Whoa.

I was surprised this morning to find out my air quality sensor was actually hooked up to my IoT setup this entire time.

That sounds unremarkable on its own, but what’s impressive about it is that it did so with my things naturally discovering themselves when I established their links prior to my discovery.

What I did.

I’ve had my Home Assistant setup for a while now. Normally I needed to do things manually — take one device, see if it’s in Home Assistant’s integrations list and try adding it and see if it shows up after it’s done. If not, either see if I can connect it somewhere or just leave it alone on its own. Typical setup stuff.

I bought a Samsung Smart Monitor M8 earlier this year. So I did the routine — I found out it came with SmartThings installed, and Home Assistant supported that and a Samsung account, so yeah, sure, I added that too. Originally I was hoping to somehow link this to my Philips Hue somewhat or at least connect to Home Assistant to access my other smart devices but alas, it didn’t do that. Bummer. But hey, at least devices connected to it could be accessed by Home Assistant.

Pretty neat! If I get SmartThings’ supported devices, I can also opt to link it here.

At some point during last month, I bought an IKEA VINDSTYRKA Air Quality Sensor. I just wanted it for quickly checking temperature and humidity at my desk because my god the summer here in the Philippines last March–June was just atrocious and was constantly reaching 31–37C temperatures and this was the time that I was conscious of power bills and A/C usage and dry modes and so on. Humidity was the common culprit when it comes to sweaty days after all, not just temperature.

VINDSTYRKA however came with a neat feature that would be handy in the future — it had Zigbee support. I don’t have a Zigbee hub just yet and while I think my Philips Hue supported it, it wasn’t connected as a Zigbee hub on my Home Assistant. Could it though? Maybe? But nah, I don’t think it did, so I just treated the Vindstyrka as a neat little display on my desk.

You’ll notice from that picture that it has a 🔗 icon on top. I thought that was just because I was playing around with the link button before and it went from blank to a blinking link icon and then it became static, but apparently, it had linked with my monitor already when I did this.

And this was way back in June.

What happened?

So basically, here’s what we’ve got:

graph LR
  A[Vindstyrka] -->|Zigbee| B[Samsung Smart Monitor M8]
  B -->|SmartThings| B
  B -->|Internet| C[Home Assistant]
  D[Other Smart Devices] -->|LAN| C

The thing that surprised me was how well it worked. Linking between SmartThings and Home Assistant is typical. But the Zigbee connection was something I just did with a casual button press and then there’s the monitor figuring out that the unit connected to its USB port was a device that it could work with and cascaded that info to SmartThings.

I knew SmartThings had an interface but it was left empty last time I checked it and was connecting it to Home Assistant, hoping that my smart bulbs and stuff would show up here.

Instead, I’m pleasantly surprised that it recognized the IKEA sensor I connected to it and was communicating over Zigbee ever since.

There was probably a notification that happened during all this, but I probably forgot and I only confirmed without thinking it was for this kind of integration.

And since Home Assistant is awesome software, it already did the things I expected when it has any device on it — it keeps track of the SmartThings link, and the devices in it and helps surface the metrics that I want on it!

A dashboard! And wow, the results are identical to what the sensor reports — as it should. Looks like it reports an update once every 30 seconds, and only when there’s a change.

It’s so good that I was even able to collect historical data since it was connected with SmartThings via the monitor.