A little one among the big ones 😂

Presentations
1

Hello everyone,

My name is JĂ©rĂŽme, I’m 37, I’m from Reims and I’m currently using Alexa and the Hue and Ikea smart home hubs.

I’ve been coming across Gladys on YouTube for two days! I was about to try out Home Assistant (HA) and now I’m hesitating between Gladys :sweat_smile:.

In terms of hardware I bought a Raspberry Pi 4B with a Zigbee dongle to run Home Assistant by default :sweat_smile:. I saw that the dongle could be modified to support Matter and Thread if I’m not mistaken.

I hope I decide quickly :joy:

That’s the short introduction :grin:

2

Hello and welcome :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

You can absolutely start with the Raspberry Pi, but it’s not what’s recommended or the most reliable for the long term, whether for Home Assistant or Gladys by the way :winking_face_with_tongue:.

The best is to go with a mini PC directly as recommended by @pierre-gilles
You can buy it yourself or go through the starter kit:

Which dongle did you buy?

For info Gladys is not compatible with Thread but is compatible with Matter.

By the way I’m discussing Thread with a compatible key (slzb-mr1) on this topic to see how we could integrate it into Gladys if @pierre-gilles agrees :wink: :
https://community.gladysassistant.com/t/mise-en-place-openthread-avec-la-cle-slzb-mr01

But Gladys is fully compatible with Zigbee thanks to the zigbee2mqtt integration :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

3

Welcome here! I hope you’ll enjoy it :wink:

4

Welcome @G_rom0304

You can very well start with that hardware and see later if it’s not powerful enough, but I doubt it. The main issue is the SD card, which needs to be of good quality or you can even take the one offered by Raspberry Pi.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/sd-cards/

On top of that install Ubuntu Server and you install Gladys by following the following tutorial.

And after that it’s fun :blush:

5

Hello and welcome to Gladys!

Don’t hesitate to ask if you have any questions

6

Thanks, I’m replacing the SD card with an SSD.

I need to look more into Gladys because I have Wi‑Fi and Zigbee at home. I’m a beginner in the world of Home Assistant (HA) or Gladys, so I need to find my bearings, but for now I find Gladys harder to get into than Home Assistant :joy:

7

Thanks, I bought the Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 Dongle Plus. I saw via Howmnation that it could be « unlocked Â».

To be honest, at the moment I find Gladys more complicated than Home Assistant (HA) because there are very few

8

Welcome @G_rom0304 !

Don’t worry, we’ve all been through that and there are people on the forum who can help and guide you.
But if you already have an RPi, it means you know your way around a bit :wink:

9

Thanks, I have it but I haven’t plugged it in yet because I’m waiting for my SSD :joy:

What would make me switch to Gladys is if it were in French, but I need to read up more on the subject — maybe you have some links you could recommend I read to properly master Gladys, etc.?

10

If you’re starting out in home automation, I don’t recommend switching your Sonoff Zigbee dongle to Thread/Matter right away.
It’s better that you first get familiar with a « simple Â» technology before moving on to a technology that should become the standard in a few years.
Personally that’s what I did: first on Jeedom (2014, a French project, simple and very extensible at the beginning) with Z-Wave and RF433 at the time (the best of the moment), then Gladys for over a year with only Zigbee.

For reading, you obviously have the doc, and otherwise I recommend watching the videos on the GladysAssisatnt YouTube account, or you can take the training that @pierre-gilles set up. It’s not free but it allows 1.) having documentation and tutorials that evolve over time and especially 2.) supporting the project because without financial support, an open-source project unfortunately dies.

And as I said, the community is quite diverse so that someone can help you with a specific request/config.

11

I was going to paste a link to the docs, but my message would look dumb next to @mutmut’s :sweat_smile:

12

Thanks for all the explanations!

I just binged the videos — how to install Gladys on a Raspberry Pi (RPI), then install a Zigbee dongle :joy:

I’ve been on a basic home automation setup for several years, but now I want to move to something better!

I’ll look into getting the documentation later, I think


And the real advantage of Gladys is its community, which is mainly French.

13

A silly question, but if I install Gladys on my Raspberry Pi, do I have to delete all my Alexa devices or can I leave them? Same for my scenes? My voice commands? Of course I’ve looked into how to set up Alexa with Gladys :joy:

Going forward, we agree that I no longer need the IKEA hub, etc.?

14

No idea, I’m against external cloud services! (so I have my own cloud)
On Alexa, I think you need Gladys Plus (but not sure because I don’t use it).

For Hue devices, Gladys manages them via the integration.
For Ikea, what exactly are you managing/doing (I don’t know the capabilities of that box)? Their products use Zigbee (and/or Thread/Matter with the latest devices) but I don’t know more about the interaction with the box.

15

I use Alexa for voice commands — so will that no longer be possible afterwards? Even if Gladys is required in addition?

The Ikea devices are in zigbee2mqtt, so Zigbee and Matter, and the box handles both.

16

I just watched this video which explains well that devices are pushed to Alexa by Gladys Plus, but my question is: do you need a clean account with no devices, preferably, to perform the procedure?

Does Gladys manage Wi‑Fi devices as well? Because I haven’t found anything about that yet. I have Wi‑Fi shutter switches.

In the meantime,

17

Welcome @G_rom0304 :slight_smile:

[quote=« G_rom0304, post:16, topic:9960 Â»]
My question

18

Hello Pierre-Gilles,

I hope the ski holiday went well :grin:

Okay, noted.

No, the Wi‑Fi switches are not Matter. So the basic Wi‑Fi protocol doesn’t work with Gladys?

19

It was great :slight_smile: Not too many disconnections; however I was working on Gladys every day :joy:

Basic Wi-Fi doesn’t exist, Wi-Fi is a radio protocol, not a home automation protocol.

Can you give us the reference (or a link) for these switches?

20

Oh darn :sweat_smile:

The model is Meross MRS100

I just saw that they’ve now released Matter :joy:

However I wanted to say as a noob in the field and having seen Aylabs’ video that made me discover you, I find that it’s not as easy to do things on Gladys as on Home Assistant (HA). For development, I can’t find enough videos about Gladys; granted I haven’t yet bought the starter pack but by comparison it’s easier to find information on YouTube for Home Assistant than for Gladys. Similarly for the terms used, it might be good to explain the terms in a post? In the video you say you’re doing things simpler for beginners etc., but from my noob perspective it seems more complicated than Home Assistant. Please don’t take this the wrong way, I’m trying to explain myself. When I receive my SSD I’ll try Gladys and that way I’ll be able to give feedback as a noob :joy:

Again this is only my opinion and my feeling about the matter.