So i decided i want a light/switch wireless protocol in the house and after consideration opted for Zigbee. After testing it out and confirming it even works with the Ikea ecosystem i was very pleased because they make some very nice switches and also control hardware.
I opted for chinese zigbee based led drivers because of the power and versatility in running my whole room RGBCCT leds. That is RGB, warm white and cold white 5 color lines i can control.
Obviously we suffer from NIH here so i setup Zigbee2Mqtt as the minimal interface so i don't have to talk the zigbee serial protocol and whipped up a nice HTML UI frontend in gemini.
I could integrate the ikea RODRET switches, but when i tried their
TIMMERFLOTTE moisture sensor it did not work... turns out it was made for the Matter ecosystem and it wanted to connect via Thread.
It was surprisingly easy to flash my cc2652 based zigbee dongle to Thread so i can use Matter. Gonna try the moisture sensor i got and if it work i will also integrate this swanky air quality monitor, too!
I thought the dongle could dual wield protocols because the hw/radio is the same but it is easier to just have two dongles, i bought 3 just in case:)
Obviously the integration of external protocols is the first step, controlling them from a single point is where the meat is. I have a simple script running now but will probably develop a sensible realtime system. One of the funny things i noticed immediately is buffer overflowing the events, you can hit it easily because the dongle is set to 115k bauds! And that's a USB 2.0 dongle! Maybe the firmware can change this, my main goal is to have a music control party with my lights so i need quite a speed response which i will manually throttle for now.
And also star wars mode, playing the music (through separate speakers:) and setting the red color, swaying menacingly...
Next step is voice control which is a subject i am quite far in researching, but have not yet decided which way to go. Obviously a multimodal LLM will be the best solution, but for now i have decided to use a wake word (to keep processing to a minimum when not used), then probably openwakeword or faster-whisper, still deciding, feeding it to the Gemma 270m model which is enough for switching lights on and off:) Very frugal, and if not funny enough i will just setup a bigger model to humor me. Then a TTS like kokoroTTS, i like the KORE voice. Also got a nice mic/speaker to interface with it.
In the end, obviously i should have just installed HomeAssistant but that's just too.. easy:D They do want to go on a raspberrypi or some strange discombobulated install but i deemed it to much hassle for not enough value, i just have a couple of lights and switches for now.
The power of opensource is in the open interfaces so maybe i'll have a look at HA sometime and try to integrate my disco lights into it:) But first i want to see it dance!
