Addon Suggestion: HA2Cube

Ideas & Suggestion Feature Request
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1

Is there a DEV in this community who would be willing to create a plug-in for Home Assistant that can see the devices paired with the iHost?

The idea of ​​the add-on would be the same as the Add-ons that exist in NODE-RED and HomeBridge.

But an Add-on for HA.

It would be great to be able to export all of our devices to HA in a simple and easy way.

Without depending on Matter or any other means.

I believe this would be a big step for the community.

Imagine how incredible it would be to install an HA DOCKER on the iHost and in that HA you install a plug-in that pulls all of the devices that are paired with your iHost. That would be like magic.

It would be possible to configure everything in minutes.

Imagine how incredible it would be if someone from the community could develop this add-on.

If anyone is interested, I am here to help.

We can exchange ideas and see how we could get this off the ground.

2

hi @Unnamedi , if you dont want it via matter or addon , there is also via hacs (sonoff Lan) it works just great , running ha on ihost its kinda slow I did test it , there is also nodered that can pull devices from both ihost and ha .

3

The Docker version does not have Matter built in.

In the case of SonoffLan, which is great, by the way, it only works for LAN products that are paired in the app via eWelink.

In this case, what I want to propose is an add-on for iHost or HACS that can export all the devices paired in iHost. This would cover both LAN devices and ZIGBEE devices that are working within iHost.

Yes, in this case, node-red would be for those who are more advanced.

In this case, I wanted a simpler solution for inexperienced users.

Nowadays, I have 4 iHosts for testing, one is my Matter bridge, another I test with Homebridge, another I test with node-red and another that is my main one.

I believe that if I don’t need to depend on Matter or Homebridge or node-red and I can put the devices directly in HA via Addon or via HACS, it would be the easiest and fastest way without depending too much on protocol evolution or other things.

4

Well, I haven’t had any problems with HA running on iHost, it runs very well. I use it in parallel with Node-Red.

Within iHost I have the integration of SonoffLan, Tuya, LG WEBOS, ANDROIDTV, LGThing, Smartthings, HACS, LocalTuya, Shelly among many others, all running without any problems.

I have 6 users whose Smartphone constantly sends location information, etc., everything works as it should.

I may not notice any slowness because no one uses the HA interface, the only interface used is the energy dashboard.

Other than that, it’s not a problem.

I have over 2 thousand automations running on it without any problems.

The only time I had a problem was when the Homebridge and Node-Red plug-in had a problem. In fact, they still do. However, I got around the problem in creative ways. lol

I really believe that HA can get slow when we are constantly testing and modifying things and creating fancy interfaces for ourselves to use. Because let’s be honest, 99% of users who share a smart home, hardly any more than the person who maintains the server, will use these dashboards and so on…

I really did my automations to service the home so that they work without user interaction. And in simple ways that users can easily disable or enable something if they want.

5

i didnt say ha gets slow , i say ha is like abit lagy interface once you install it at docker ihost , for me running ha on separate machine and got plenty of integration and all running local with like a snap , you wont feel that with ihost because of its small resources .

6

have you tried to pull devices from ewelink to homebridge then to ha ?

7

that’s the most important part , manage yourself with what you got

8

As I said, I don’t even have a slowing problem with HA running on ihost.

And as I said I know all the existing methods that would be Matter, Homebridge and Node-Red Bridge.

What I want to propose with the post is a new solution. So that the user has alternatives and can choose what to use.

Examples:
For more advanced users, Node-Red is perfect.
For users using Apple equipment, Homebridge and Matter would be perfect.
For Smarthings users the only solution is matter.
Now for HA users there is the Homebridge and Matter solution.
But Matter wouldn’t run in the Docker version. The Homebridge version would already have to install the homebridge and etc…

If we can only install an addon that exports all devices it would be much easier for users who have no experience.
It would make their lives much easier.

9

The idea of having one more alternative within these existing addon that exports the devices to HA would be incredibly useful.

I wouldn’t be stuck in the development limits of matter.

Matter has great potential. But I believe it will take years to establish and consolidate.

An addon would have no limitations since the limitation would be on the platform it would be implemented.

The idea is simple to make the user’s life easier and give options of choices to them.

In a perfect world, Matter and that choice.
But he is far from mature for it. It is many users who do not wait 3 years or more for a growth of a protocol.

Aside from that there is still a fragmentation in it for example the HA already uses matter 1.3 the smarttings and the 1.2 the google and amazon is 1.1 if I am not mistaken and so it goes.

10

yes you are right , matter still like beta and not all companies are following up and slow support , if you want to bring ewelink devices to ha then I think it should be ha to do that move , with all respect I agree with you having an easy friendly solution that any user can do without complication , but in my opinion it should be ha who should work on this integration .

11

If you use Home Assistant, the idea of ‘exporting’ anything to it is bizarre and stems from a misconception. It’s like attaching a harvester to a scythe. If you think about doing so, you do not need any HA server.

12

Here I have to disagree with you.
The HA would be the same as the Node-Red or the Homebridge Plug.
I don’t think it has to be an H. A. move to have that integration with the Cube.

Act because I don’t believe it’s H. A. itself that makes its integrations. Most of them are community initiatives.

Even those that are now officially supported.

As I said the idea would be an integration at Homebridge level. (at least that would be the concept)

I wonder why it would be bizarre since there is the same for the Node-Red and the Homebridge.

I really didn’t understand why it would be weird for an addon like that.

My original idea of the pole was to see if there was anyone or any possibility of the idea going forward.
Because again we have the Matter, Homebridge and Node-red to make automations and so on…
However, there is no option for HA via docker.
What runs natively on iHost.
I see H.A. as one of the big players in the automation market.
If there is a simple way to integrate with it, it would be an advantage for iHost itself.
Since the trend is the number of compatibility with zigbee equipment increases making it one of the few zigbee HUBs on the market all that a smart home needs.

13

This sounds nice but given the how easy it is to install Node Red in Home Assistant and then the Cube Palette there I am not sure it will happen.

If you mean auto-discovery of devices into the home assistant I suspect it could be done using Home Assistant’s MQTT auto discovery and Node Red but I’ve not read the documentation on MQTT auto-discovery or watched the debug node output from the node in the Cube palette. If correct an additional ‘add to home assistant’ node in the Cube palette might be easier than linking the Cube to a docker image. You would just need an MQTT broker but that is easy to install in Home Assistant. If they are already iterating through the devices to create a list of them in Node Red then all they would need for this new node is an IP Address, username and password so it could connect to the MQTT broker on Home Assistant.