Thankfully I don't use any of their products, but this really pisses me off. They claim that this open source project "causes significant economic harm to their company"
This is ridiculous. It is truly ridiculous. How can something that enables the user to efficiently control their AC cause "significant economic harm"???
Consider forking the repository or mirroring it to another platform like GitLab, Codeberg or your self-hosted Git server, so the project can continue to exist and someone can maybe fork it and maintain it.
The effected repos are: https://github.com/Andre0512/hOn and https://github.com/Andre0512/pyhOn
If you don't know about Home Assistant, check it out. It's an amazing piece of open-source software, that you can run at home on your own server and use it to control your smart home devices. That way, you don't need to connect them to the manufacturer's (probably insecure) cloud. It gives you sovereignty over your smart home instead of some proprietary vendor-locked garbage. Check out their website and the Lemmy community: !homeassistant@lemmy.world
I also highly recommend Louis Rossmann's video about this: https://youtu.be/RcSnd3cyti0
He makes awesome videos in general, consider subscribing.
As Rossmann said, don't ever buy anything from such a shitty company that doesn't respect their customers. This move by Haier is nothing other than a slap in the face for everyone, who just wants to comfortably control the product they paid for. This company is actively hostile towards their paying customers. Fuck these bastards!
I basically run my house IoT setup as you desire. My smart switches are a mix of Tasmota (open source firmware, running totally locally) and ZigBee (an open protocol for IoT interoperability). The whole lot is controlled by a NUC running home assistant. My doorbell camera also streams directly to the server.
Home Assistant basically acts to glue everything together, and provides nice, easy to use GUIs. It can also bridge between networks. It's easy to have all your IoT things on an isolated network, with no internet access. Only the HA install can see both networks.
I've also been careful of WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor). If the internet goes down, almost everything keeps working. If the NUC dies, the switches still work as dumb switches. The bulbs all default to full brightness neutral colour.
I have a bunch of smurt plugs that require internet and I didnt know before buying that they cant be flashed. Jealous.
You can flash them, you just need some tools from AliExpress to hook leads directly to the UART pins on the ESP chip they're using.
Sounds way harder than it actually is.
Its not an ESP, its some other bullshit
This might cover it for non ESP devices: https://github.com/openshwprojects/OpenBK7231T_App
It used to be most used esp8266 or esp8285 modules. Unfortunately, tuya have created a pin compatible module that explicitly can't be replaced easily. They've pushed it hard with their ecosystem, so it's all over the place.
There are still a lot of esp based devices about, but you need to be careful of anything with a tie in to tuya.
Ah, yeah. Any Tuya device should be an automatic no for anyone.
Haven't used it myself, but this supports some of them: https://github.com/openshwprojects/OpenBK7231T_App
Is home assistant also hardware? How is it configured so that HA can see both networks? Is one of them visible through a USB interface or something?
They do now do a hardware option, though I've not used it. In one of my setups, it just uses the native ethernet, as well as a usb adapter. The software doesn't have any issues with this.
To control Zigbee/Zwave you'll need USB dongles. They did start offering their own hardware (essentially a purpose built Pi) but I'm not sure if it includes either of these radios.
What doorbell camera do you use?
Reolink PoE
https://m.reolink.com/gb/product/reolink-video-doorbell/
Thanks!