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My impression about Matter was too that it is not “done” yet and device support is poor. On the other hand you read at every corner that it will be the future.

This is my impression as well. I'm keeping an eye on how this space develops and I'll probably buy a second dongle just for Thread when I need it (i.e. when some product I really want comes out that only supports Thread.) I believe most zigbee dongles are theoretically capable of supporting Thread, since they both share the same physical layer protocol.

I'm curious to hear people's experiences with Thread/Matter devices. Ideally, I'd like to use my HA box as the border router and configure it to not allow any external Internet connections. Will this break any functionality on devices with a Matter logo on them? Ideally it shouldn't, but given the track record of manufacturers so far, my expectations are low.

I use zigbee2mqtt myself and I've been very happy with it. I haven't tried ZHA, but I believe z2m supports more devices. (I use z2m's supported devices list to choose which ones to buy.) The downside is that it's a bit more work to set up initially, as you need an MQTT broker as well. But in return, I feel like z2m is more reliable since it runs (and is updated) separate from HA core. I use it with a zzh! dongle and even though I got one of the bad ones with a faulty amplifier chip, it's been rock solid.

As for Thread(+Matter), I'm waiting for things to settle down. Support in HA is still experimental and there are very few products out yet that use Thread. I'll probably prefer Zigbee for as long as they sell them so all my devices will share the same mesh. Also, unlike Zigbee, Thread devices are not guaranteed to be local-only, which is my biggest worry. Thread/Matter won't free us from having to check a device compatibility list before buying.

This is my chief worry with Thread. Zigbee is guaranteed to be local only, but if they switch over to Thread, the individual bulbs will be able to call home, even if they expose some of their functionality locally via Matter. With home assistant, one can probably configure their Thread Border Router to not allow internet access, but I have a suspicion a lot of supposedly local thread/matter devices will be designed with the assumption that they have cloud access and won’t function fully if firewalled.

I didn’t actually have problems with proxmox, other than the potential compatibility issue with Frigate. I didn’t test it, but I had read that getting iGPU passthrough for video acceleration working can be tricky. A couple of things worked better: the ethernet adapter was more stable and the power button worked.

Adding to this as I’m also interested. I’m currently looking at cameras recommended in the Frigate wiki, since any camera that works well in Frigate also ought to work well in HA. One interesting thing I’ve noted is that some of the Hikvision and Dahua models have onboard AI features for object recognition. Does anyone have experience with these? Can they report these events back to home assistant and are they worth using?

One thing I’m curious about: Do you measure the idle power consumption of your NUC and does it really drop down to 6W? Because with a Hypervisor installed I would assume that it never really goes into „idle“ hence the resources are constantly bound.

I used a power metering plug to measure the consumption and it showed around 6W when no VMs were running. I think it’s probably higher now with HA online, as my UPS is showing a 5W increase over when the Pi was plugged in. (The UPS always shows a higher number than the power meter though, so I’m not sure which one to trust.) If the new figures are correct, the NUC appears to be using 10 watts with HA on. I’ll have to see if setting the CPU frequency governor to powersaving mode has any effect.

I considered bare metal HASSOS too and would have gone that route if HA were the only thing I was planning on running. Another option would have been to install a linux distro and run HA in docker, but having HA in its own separate VM means I don’t need to worry about accidentally breaking it when I’m messing around with other services.

Now, having written this, I realize that there would have been some real advantages in running HA in docker on a bare metal OS. For one, it would have made running Frigate easier, as its documentation recommends against running it in a VM.

NUC is a brand of mini PCs from Intel (or now Asus, I suppose.) I haven’t tried Lenovo mini PCs myself, but they fit the same niche.

there are new dimmable LEDs that automatically change to whiter when bright and warmer when dim

I love the idea of these bulbs. I’m using the adaptive lighting component so my bulbs’ temperature and brightness are always correlated anyway. For light fixtures with more than one bulb, a single smart dimmer could replace a whole zigbee light group.

However, are there any bulbs on the market yet with a good temperature range? So far, the only ones I’ve been able to find are Philips Warm Glow lamps that only go from 2200K to 2700K, which is way too warm for daytime use.