not only with my existing smart home devices, but how detailed it allowed me to program my existing devices. But what kept holding me back was my Philips Hue system, which for years had made everything outside its ecosystem a chore. Until recently, Hue relied on Zigbee, a low-power mesh networking standard, to make lights talk to each other.
As an early adopter of the Hue system, Hue hasn’t made it easy. Despite sharing the Zigbee protocol with other lights and switches, historically it’s like pulling teeth to get them to have fun playing with it. Ikea, for instance, has its own smart home system, complete with its own hub and app and everything (hey look, it now has one with Matter!), but a few years ago there were a lot of weird solutions to make them play nice. Of course there are great solutions and integrations I could use, such as Zigbee2MQTT, the Philips Hue integration and now Matter. But it was about the principle: I wanted to get rid of that hub and get everything working in one little ecosystem. I wanted a fresh start. This is where the SkyConnect comes into play.
Adding Zigbee (or even Z-Wave) to Home Assistant isn’t new. Plenty of USB dongles, such as the ConBee II, already exist. The SkyConnect is new in that it adds both Zigbee and Thread/Matter support, and while I don’t have any Matter devices in my home, knowing that it’s partially future-proofed and manufactured to work directly with Home Assistant itself was incentive enough for me to pre-order . It’s a good excuse to take the plunge and make a fresh start. Another option for adding Matter and Zigbee is the Home Assistant Yellow, a rugged little board that uses a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, but I don’t have access to a CM4, so I went with the dongle.
Normally I would just run this as a Docker container on my NAS, but I had no idea if the dongle was even compatible, and I thought it best to dedicate an entire device to running my house. Fortunately, I had recently replaced a network of Raspberry Pi’s with WiiM streaming pucks, so I had a few Raspberry Pi 4B’s lying around (if you’re still struggling to find one, rpilocator is a great tool). It was time to get serious. Installing Hass.io (Home Assistant’s operating system) is a piece of cake if you’ve ever done anything complicated with a Raspberry Pi; you just download the .img file or copy the URL, use software like Etcher to write it to a microSD card and follow the instructions from there. As far as open source projects go, this is a very simple process to get started.
The SkyConnect looks like a small blue USB drive and comes with a small extension cable, especially since USB 3.0 ports are known to interfere with wireless devices. The device itself is plug-and-play, meaning you don’t have to set anything up; Home Assistant will just recognize it and make it work.
Here comes the fun part: the slow, painful process of dismantling everything connected to the Philips Hue Hub. For this process, I was going to use Zigbee Home Automation. The process is simple but less intuitive than software made specifically for the hardware. Since you have to unpair lights and remotes from the hub to get them to work, that meant every switch in my house was temporarily out of order. Nothing worked, but I was excited because I got to do everything on my terms, using software I hosted and without a freaky little uncooperative hub holding my hand.
I started by linking my lights to ZHA (Zigbee Home Automation), an integration that would talk to my Zigbee lights and remotes. From there, Blueprints came in very handy. Blueprints are pre-made automation presets that simplify the programming process in Home Assistant. The Hue wall switches I had had to be reprogrammed. Awesome HA Blueprints is a great resource and had a compatible blueprint available, although I stumbled a bit on the helper text file I had to set up to actually make the blueprint work. From there I started setting up whatever light scenes I had.
The situation went from back to baseline to fun when I started integrating other non-Hue switches into my Home Assistant ecosystem. I have Elgato Key Lights on my desk for streaming and Zoom calls, and now, with Home Assistant, I can skip the app and treat the lights like any other bulb or switch, adding them to scenes and even automating them. I then started adding other devices to my home, such as sensors from Xiaomi that I could use to turn on my office lights when they detect motion. I also have several other lights and custom light strips that I’ve made by hand that run on something called WLED, a Wi-Fi based system that allows for very detailed control of light strips. The subject of WLED is an article in itself, but the long and short of it is that there is an integration for it in Home Assistant. Someone is also working on an integration with my WiiM pucks, although I really need to dig into that.
From there, things get really perverse. I installed HACS or Home Assistant Community Store, an add-on that requires a little bit of complicated installation but lets you download custom GitHub repositories to do some really crazy stuff. My colleague Chris Grant, a true Home Assistant maven, also recommended Node-RED, an add-on for setting up complex home automation using flowchart nodes. I was in pig heaven. I could do really crazy things right now.
Do I have to buy Home Assistant SkyConnect to use Home Assistant? Or better yet, did I need Home Assistant at all? Honestly No. I could have lived my life with HomeKit and the Hue app and been perfectly happy and satisfied. Everything was set up and numerous workarounds developed to get my patched system of devices to talk to each other. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten more cranky about who and what has access to my stuff, and I’ve become increasingly impatient if I’m not allowed to do something with my hardware in the most depraved way. While I’ll never have a use case for a light switch that also sends an email, I know that if I ever wanted to make that happen, I could now with a simple Node-RED flowchart.
What it comes down to is control. And while the SkyConnect is just a simple radio dongle, it was also an excuse to take back that control, to do something I’d been putting off for years, and finally make a smart home my home.
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