It's very important to note that this is not the entire brand joining, this is three specific products which already use Matter over Thread and thus would be interoperable anyway.
this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io
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Still a win for Home Assistant to have a big brand like Aqara want to play ball at all.
if they are supporting the current Matter/Thread devices hopefully they will do the same for future devices, especially (if and) when they start to deprecate their Zigbee devices.
Oh yes for sure. Wasn't saying otherwise. Was only pointing out the details because the way the program worked previously, it was kind of an all or nothing thing. And thus, Aqara joining could be taken as a sign that they are going to make everything completely open and interoperable and work perfectly directly with HA. I don't think that's the case.
This is still a very important step. Open standards may be the most important part of home automation, but the second most important part might well be respect.
Go back just a year or two and HA and open source in general were basically ignored in the market. Now things are changing.
Every company that partners with HA further cements HA and open standards in general as a legitimate / major player in the automation market that manufacturers ignore at their own peril. The more that happens, the more products will be developed with open standards in mind.
That's great. I recently got a pet feeder from them. My main criteria was that it works with ZigBee and home assistant.
Every other I have tried ends up failing with communication with their back ends, inevitably leading to a piece of unmaintainable trash.
Aqara worked immediately out of the box. Connected to my home assistant within minutes.
I use zigbee and their sensors just keep dropping off the network
My first zigbee device was Sylvania (73685) rgbw led strip. On it's own it worked fine but once I started trying to add sengled zigbee bulbs I kept having problems with pairing the bulbs or keeping them connected. Zigbee uses 2.4ghz so I thought maybe interference so lowered power output on wifi AP 2.4ghz band & even turned it off for testing but didn't help. I think I read somewhere that sylvanias caused that problem. I unplugged sylvania led strip, reset & rejoined everything else and had zero problems. Tried to add the sylvania back in and disconnect problems came back after awhile. It was past the return period so now I keep it unjoined and plugged into a zigbee smart outlet. I sometimes have to remove power from it to join new devices or when I restart zigbee controller. Currently have mix of sengled bulbs, thirdreality plugs, sonoff plugs & sensors, and single aqara tvoc all working together fairly reliably.
If you happen to use a Conbee II: I had this issue until I updated the firmware. Has been rock solid with aqara devices after that.
Aqara devices can be finicky with non-Aqara devices, especially router devices.
I've personally also had much better results with Aqara devices since switching to Zigbee2MQTT and a Sonoff Zigbee stick, I had a lot more dropouts with ZHA and a Conbee II stick.
I have your exact setup. Have you done any tweaking? What channel are you on? All I can think is, I have thick concrete walls. Changing battery also didn’t help.
I haven't done any channel optimisation so far, I probably should do. I have the P version of the Sonoff Zigbee dongle, I haven't tried the E version.
I've also been careful with picking router devices. I've tried to avoid router devices that have poor reported compatibility with Aqara. There is a page/thread somewhere online where people were compiling lists of devices that do or don't play nice with Aqara. IKEA devices apparently work very well with Aqara, I've been using their smart plugs wherever I can.
My Zigbee network also improved a lot when I set up some IKEA plugs in the loft. My house also has thick walls, but it seems Zigbee signal can propagate more easily through ceilings/floors.
Using quality brand batteries also seems to help a bit, at least from a battery life point of view.
IKEA devices apparently work very well with Aqara
When it comes to zigbee devices, don't combine the aqara wall switches with large (4 buttons) ikea remotes.
The wall switches tend to execute the commands from the remotes instead of just routing them to the coordinator.
My Zigbee network also improved a lot when I set up some IKEA plugs in the loft.
I have similar experience with the ikea bulbs. More of them I connect, more stable the whole network gets.
Fortunately my thermometers don’t do that, because they are a good choice, Zigbee wise. Always on the lookout for replacements, if the need arises…
may wanna check your wifi & zigbee network collisions, your network map or make sure you don't something like a 2nd hub or something like that
interesting. theirs are pretty much the only reliable sensors I found
That's weird to me. I have 30 aqara devices and they only drop off the network when the controller is missing (ConBee stick).
This is awesome news. :)
New leak sensors that don't take magic incantations to connect when?
I have zwave water detectors that are pretty easy to pair. The only problem is that every time they reset, they trigger an alarm event. Fortunately, this only happens when I upgrade zwavejs, or change the batteries, so the false positives are not random. Still, it's a weird design decision.
What brand and model are those? I have a Z-wave radio on my HA.
Zooz 800 ZSE42 800LR. $30, the coin battery lasts about a year IME.
Oh nice, I think HA radio is from Zooz.
Sad, all they tried was bring some magic to the people and teach them basic spells and all we do is complain... When the dark lord attacks and none of us know any spells we're screwed