Home Assistant

[Triassic]

Over Christmas I was looking at Home Assistant. It looks like a simplest, open source, locally operated system.

 Is anyone using it and do they have any pet projects they could share?

 

https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2020/12/13/release-202012/

Edited December 30, 2020 by Triassic

[puntloos]

Looked at this somewhat myself, very popular in home automation enthusiast groups in my company, but it feels like it's too DIY - I'd love to hear about professional installers who can do this with confidence. 

[Luke1]

I run this at my current place on a Raspberry Pi, however as you say its very DIY.

The software is opensource and as such it is evolving really quickly. A new release is made every month with new features and usually a number of breaking changes. 

If you are willing to maintain and update continuously, then this could be a good route. Especially if you are into a fully customised setup.

 

I personally plan to run this software when my renovation project is complete, however I will be doing it to link various other smart home appliances rather than running them natively from Home Assistant. IE. I may use Phillips Hue bulbs with a Hue Hub and integrate this into Home Assistant to provide supplementary automations or control from Home Assistant.

 

A lot of people want to use this system to move away from 'The Cloud' to keep everything secure and local. 

I personally am happy to use a combination because if my Home Assistant software were to fail, I still want to have working lights through their hub. 

 

My personal use case at the moment is across lightning and Sonos speakers.

There is an integration to give me Air Play support on Sonos speakers that don't have that support.

I have a number of motion sensors which drive an automation to group sonos speakers in various rooms if music is playing somewhere else.

I have also designed a 3D floor plan which can control lights and show the status of lights by changing how bright the room is on the floor plan. Completely pointless but a good little project during lockdown.