Heyho,
as I will soon move into my first “own” apartment (have lived in shared apartments so far), I would like to set up some smart home devices. Primarily lights, but I am open to other ideas.
Looking into the topic I noticed that basically all cloudless setups need a server - often they use a Raspberry Pie, a low energy protocol - like Zigbee or Thread, and a managing software like Home Assistant or openHAB.
Currently, I think about using the Raspberry Pie 5 (should also be helpful for other projects such as Immich) together with some kind of USB to connect to the Thread network (guess there is something similar like conbee2 for Zigbee) and openHAB as the software for greater customization. While openHAB is probably overkill, as a computer scientist I think I might enjoy the greater customization options.
So my question: Are there any good tutorials for this setup? While I knew of Zigbee before this project, I wasn’t aware of Thread and am just looking into it. I don’t feel comfortable yet to double down on it without learning more on possible ways to connect Thread to openHAB on a Raspberry Pie.
Thanks in advance!
Alright: For now I have bought:
- Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2, Zigbee 3.0/Thread/Matter USB-Adapter
- Soyo MiniPC M4
Instead of choosing openHAB, I will start with Home Assistant. While some people argued that they use Zigbee without issues, I still feel like Matter/Thread is the more interesting standard. Given that you can only use one standard with a ZBT-2, I will try to find all my devices in the Matter/Thread ecosystem.
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I’m using the HomeAssistant Blue. Amazing device you can no longer get but can build something similar. I’m slowly working on integrating HomeAssistant into an old house I’m fixing up while I live in it. I build many of my own sensors and controllers using ESP32’S and ESP8266’s. They run on wifi and use a bit more power but I can build a single box that costs me about 30 bucks and will cover multiple zigbee devices so don’t discount the use of wifi. The ESPHome Bluetooth proxy paired with the Bermuda BLE Triangulation is another plus for ESP32’s for tracking as you can use a phone with Bluetooth low energy setup in the HomeAssistant app or you can use the android ble trackers.
I’ve been integrating some zigbee devices lately and ones like the Sonoff ZBMINIR2’S are really nice to have since they can turn any dumb switch into a smart one. This will be less useful in an apartment but something to keep in mind. For zigbee sensors I use a vibration sensor on my front door and have some moisture sensors that will be paired with a zigbee faucet valve for automatically watering my garden this year. I have a couple zigbee rgb bulbs and they seem fine as well.
Another project to look into is WLED is truly amazing for RGB strips and strings.b
For the thread/matter vs zigbee stuff there is a ton of information out there. They use different frequencies (zigbee overlaps with wifi thread/matter doesn’t.) Thread/matter utilizes IPv6 and can provide internet access while zigbee does not. Zigbee has been around longer and is very stable and mature thread/matter is newer and aiming for higher bandwidth an better interoperability.
Just to throw a wrench into the works there is also Z-wave
https://lemmy.world/c/homeassistant is a good place to get more help and info on HomeAssistant as well as directly on the HomeAssistant site.
Just saying that HA offers a lot of customization already. I’d start simple and only add stuff where needed.
My home has some 100 ZigBee devices… Definitely can recommend ZigBee. Lots of cheap options, specially anything from Sonoff is good quality.
Some devices like thermo/igrometers and smart plugs you can go as cheap as aliexpress allow you…
Some devices like TRVs, smart energy switches I would spend money for a Sonoff or equivalent price point.
You need to invest in pure router devices too, specially in a biggish home. Definitely in multi-stories homes.
And go with an high quality coordinator as well.
You can check my wiki https://wiki.gardiol.org/doku.php?id=homeautomation%3Astart which I wrote mostly for myself for future reference, in the hope it could be useful to others.
Wdym with pure-router devices? What makes them better than smart plugs for routing? I have ~50 Zigbee devices across 4 floors and the plug/bulb routers seem to be perfectly fine.
In my experience I needed some routers, not smart plugs, to ensure a smooth mesh. Maybe my smart plugs where too cheap. Anyway, I added one router per floor and had no more devices dropping out randomly.
A dedicated router is a small dongle connected to a USB power adapter in a wall outlet. Add to the mesh, and they only provide routing for other devices, no other function.
Maybe you have better quality devices… I have lots of super cheap switches that behave weirdly without.
Interesting! I have different ones and so far, all of them were working fine as routers. 🤞
Buy a Home Assistant green and self. Host HomeAssistant itself
Great software, and purchasing the green is a great way to support them. Also, the green is a beautiful and very high quality piece of hardware that’s worth the money anyway.
Buy also the thread/ZigBee dongle they provide, again, top quality for the bucks and also support the project.
Hi! I recently started with home automation myself. Despite already having a home server, I decided to get a dedicated Raspberry Pi 5 4GB to run home assistant by itself. OpenHAB should work just as well on the RPi5.
I’ve got Zigbee and Matter over Thread connectivity using 2x Aeotec Zi-Stick dongles, one flashed with OpenThread firmware, instructions on their forum. It was not the best solution to use the same dongle for both protocols as it’s recognized with the same device name in Home Assistant and I had to use my Linux skills to work around that. You can easily get 2 zigbee dongles from different brands, check ahead which ones provide an easy OpenThread flashing solution. I think the Sonoff dongle is another one of these.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters HA Home Assistant automation software ~ High Availability NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SBC Single-Board Computer SSD Solid State Drive mass storage Zigbee Wireless mesh network for low-power devices
[Thread #196 for this comm, first seen 28th Mar 2026, 20:50] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Home assistant is a beast, not sure openhab can actually match it today. Unless you already have a pi5 and a SSD (avoid micro sd card), you could consider a mini pc with n150 (or n100) processor. It doesn’t consume much power (close to pi5) and it will be more powerful and more Ram which will be useful for immich.
Start with zigbee first, much more mature than thread. I don’t personaly use thread but i believe some zigbee dongle also can deal with thread at the same time.
About the setup. If mini pc, you can use proxmox so you will be able to create a VM for home assistant and another one for immich.
Do you have any concrete mini pc in mind? Most I can find are considerably more expensive than the pi.
A pi5 with 1gb ram will always be cheaper but that’s not enough ram for your usecase, search n150 at Aliexpress, you can often find some mini pc for around 150-160€ on sale with n150, 12gb lpddr5 (or 16gb ddr4 sodim) and 500gb SSD. https://a.aliexpress.com/_EQ5k2Uu This one was 153€ couple of days ago. Thay are other Chinese brand like soyo, beelink, bmax that have similar hardware. They are not as good as NUC, but they do the job for way cheaper.
There are two things in my house I don’t “play” with: internet connectivity and core home functions (lights, locks, garage doors, etc). That doesn’t mean I don’t self host anything or then, but I always start from a mindset of “must work”.
I run HA on a Yellow (functionally an RPi 5 with radios and storage interface built in). My lights are either Hue running as plain Zigbee devices, or Zigbee switches. I don’t necessarily want more customization with home automation, I want stable, extensible, and easy to use day today. HA checks all those boxes easily. I’ve not done much looking into OpenHAB, but I would caution against going with something for home automation just because it’s more customizable. Sure, it’s great to have an automation routine that turns on your lights when you get home, it’s less great to have an integration that misbehaves and now you cannot turn off a light, or lock your door, or turn down the volume on your music, etc. Be sure to know what you want to accomplish before you buy devices, build automations, and always build things with a manual backup operation option.
I use Home Assistant (running on Yellow) with ZigBee, Matter/Thread and Z-Wave. If I had to start today, I’d get a Pi 4/5 and Home Assistant ZBT-2. I would not run anything else on the Pi. Let HA OS take it over to ensure smooth updates. Then I’d add ZWA-2 if I need Z-Wave. Not you’d need 2x ZBT-2 if you want both ZigBee and Matter/Thread.
