from Hacker News

Turtles, a Shelly/Zigbee home automation tool in Elixir

by joisig on 1/4/24, 9:05 AM with 53 comments

• by smt88 on 1/5/24, 6:50 AM

  > * Rationally, I might have been better off going with Home Assistant, which has ready-made integrations with Shelly, Zigbee dimmers, and probably thousands of other device types, but I wanted complete control and hackability, and I preferred to spend time building my own system rather than learning and customizing Home Assistant and maybe never getting it to work like I want it to.*

  This thought was correct. Home Assistant is absolutely incredible, easy to use, polished, and flexible. You can get it to do all of this easily.

  I got it installed and configured within ~3 hours.

• by jacquesm on 1/5/24, 2:24 PM

  The Shelly stuff is very nice, extremely reliable. I've used a whole pile of different products to test in single units and finally settled on using Shelly wherever I can and some special stuff for the few things that require different interfaces than Shelly provides. I use their 3 phase power sensors, thermostatic controls for on the radiators, temperature and humidity sensors and relays. Everything is on a separate WiFi network to make it independent of the rest of the house internet setup and it all runs off a Raspi 400 running HA. It's been up and running for well over a year now without a hitch and does all of the energy management, heating, cooling and monitoring.

  The only gripe I have about the Shelly stuff is that it uses more power than what you would expect for stuff that is pretty much very intermittent use and as a result I've wired up everything with 5V wall warts, very low power to save on parasitic drain. We've done what we could to knock down our daily average and typically do about 8-10KWh/day so every little bit counts.

• by bo0tzz on 1/5/24, 11:18 AM

  What a great coincidence to see this. I've been doing something pretty similar over the past few weeks, slapping together an Elixir app [0] that controls lights in my house via zigbee2mqtt. For now it only handles a motion sensor nightlight, but I have grand plans of course.

  [0] https://github.com/bo0tzz/machinekamer/

• by ttyyzz on 1/5/24, 8:49 AM

  I have a couple of Shelly relay switches for various purposes in a separate IoT vlan which is not connected to the cloud. The new Shelly android app not only is worse and barely functional but also pushes you to use the cloud. On top of that, they try to sell some functionality as a subscription Model. On the other hand you don't need the cloud and their http API is super well documented and does everything you would expect. I really prefer Tools like this for products like Shelly, good job!

• by mwlp on 1/5/24, 7:14 AM

  Nice! I also control my lights using Elixir and a Hue bridge (through Home Assistant). https://github.com/Manwholikespie/mojodojo

• by aidenn0 on 1/5/24, 4:29 PM

  I looked into some basic automation for Christmas lights this year; some thoughts:

  1. Zigbee devices are crazy inexpensive. I can get two zigbee power switches for less than half the cost of a single USB controlled one.

  2. Zigbee2Mqtt is really nice; setting it and mosquitto up was easy, and I can control everything over mqtt now.

  3. The creator of HA really doesn't want me using his software, so I'm not.

• by birdman3131 on 1/5/24, 5:24 PM

  The big thing I really like about the shelly devices is that you can flash tasmota onto them. I don't have the need or desire to do so but it means I can't find myself with a dead home automation setup because some company went belly up as has happened several times before.

• by BluSyn on 1/5/24, 6:38 AM

  What light switches did you use, if any?

  I also want to use Shelly dimmers, but I haven’t found simple stateless light switches. I want automation and app control in many cases, but also want simple tactile button for on/off or hold for brightness control. Amazingly hard to find.

• by asylteltine on 1/5/24, 2:29 PM

  Home assistant!