On 21/12/2020 19:41, T i m wrote:

With some good pointers from the Home Automaters here I've been
experimenting with a starter HA system (from Lidl).

Their Silvercrest rebranded Tuya ZigBee gear all seemed to work out of
the box (hub, 3 lights, some mains switches, remote control, strip
light) in addition to a Sonoff PIR sensor, switching a light in the
hall and others coming on/off, dusk/dawn etc.

Again, with advice here and in the hope of keeping it all local and
doing more powerful things, I've installed the Home Assistant system
(v Hassos) on a RPi3B and with a TI CC2531 ZigBee2MQTT (Coordinator
firmware) dongle ... and that also connects ok to a smart switch and I
can toggle that manually from the dashboard but I'm yet to get the
hang of any of the automation stuff.

Like when you go though creating the automation it doesn't seem to use
the 'friendly' name for the devices but the complex discovered names
(is that right?) and it seems to be un-intuitive / settings overload,
compared with the Lidl / Tyua 'Smart Life' app in any case.

But then I'm guessing it's going to be fairly complex if it's going to
be able to handle all the boolean rules stuff? ;-(

So, can anyone point me to a very basic user guide / walkthrough for
say adding a smart light and remote control or making a smart switch
go on and off randomly please? I'm hoping if I have something that
works I'd be able to tweak it bit by bit and then understand it
better?

(It's all looking a bit too much like programming for me and I hope I
read abut a more GUI version on it's way (or is this it))?

Host Operating System Home Assistant OS 5.8
Update Channel stable
Supervisor Version 2020.12.7
Docker Version 19.03.13

Or is there something else I should have added to make it do what I
want please?

Common sense? As in not wasting such time, effort, and money for so
little return?

Just because something is possible doesn't make it a good idea to implement.

--
Spike