[baq]

> why is it so hard to get a simple IoT button that runs local Wifi (really hoping for no base station) only and is battery chargable?

Battery life is atrocious and latency from deep sleep will be very bad. I’ve got Zigbee buttons from ikea that run on nimh batteries for a couple years now and only used like half of the charge. The hub is an usb dongle attached to the home assistant server, no issues.

[hardwaresofton]

> Battery life is atrocious and latency from deep sleep will be very bad. I’ve got Zigbee buttons from ikea that run on nimh batteries for a couple years now and only used like half of the charge. The hub is an usb dongle attached to the home assistant server, no issues.

So what do you consider to be "bad" battery life? I've got quite the tolerance, but the problem is that they don't even exist. Everyone seems to stop out on this at "it would never be worth it".

> Zigbee buttons from ikea that run on nimh batteries for a couple years now and only used like half of the charge.

This is intense for me, I'm happy with replacing batteries every 6 months if I could simplify deployment by 10x.

> The hub is an usb dongle attached to the home assistant server, no issues.

Maybe deployment isn't as hard as I'm making it out to be! That said, nothing easier than sending some packets to an IP address. I assume Zigbee APKs are easy... But for example if I search on crates.io (https://crates.io/search?q=zigbee) I don't see any obvious choices.

To restate what I want (and hopefully is sounds a bit more reasonable) I want to be able to buy one smart light bulb, configure it over BLE to connect to Wifi and for the rest of it's live configure it/change it via Wifi. I want that for basically every device, and I'm fine with swapping batteries every 1 to 6months if I could have that!

[fader]

> Maybe deployment isn't as hard as I'm making it out to be! That said, nothing easier than sending some packets to an IP address.

I think this might be the case. Get a USB zigbee dongle and spend ~1 hour setting up Home Assistant and you're more or less done. Adding a new device consists of clicking a button in HA to enable permission for devices to join and then powering on the device. It will discover the network and report the features it exposes.

You can control devices via HA over wifi. Plus HA gives you an API that you don't have to maintain and update as you add new classes of devices to the network.

You'll spend far more time repeatedly replacing batteries with wifi devices than you will with configuring HA once.

Edited to add: one nice thing I forgot to mention is that using HA for your own homebrew devices lets you keep a single consistent API for those and commercial devices. You can build a little ESP32 device with custom sensors, displays, etc. and control those exactly as you would with off-the-shelf products.

[hardwaresofton]

Yeah these are all good points, thanks.

I really need to figure out how deep I want to go -- HomeAssistant is clearly the best off the shelf option. Maybe I'll set up HA first and then see if it really is worth trying to build something better.

[baq]

BLE should also work but you also want a dongle, so hardware wise it’s the same; ideally you also want a couple gateways (Shelly devices can do that out of the box btw, and new Shellies will be supporting Zigbee.)

You should look into zigbee2mqtt IMHO.

[hardwaresofton]

Yup, you're right -- looks like zigbee2mqtt is a huge unlock, hard to build without it since it supports so many things!

Not excited about having to essentially now also bring along a MQTT broker but... It's probably pretty painless to run most brokers and it's likely a single-machine-is-fine affair.