Side question but where would one learn how to do this that way? Any guides, reddit? The home automation market seems such a mess every time I check it out.
And that's pretty much it, you can add devices through the MQTT add-on page. They will also become available as entities in the rest of Home Assistant, and you can make graphs, dashboards, actions, etc.
You can also run + install zigbee2mqtt and Mosquitto on a Linux machine, but HAOS give you more of an integrated solution with dashboards, graphs, backups, cloud access, etc.
https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/
Then get a coordinator recommended for zigbee2mqtt:
https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/guide/adapters/
Then install and start the following add-ons in Home Assistant:
- Mosquitto - zigbee2mqtt: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/guide/installation/03_ha_addon.ht... - MQTT
And that's pretty much it, you can add devices through the MQTT add-on page. They will also become available as entities in the rest of Home Assistant, and you can make graphs, dashboards, actions, etc.
You can also run + install zigbee2mqtt and Mosquitto on a Linux machine, but HAOS give you more of an integrated solution with dashboards, graphs, backups, cloud access, etc.