Hue vs Xiaomi vs Ikea and their light switches + API's
I'm a student going to university next month and I've been looking for lights to power my dorm room with smart lighting. It's a +-20m² room with what looks like a lightcluster with 3 spots for normal E27 lighting but I can't confirm it right now.
I was wondering what the differences between these lighting systems were, especially:
-
How many lights of how many Lumen would I need to light the room? There is a lightcluster (located in the centre) that can hold 3 lights and I was wondering if 3 Xiaomi Yeelights (close to eachother) at 800lm would be enough. Ikea has lights up to 980lm, is the 180lm difference noticeable?
-
Philips Hue seems rather expensive, what is it that you get for paying twice as much? Xiaomi is my current favorite with it's low price for good functionality (from that I can tell).
-
Are there differences between lightswitches/dimmers and the options they have between brands? I want to go for a battery/wireless one since I don't think I'll be replacing the existing light switches. Is it possible to pick up when a button on these switches/dimmers is pressed so that I can use it to activate scripts instead of using it for lighting only.
-
Do they all have similar API support? This is rather important to me as all my current home automation is connected to a central system that I made myself. Can I, for example, listen for presses on a Xiaomi lightswitch and power Hue or Ikea lights? Or even better, make a button press activate a script that starts playing music throughout the room or open my curtains? I picked something up about the Xiaomi gateway having a developer option which makes you able to get all the information (like temperature, humidity, button presses on lightswitches) from it. Anyone have experience with this?
-
Everyone will be connected to the same WiFi, so that's a bit of a problem when it comes to home automation, security wise at least. I'm pretty sure there is an ethernet connection though so would buying a seperate router and connecting all of my devices to this router make it impossible for other people to connect to my lighting, even though they are connected to the same network as my seperate router will be? Same question regarding chromecast, since I don't want people to play stuff on my chromecast devices.
-
Are there any disadvantages to using colored light bulbs when displaying normal (white) light. I can't imagine using the colors much but I don't mind paying a little extra for the color functionality unless ofcourse there are disadvantages.
-
Finally, I'll be using the lighting via my Google Home. Any brands that work better or worse with Google Home?
Thanks a lot!
Posted Aug 8, 2018, 6:23 PM UTC
Hue gives better automation support, because it can handle lights individually or as a group. It's stable and fast. The advantage it has over LifX is it uses a mesh network that connects directly to a HA controller, rather than individual WiFi devices. Aside from offsetting the cost another router, for a dorm room, these aren't big advantages. IKEA gets a lot of complaints about not connecting correctly. Even a few months ago, if your budget demanded, it'd be worth giving them a shot. But Hue bulbs have dropped in price recently, and can be gotten for less than $15 per bulb if you catch a sale or get refurbished.
With a good controller, yes. I have not used the Xiaomi gateway, and have no intentions of ever trying it. I don't think I've ever seen anyone here say they have. Personally, I use Hubitat. For a dorm room, it may be overkill, and fairly pricey at $115. Other options are SmartThings (which relies heavily on cloud processing) and Home Assistant (which has a steep learning curve and difficult to set up).
For this application, I think I'd go with Hue dimmer switches. They have great functionality out of the box, and super easy setup for lighting control, while still allowing being connected directly to a controller to remap buttons to control non-Hue devices.
Curtain controllers are expensive, and I've heard they don't work well.
Xiaomi sensors are super cheap direct from China and work well, at least with Hubitat and SmartThings. They do not require the Xaiomi hub.
Other than price, at least with Hue, no. The color and white bulbs look the same on white. Hue also has a middle-ground "Ambiance" bulbs that allow changing the "temperature". Other than the shape, I can't tell the difference between the three when set to straight white. (The whites are shaped like a normal bulb; Ambiance and color have a weird flat shape.)
Shouldn't be any issue for the lights, but Hubitat does not have direct Home integration, so voice controls for blinds or a non-Home music player would require another controller in the middle (but could be as cheap & easy as an always-on smart phone with Tasker installed).
Is grouping lights and controlling that whole group with a light switch possible with Xiaomi aswell?
A controller isn't really needed as I plan to just control it all with a raspberry pi that runs something similar to Home Assistant that I made myself. That's why public API's would make things easier, but worst case scenario I'll have to reverse the communication protocols of these devices.
Do you mean that they don't require the official Xiaomi hub, or no hub at all?
I found this link which suggests a hub/gateway is needed, but I'm not sure: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/xiaomi-cube-sensors-without-xiaomi-hub/35187
Thanks a lot for the info!
To be clear, it's the Hue hub that allows this. As I've said, I can't recommend the Xiaomi hub. Any bulb that uses the Zigbee Light Link (ZLL) protocol should be able to connect to the Hue hub. That includes IKEA and Cree bulbs. (Kept meaning to mention, you can also connect LED strips using a FLS-pp lp or a Chinese knock-off ZLL LED "ballast".) Xiaomi has two different bulbs, one actually carrying the Philips brand name. I know the Xiaomi YeeLight is WiFi, and pretty sure the other is as well, so they'd be completely invisible to the Hue system.
Just FYI, the Hue bulbs can also be direct connected to a controller without the Hue hub. I'd not recommend it, since it defeats the major advantages of Hue, but can be done. It forces the bulbs to use the Zigbee Home Automation protocol rather than ZLL, and I've heard it's far more difficult to get them back on ZLL.
The pi is what I call "a controller".^1 To be blunt, I don't know the full answer to whether Xaiomi bulbs can be group controlled. However, if they could be, it would require Home Assistant to go to the Xiaomi cloud (assuming there is one) to be able to "see" its groups. That would be a minimum 2 second response time. Otherwise, it would require the Xaiomi hub, with all the same question marks about it (that I can't answer).
However, with Hue, the Home Assistant would talk directly to the Hue hub. Rather than (or in addition to) adding individual bulbs to your Home Assistant controller, you can add "rooms" that appear as if they are devices. The advantage to this (aside from making automations slightly easier to set up) is that it prevents "popcorning" where multiple individual devices are issued commands in serial, and won't react in sync.
The only things that don't require any hub at all would be WiFi, where - in essence - your router acts as a hub and an app or cloud services sends the commands (eg is the "controller"). The Xiaomi sensors use ZHA and, not 1000% sure but pretty positive they will connect just fine with a HA controller, assuming you use a ZHA receiver/transmitter. (I'd recommend getting a dual Zigbee/Z-Wave stick, because... why not.) However, there are some devices that absolutely require the vendor hub. Just as an example, Lutron Caseta and RA2 both require a Lutron hub regardless of what else you do.
To recap, in your circumstances of a dorm room.... A Hue hub might benefit you. I always strongly discourage using WiFi devices, but for your setup, it'll be fine, and Hue might be overkill. However, one advantage would be to make the Hue dimmer easier to use (but it can also be direct-connected). If you use Hue, that doesn't mean you have to use Hue bulbs. I'm really positive you can use Xiaomi sensors with HA. I use Hubitat, because it's easier to set up.
^1 On home automation forums you'll see it's pretty common for people to use "controller" or even "home automation controller" to refer to... in your case, HA on a pi. A "hub" or "bridge" will usually refer to some slave device like Hue.
The Xiaomi hub can be talked to locally, no 2 second response times. You enable developer mode and it gives you an API key.
Afaik I can't make groups within it.
Also, home assistant supports ZHA devices with a dongle, so you can control them. There is a fork of the bellows project that fixes issues with Xiaomi sensors so they should work with it; but I've not had good experiences so far.
How are things like button presses detected from the hub? Should I just request the hubs details every few milliseconds from my raspberry pi? That seems very inefficient.
Also, no groups? Even with the app? So I can't make 3 lights turn off at the same time when pressing a button?
So the only point of having a Xiaomi hub is that Xiaomi devices haven't played well with HA? My Xiaomi stuff has had a few connectivity issues on SmartThings and Hubitat, but not enough to be much of a bother, and fingers crossed have been stable for awhile (about three months now with no issues). More to the point, I've read that the issues are because of how they pair to repeaters, which can be fixed with a network mapper.
Alright I learned a lot from this post. Thanks a lot!
Why strongly against WIFI? In an always powered config it seems like it wouldn't be an issue.
https://old.reddit.com/r/homeautomation/comments/97i0fs/help_with_starting_with_home_monitoring_and_work/e48tmp7/
If you're looking to do that, the Xiaomi hub has APIs, which home assistant can talk to. You need the region set to mainland China to enable developer mode, and then it works pretty easily.
The devices themselves are almost ZigBee spec, they just do some weird things
Alright I guess I'll just check how Home Assistant talks to the Xiaomi devices and replicate that in my own program. Thanks!
They do require some sort if hub, just not the necessarily the official one.
Both SmartThings and hubitat have community created device handlers/drivers.
As far as I’m aware home assistant does not though and needs the official hub as a bridge.
My Xiaomi gateway just arrived yesterday...but they forgot to include the USA adapter. Started a dispute on aliexpress for $10 since thats how much one is on amazon. I already ordered the amazon. If you have anything you want me to try, let me know. I have motion sensors + humidity sensors that came too. I have a Smartthings V1 and home assistant for them too. V1 does not integrate Xiaomi devices which is why i am going through home assistant
I'm mostly interested in the degree of automation it allows. Does it have local processing and complex rule building?