Welcome to the community! I think you are in the right place and I’m personally very interested in this problem space. I think you have received a lot of good technical advice on this thread already and I have little new to add but I’ll go ahead and repeat.
Stick with Zwave, Zigbee and Wifi if you can.
Consider smart switches over smart bulbs. Even if you won’t use the switches, family and care takers may and when things go wrong, you will have a backup for controlling the lights.
OH by itself is probably not going to be the best choice for IP camera/video doorbell stuff on it’s own. I can probably be made to work but your time would probably be better spent just integrating with a special built system or letting the video doorbell be it’s own separate system.
The hospital bed is indeed going to be unique. I’ve not seen mention of one on this forum at least.
But, what hasn’t been said which I think you should take under serious consideration is how are you going to document this system? How are you going to build in the “knobs and dials” that a non-technical person, or at least someone not you can administer and recover from failure? In a case like this, IMHO, this should be one of your primary concerns because stuff fails and you may not be in position where you can make the repairs yourself. I hope that is a very long way away for you, but spending a little bit of time and always keeping that in the back of your mind as you make decisions up front will hopefully leave you with a robust system that is maintainable and supportable into the future.
To facilitate this, I’ll bring up my favorite home automation quote. “You should never see an escalator out of order sign. Only escalator temporarily stairs, sorry for the convenience.” - Mitch Hedberg. As you build your home automation, endeavor to build escalators, not elevators. When an escalator breaks, it is still fit for purpose, it’s just a little less convenient. When an elevator breaks it cannot be used at all. An example of this is a wifi smart switch versus a wifi smart bulb. If your wifi breaks for some reason:
smart switch can still be flipped to turn on/off the light
smart bulb (assuming no switch) is stuck in what ever state it’s in until the wifi comes back.
So consider failure modes and ways you can design this system to fail gracefully.
And please come back to the forum and ask questions when you run into trouble. We are happy to help. And also, please share your experiences! I’m certain you are not alone and others will benefit from your experiences.
smart switches have another BIG advantage.
When you use 3 channel switch, one can be hooked to ceiling light directly via 220AC and two others can be via MQTT used as controllers to anything you like.
It’s very comfortable to have common controls at one spot, without need of doing anything else.
There is no reason why what @kriznik recommends wouldn’t work here in the US (assuming a US plug device). The only difference is what you wire the switch to. But don’t confuse a 3 channel switch (can control three things) with a three-way switch (multiple switches to control one device).
The Sonoff T1 kriznik references is available in the US as well. Amazon.com
What he is recommending is wire one of the three channels to the light, and don’t wire the other two to anything. Those will issue MQTT messages picked up by OH and OH will trigger other devices to turn on or off in response.
The voltage, Z-Wave frequency, or event how the switch works is irrelevant. You can even, for example, convert a one gang box to a four gang box, install four “dumb” switches and put a Shelly1 or Sonoff behind the switches to make them smart. Except to get power to the Shelly 1s, the three new switches do nothing except generate MQTT messages when toggled. You can do this with Zwave or pretty much any type of switch you can think of.
I have ignored Wi-fi devices because I see many 2.4GHZ Wi-Fi device issues at work.
Also, I know I cannot get good 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi coverage at home due to there being only one interference-free channel available. Neighbours with misconfigured Wi-Fi can be limiting…
Yes, thanks for reminding me. There will be failsaves. But I will go a bit further with it. The “smart” pieces will be completely separate from the “manual” pieces, and redundant. So, the current switches will just stay where they are and switch back up lamps, for an example. Everything else that is important (A/C, heating, bed) needs to retain its manual controls.
not sure why, again (not really pushing for this solution tho) sonoff wall/relay switches does exactly this for you … they are smart but even without everything else offline they still works as normal switches without need of any connection anywhere.
I kind of do not see why to overthink it that much
Not at all … I have zwave Fibaro smart devices behind my “old” switches and those work fine if openHAB is down (for whatever reason). No need to leave them on.
I think you use your “normal” switch to control a mains operated relay to control the light. That relay can also be controlled by OpenHAB.
It is not either/or. It is both. If OpenHAB is down, the switch still controls the relay, and hence the light.
normal switches switching A/C to the light … so if that switch is off, your smart whatever will do nothing, as there is no power to the controlled device.
That’s nothing to do with OH
I think I have not stated my goals very clearly.
I don’t need my house as a whole to be smart. I will use the smart home tec to build myself a single room specifically to be voice controlled and, as a backup, controlled by a PC.
I will not be able to use a smart switch because if it comes to it, I will have to stay in bed. Other people can also use the voice activation, maybe a control panel somewhere - or use the manual lights that are still there.
Take the lights as an example. I will wire 230V to a transformer to 24V DC, have a Z-Wave (or maybe WiFi) controller do it’s thing and hook it up to LED panels. No switches needed.
Or maybe I just have a brainfart and that’s not possible?
I guess there might be some kind of misunderstanding.
What the other posters try to explain is a combination of your in place wall switches in your special room with smart devices, like e.g. a shelly1. That‘s how I did my lightning in most rooms.
Doing so, you will still be able to control your lights with the physical switches, via smart devices like tabs or phones, or even via voice.
All this controlled by openHAB. If there is a failure of your smarthome server or your WiFi, the physical switches are still operational.
The physical switches in this case control the mains powered smart relay connected to the light
The smart relay has mains power independent of the wall switch position.
