This one was a surprise to me, Boolean (as in logic/algebra) is actually named after George Bool.

Haha yeah he seems to love it, he also doesn’t seem to care about wearing a harness so possible future adventure kitty woo! I should post more pictures of him on here hah.

I recently got a kitten and he is all about water, he even climbs in the sink to drink water! I am going to have to get him a kiddie pool in the spring, including a photo for the cat tax, his name is Galileo!

Oh man RDREs are so cool! the other commenter explained it better than I ever could but also here are some great videos about it for further fun!

• Real Engineering
• Scott Manley
• Integza

ETA: I forgot the coolest one! NASA’s own test video

I’ll second this for sure, I have been using zigbee2mqtt for several years with several different dongles and it is great.

I just want to thank you for continuing to post photos of Bowie, every single one is amazing and make me smile every time. Happy holidays and give Bowie extra belly rubs for me :D

So I am definitely not an electrician by any means but I noticed on their site the ZEN05 says “Do not install the device in a place with direct sun exposure, high temperature, or humidity.” which seems pretty silly to me for something that two lines above says it is outdoor rated hah. I bet that is why they said not to use it though, heat+melting ice will generate humidity or something. I wouldn’t be placing the device next to the heating pad if it was me anyway so I would think it would work, your logic seems sound to me, I probably wouldn’t even have asked zooz now that I think about it.

That said, I’m going to need to hear more about these heating mats, I have some sidewalks that I don’t enjoy shoveling hah.

ETA: forgot to include, I use the GE version of that ZEN05 outside (since 2019) plugged into a GFCI outlet and it works fine, it definitely has very direct sun and gets all weather too.

OP, this is the way. I use the Sonoff zigbee dongle with zigbee2mqtt on a spare pi located centrally in my house and it works great, home assistant is down in the basement. I have had nothing but issues with battery powered zwave devices of many brands and all of my light switches are zwave and they work fine so it definitely wasn’t a range problem. I will probably slowly replace those with zigbee switches as they die because the zigbee mesh has just been so much more reliable.

Do make sure to throw a few mains powered zigbee devices on your mesh to act as routers once you get more than a few devices on the mesh, it also helps with range and response times.

I definitely recommend Fully Kiosk Browser, it’s easily worth the 10$ license even if you don’t need the features. The integration into Home Assistant is great, you can do all kinds of things really easily to the app through HA like loading URLs and controlling the screen on and off, the integration is really superb.

ETA: I forgot, it also has a webui to manage it remotely. Also, I’m pretty sure it’s free still, I just mean it’s that good of an app that it’s worth whatever their license costs (I bought it a while ago).

Oh I didn’t know that, that’s cool, I’ll give it a whirl! Thanks for sharing.

So I couldn’t think of a short way to describe it without so I just did that, the Pi is the one on the right side near the top with the red velcro and the radios are velcroed to the door on the left. I have cheaper extensions for both radios but that was more to keep it above the power strip because I was slightly concerned and make opening the door easier.

If your adapter isn’t like buried in a metal cabinet and you have one or two zigbee router devices (like a switch or a bulb) close by it will be fine I bet, give it a whirl. Those extensions are just cheap USB 2.0 cablematters extensions from Amazon.

I also apologize for the cable management hire, that location is in transition to different gear 😀

ETA: The other radio is the z-wave radio and I was wrong above, it’s the zooz radio, guess I forgot I upgraded it hah

Oh man, that’s a really slick idea, thanks for sharing! Have you tried it with zwave as well? Do you notice any delay in zigbee commands to the mesh at all?

I use zigbee2mqtt on a separate pi4 from home assistant specifically for it more central in my house with the sonoff zigbee 3 dongle with great success. The same pi actually has a zwave2mqtt instance on it with the conbee dongle, just make sure to use a powered USB hub on the pi for the radios, I always had flaky issues if the pi was powering it directly.

That’s a pretty great little machine! More details on the home-assistant blog post.

I have several of these power strips and they are awesome, they even do power monitoring per socket. Home Assistant integration is flawless as well, each socket shows up as a switch.

Hey sorry I forgot to reply yesterday. Are you talking about the add-on in hassos? How are you installing it?

I misspoke and what I use now is zwavejs2mqtt since that came out, I used regular zwave2mqtt before zwavejs and zwavejs2mqtt existed. You are right that zwave-js/zwave-js-ui are the newer tool but zwave-js-ui isn’t exactly the same thing as zwavejs2mqtt even though they function relatively the same from a home assistant perspective and both are provided by the zwave-js project which is confusing and I had to tipple check they weren’t the same now hah. The biggest usability difference is that to add devices to it (or the zigbee equivalent) you have to use its UI and not the integrated home assistant UI as you do when you run zwave-js and zha (at least the way I have it configured, this could be possible now). Both bridges provide discovery in home assistant via MQTT though so the experience is pretty seamless once its set up, I haven’t had any issues with it.

I don’t have a guide, I just run that docker container that I linked on a Raspberry Pi with the zwave controller plugged into it that is connected to the same MQTT server that my home assistant machine is connected to. I can grab the docker-compose file that I use on that machine if that would be helpful but its really pretty straight forward, I don’t remember needing to read any guides that I could pass along.

Reading your post again I also wanted to mention that neither zwave nor zigbee support multiple primary controllers so you couldn’t really just set up a bunch of controllers/coordinators (coordinator is the term zigbee uses). Both protocols are designed to be mesh networks and will try to mesh as much as possible, it is really key to how they work for traffic and radio frequency congestion in addition to reliability. I know it seems annoying to do but I have had great success with using a few zwave and zigbee mains powered devices (I use zwave light switches and this zigbee plug as an example) to act as routers in both meshes and it works pretty well and I think you will have much better luck if you build your mesh that way. You may also find that most controllers/coordinators aren’t designed to have all devices connected to them in a network and won’t perform as well when configured that way but that depends on how large your mesh networks are going to be (I have 29 zwave and 65 zigbee devices currently).

Hope that helps! Let me know if you have other questions or need more info.

ETA: I forgot to include, I use that zigbee plug even on things that don’t need really need a switch but I want power metering on since they do that as well. I have one on a small mini-fridge for power metering and a zwave equivalent on my washing machine for cycle alerts a examples.

I have had mine set up this way for 3 or 4 years now using a raspberry pi and zwave2mqtt/zigbee2mqtt and it works very well. Both of those have their own UI though which could be better but definitely get the job done. I have the pi centrally located in my house and my home assistant machine is in a rack with the rest of my gear.

Hah yep I had to do like a triple take, it looked like a wrapping link.

The second link he posted is the repository with the custom component, installation through HACS looks like.

Thanks for those links BTW, I just added finding something like that to my list the other day haha.