Hi all, I’m new to the whole smart house stuff, I wanted to give it a try by setting up openHAB on a raspberry pi and looking for sensors I found out switchbot has a lot of sensor that I might want to try: contact sensor, thermo-hygrometer, etc.
Then I saw that those needs an hub to communicate with alexa/google home.
Finally the question: do I need the hub also to make them communicate with openHAB or does openHAB act already as an hub?
I’m not really in DIY stuff, but if it’s something simple I might give it a try, so if you have cheaper options I’m open to it (from switchbot sensors I also liked the simple and clean design)
You need some kind of gateway as these devices communicate with the rest of the world with via a proprietary BLE api.
I don’t have any experience with the official switchbot hub 2 gateway but it seems reasonable priced and has a few interesting features itself. However I don’t know if this can be integrated in OH as it is built to support matter and I don’t think it offers an mqtt interface or the like. However I’m am aware of two viable DIY options to integrate bots/curtains/meters:
This is a dedicated switchbot gateway solution which works great but unfortunately hasn’t been updated in a while and this does not sport the latest devices (e.g. the outdoor hygrometer)
This is a generic gateway solution that also supports some switchbot devices.
Both solutions require you to run a mqtt broker and to flash and run an esp32 device as gateway. These devices are very cheap but you need a place to put them/hide them unless you’re willing to create a nice little case for them. Both solutions support homeassistant discovery which should in theory also work with OH but I never got this working unfortunately so I created my things manually as generic mqtt things which is quite a bit of work…
Thanks for the reply,
just a clarification: with the switchbot hub gateway it says it can communicate with alexa/google home, does that means that it can also communicate with openHAB?