My Home Assistant Setup: bhyve, FreeBSD Jails, Zigbee, Homematic, and Matter over Thread

The useful part of a home automation dashboard is that it hides the plumbing. The screenshot above shows weather, heating, doors, windows, temperature, humidity, air quality, lights, and energy consumption. A light is a light, a thermostat is a thermostat, and a water sensor is either dry or it is about to make my evening substantially worse. Behind that dashboard, however, are three quite different device ecosystems. Most of the apartment uses Zigbee devices from Philips, IKEA, Xiaomi, Sonoff, and a few others. The heating and several door and presence sensors are Homematic or Homematic IP devices connected to an eQ-3 CCU3. The newest additions are IKEA Matter-over-Thread devices which, somewhat unexpectedly, use my Nanoleaf Shapes controller as their Thread border router. Home Assistant ties all of this together. The slightly unusual part is where each component runs: Home Assistant OS lives in a bhyve virtual machine on my FreeBSD home server, while Zigbee2MQTT and Mosquitto run in…