Could you recommend a good component for security purposes? Like if someone enters my flat without breaking in (I rent). The docs list a bunch of options... do I go for motion & presence or binary presence detector? Which sensor is better (and most cost effective)?
Depends on your threat profile and budget. Specifically if you're worried about your door opening, you can use a magnet and Hall effect sensor(or reed switch). Another thing you could do is PIR, but the cool kids are playing with 60GHz pulsed radar, which does presence pretty well (I've recently tested that the XM125 radar I just got can pick up my breathing and detects presence from the other side of 2x pieces of 3/4in sheetrock).
I'm definitely not a cool kid:) I was considering putting a camera in the flat and hooking it up to a visual motion detector but that would be a bit expensive probably (would probably need another server in addition to home assistant...)
Yeah that's overkill. But PIR and esp32s would work for the most part. (don't rule out the radar, it's only $50 bucks at Sparkfun lol I just got it working the other day, it's pretty awesome)
For home security I use PIR motion sensors in the main rooms feeding into Home Assistant which has a presence service, Eg it knows if we’re home or not based on whether our phones are connected to the home wifi. If we’re not home + it detects motion, it pings me.
Never mind, parasoll costs like $12. I mean something like HLK-LD2420 which should be around $2. ESPHome lists many similar sensors and I was asking which one is better. Curious if anyone had any experience with any of those
Generally, a lot more Zigbee devices are compatible with Zigbee2MQTT that to HA's own "ZHA" Zigbee implementation. But Zigbee2MQTT and HomeAssistant work EXTREMELY nice together, very well integrated.
And if you have your Zigbee devices in Z2MQTT, then you can also use Node Red or similar tools for some automations, if you prefer that over the somewhat weird YAML-based automations of HA.
(Tip: use a cheap x86 PC, install Proxmoxx, install Zigbee2MQTT, install HA.OS ... done!)