Hi everyone,
I am reading up on that topic for a few weeks now and the only conclusion I have so far is: There is nothing that works perfect and you need to check for each device if it works with your setup.
So I am asking about your experience so far, what you use, if you plan to change your setup (for what reason?) or what you would do different. Or do you use multiple gateways / protocols at the same time?
I run HA in Docker for a few things, but I have nothing connected yet via one of the protocols mentioned above. Yesterday I came across SkyConnect and thought I found the holy grail of dongles. Zigbee? Check. Zigbee2MQTT? Check. Matter? Check. But then looking at the details... Zigbee2MQTT is experimental and in a few review (although none was younger than 9 months) people report that it works unreliable. Matter support also is not there yet it seems. And to add insult to insury it seems that it officially does not work with a Dockerized HA setup.
So whenever I think I found "my" solution, there is something that does not seem to work, is unreliable or not compatible with all devices. I even ran across reports that said if a device Support Zigbee or MQTT it might still not work with your particular setup because... well... not everything that has a specific protocol stamped on the package seem to work in the same way.
So I feel like running in circles. I wanted to start with a few simple things like Temperature / Humidity sensors and Door sensors like for example the ones from Aqara. But if I throw money at someone my highest priority is reliability. So I want to go a route that (at this moment) is the most stable, reliable and future proof in your opinion.
So I am very curious about your setups and the experience you made with it :-)
I migrated from Samsung Smartthings when they did their big change I guess late last year. I am using zwave and Zigbee2mqtt as I had both zwave and zigbee devices already installed all over.
I went with z2mqtt because I wanted to integrate a few other things into HA like my weather station, and Blue Iris. It's been working great for me.
I run HA on a Rpi, and the only 'problems' I had were because of radio interference from USB 3.0. I bought a cheap usb 2.0 port (HUB) and extension cables to move it away from the pi, and it's been pretty solid since.
May I ask what Gateway / Dongle you use? Oh and that weather station sounds interesting, if you happen to have a Manufacturer / Model for me I would like to read up on that too :-)
I am leaning towards MQTT too because of other solutions that already integrate into that. It looks like a great way to throw different Data into a single pool to make them accessible in the same way, no matter if it is a switch, temp sensor, Camera, GPS Data etc.
Conbee Ii for zigbee and Aeotech z-stick for zwave.
As for weather, I use ecowitt devices that run through their GW1000 (gateway 1000). This is integrated with a weewx install (also on an rpi) that has an mqtt module installed. So once that's all setup I configured the sensors on comfig in HA to look at the ones I wanted access to.
That is cool, thank you very much!