A little late to the party, but yes, I can confirm that Hue bulbs can be controlled directly over zigbee. You will need a zigbee radio if you haven’t already bought one (£20-ish).
They literally just appear like a zigbee device inside that integration.

You may need to reset them before they will pair.
I forget the pattern, but iirc it’s on 2s, off 8s, repeated until you see an acknowledgement flash.
Sometimes, you’ll get one that takes forever, then the next bunch will just hop right on.
I have several Hue hubs I still need to offload, as I sometimes buy the combo packs that include another hub.

I also found that the response time was a lot quicker over direct zigbee than farting around with Signiant/Philips’ API.

The trick is to buy reasonably open devices, then provide the smarts yourself.
If it can talk to / be configured by HomeAssistant, and doesn’t require internet to work, it’ll probably be fine.

That’s indeed useful information!
My boiler control for the central heating has the very useful function of a 30 minute button.
Which means even if I torpedoed HA in the middle of winter, I could still get the house warm.

I love my Reolink one.
It’s powered by PoE, which means running an ethernet cable, and either using a PoE capable switch, or injecting the power just for that cable with an injector.
If you’re planning a few cameras, a switch is worth it, as you can power them all easily. Basic ones are £20.

Because it’s powered, it will stream all day/night without worrying about batteries. It stores video locally on a microSD, and dumps clips to FTP happily.
The clip capture is pre-rolled too (30s, I think?), which is always nice.

Currently, I have the feed in dashboards, and I have an automation that flashes the lights and sends a picture to my phone when someone presses the bell.
Eventually, I’d like to integrate it directly into HA so I can speak to people without using the Reolink application.

I like Reolink’s other cameras too (they do quite a few). I have an 810A, and a 510, if you wanted any feedback on them.

One of us, one of us!
Reach out if you have any issues. The dashboards are basically one step away from the configuration, you’ll probably have one sooner than you think!

Also, when you start playing with the light, check out grouping. Very swish having one button to turn all the lights in the house off.

Lemmy honestly tends to run on the ideas of “be the change you want to see in the world” and “well volunteered”.
Stick a post up, see if people are interested.
You could message the mods. While they don’t seem to have posted for a while, there are mod actions happening still.
And if you don’t hear anything back, put it as a suggestion to the admins.

Honestly, it’s because it went in early days.
When ML generated art was a novelty, and people hadn’t had a chance to sit down and go “wait, actually, no”.
And it’s an absolute arsepain to replace, because you’ll get 1001 prompt engineers defending slop.
feddit.uk banned generative AI content to make this process easier, and still needs to sweep through and commission new art for a few communities.

These are some great looking dashboards.

Just thought I’d pop a link to last year’s thread, which had some other fun dashes.

I’m a great believer in keeping things as simple and modular as possible.
Much easier to just dump files over FTP than have HA do the saving.
Plus, the camera can operate like a dashcam, and save before/after the event, while that would be tricker in HA, as you’d have to run a buffer.

Just in case you were not aware, most Reolink cameras can do “save a clip if you see a person” on their own, without involving HA.
And they can either dump it to local or network storage.
The detection is done at the camera, and just fires a notification over ONVIF.

Part of me also thinks that fediverse doesn’t need growth for the sake of growth.
That it’s primary function is to be an alternative if people want to use it.

I keep wondering if I should open a little non-profit shop, specialising in “cheap home assistant stuff that isn’t awful, that I’ve tested”.
Then I remember the absolute chaos involved in running a shop…

I’m currently eyeing up an Airgradient One, which uses the SHT40.
Unfortunately, I don’t have enough tinkering time at the moment to roll out much more kit.

In honesty, I use the relative humidity readings as more of a “it’s dry” “It’s OK” “it’s moist”, than expecting any sort of accuracy!
I’ve even considered mapping percentage ranges to “moist, normal, dry” in HA.

I mean, that’s where all my sensors are, and they’re doing OK.

My outdoor sensors are classic 433mhz meteorology ones though, as I didn’t want to mess around waterproofing zigbee gear.

Have you considered mounting a door sensor (depending on the letterbox type).
If it has a shutter, you could mount the two parts on the inside, on the edge.
Do americans still use those flag things on mailboxes? As I guess you could also use a door sensor on the flag.

I knew this would come up, which is why I threw in the “ok for consumer gear” line.
I don’t have any super accurate sensors at home to test against, but to be honest, cheap hydrometers are best for vague ranges. “It’s damp”, “it’s normal”, or “It’s dry”.
Which is actually what I use it for: It’s in the bathroom to send alerts to open or close the windows based on humidity and outside conditions.

Compared to the rest of the sensors in the house, when the windows are open and air in the house is normalised, it’s within 5%, which is about all I could really hope for.

I think live view is how mine are configured, with a snapshot that updates every few minutes.

Then if it’s clicked, the true video stream is opened.

That’s a very good shout, as it’ll save me mucking about in bash.

That was going to be my backup plan, as I didn’t want to use any more resource if I could avoid it 😅

The good news is, we figured it out, and got the file serving out of /config/www without an auth requirement.

Aha, that was what I was after, big thanks!

So, after a bit of meddling:

The location I was placing things in was media>my media (from the HA UI).
Assets there are stored in /media, and served in 8123/media/local, but require an autoSig.
Changing permissions doesn’t affect the availability, no sig is a 401 error.

However, if the file is copied from /media to /config/www/ , it’s then served (as you said) under 8123/local.

Brill, not too painful a process for a few static images (or indeed if I’m feeling brave, I could just symlink the folders).

Maybe one day there will be a way to upload background images for picture elements cards from the UI :)