Automate smart lights with Yunohost and...? Home Assistant? Node Red? Something else?

Hey everyone,
I’ve just gotten a Conbee2 USB Zigbee hub and a bunch of Phillips Hue smart light bulbs. I don’t have a Phillips Hue hub, but my understanding is that the Conbee2 should be able to replace it(?).

I’d like to set up a Yunohost app to automate them.

I was thinking I’d use the unofficial Home Assistant app, but it says that it runs an old version of Home Assistant and they won’t be upgrading it until after Yunohost moves to Buster. It also looks a little… dead (no merges in 2 months, no reply to an issue in a week).

Then there’s Node Red. That looks maintained, but more like a low level node based programming tool.

Which one do you think would be better for setting up some basic smart light automation via Yunohost? Or is there something else again I should be using?

Well, as the maintainer of NodeRED, I advise you to use it. :stuck_out_tongue:
I think you have plugins for NodeRED that can add some abstraction and lift some work from you. Example with node-red-contrib-huemagic or deCONZ.

That makes me think that I have a deconz_ynh package that is almost functional. The only issue is that one can access Phoscon app only with the IP address, not the assign domain (that’s the manufacturer’s fault, I think?).

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So, @tituspijean NodeRed installed without any issue, as did the deCONZ plugin. I’m assuming though that this still requires running the deCONZ software beforehand to set up the lights before Node Red can access them, right?

I ask, hoping I’m wrong, as it seems deCONZ won’t run on a Yunohost system without a graphical desktop running. Really hoping I don’t need to install an entire KDE/Gnome desktop for Node Red to be able to access the Conbee2…

Ah yes you need to set it up beforehand. If you may wait tomorrow evening, I will publish deconz_ynh app to install it for you. :wink: (and no need for a graphical desktop!)

Thanks for the offer, @tituspijean . I actually have deCONZ installed already. The issue seems it won’t run without X + QT running first…

It just spits out the error:

deCONZ --http-port=80 --auto-connect=1
deCONZ: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libQt5Core.so.5: version `Qt_5.9' not found (required by deCONZ)
deCONZ: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libQt5Core.so.5: version `Qt_5.9' not found (required by /usr/lib/libdeCONZ.so.1)

There’s no deCONZ CLI or other way of setting up the network on standard x86 Debian/Yunohost, right?

You need only deconz REST plugin, actually. It installs as a service, along with the Phoscon app that works in lieu of the GUI.