Review on 🏠 Aqara Cube - Zigbee Connection, Smart Home Device Controller with 6 Customizable Gestures, 2-Year Battery Life - Works with AQARA HUB and IFTTT by Michael Herrera

EDIT JULY 2021: With Home Assistant automation, setup is now a breeze. Just search "Aqara Cube Blueprint" and voila! It offers 51 unique promotions! Wonderful! where to start Okay, there are some minor issues with this device. First, Revain hasn't invented instant delivery yet. I mean come on How difficult it can be. Aside from getting serious for a minute, the pairing was a pain. I had to try several times. When I got it working I didn't feel like I did anything differently, but it just worked. Maybe I thought too much about it beforehand. OK, on to the GOOD (ie REALLY AMAZING GOOD) things: 1. Don't believe them when they say you need Aqara Hub for this to work. They lie. All you need is a Zigbee dongle connected to your Raspberry Pi already running Home Assistant. Nortek works natively without the need to install other add-ons. I repeat: YOU DON'T NEED AQARA HUB. Why send your activity via the cloud? Keep it local like Playas.2. You need to know what you're doing and use some JSON knowledge for the automation to work. First, I went to Events under Developer Tools and subscribed to zha_event. Click on "Start Listening" and then fiddle with the cube. Shake it, slide it, flip it, tap it. Getting crazy! Admire how Home Assistant knows what you just did, including WHAT SIDE OF THE DEVICE IS UP. Double-clicking tells you how the logo is aligned. What is this dark magic?3. Check out the conclusion. When you're done, create a simple automation that will notify you when you've done something with the cube. I used the flip event and selected the one where I flip it over so the logo is facing me. Select "Event" as the trigger of your new automation and fill in "zha_event". In the Trigger Data section, copy the "data" section of the listener output into the "trigger" section (don't forget to move the "{" and "}" characters - there are two of them). Also DELETE the "unique identifier" line. You may need to left-align the material and don't forget to indent the lines under "args". Then save the automation, exit and return. You should see this data now, but in YAML. If it's empty, you've made a mistake and you'll be notified of anything you activate with the cube. But if you're right, Home Assistant knows EXACTLY what you did with the cube! From here it goes to the races. This can be used to launch almost ANYTHING Home Assistant can do. Blown up.